The arts are moving into the forefront of work tackling the problem of youth crime: the government has recognised the significant role the arts can play in engaging young people in the youth justice system, helping unleash their talents and teaching new skills to help prevent offending in the future. Susannah Brown describes the partnerships the Youth Justice Board is forming with arts organisations.
The Youth Justice Board (YJB), set up in 1998 to oversee the youth justice system, has joined forces with the Arts Council of England (ACE) to promote the use of the arts in programmes to prevent offending. A national conference for arts practitioners and youth justice professionals took place in the Tate Modern in March. Organised together with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the conference looked at how the arts can be better integrated into the work of Youth Offending Teams (Yots) and the secure estate. Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell spoke at the conference of the need for better funding for the innovative work taking place at local level and has asked the distributors of Lottery money to take into account the needs of young people when making grants. ?We know already the ingredients that make up the reasons why a young person turns to crime. They include having no role models, no self-respect, no self-discipline and nothing better to do. Surely the answer is staring us in the face. Engaging them in sport or the arts gives them all the tools they need to make a success of their lives and keep them off crime,? she said.
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport recently secured £12m from the New Opportunities Fund to finance 300 Splash Extra schemes in the areas with the highest levels of street crime. The schemes, focused on high crime estates, provide arts and sports activities for youngsters during the summer holidays when they are most in need of something constructive to do.
Arts and education
Gathering an evidence base is a crucial way of demonstrating the impact that arts programmes are having on the lives of young offenders. Research from ACE is already underway to evaluate the impact of arts programmes on areas such as health, crime, unemployment and educational attainment, as well as looking at the accessibility of arts programmes to young offenders on Detention and Training Orders. The results of this research should be available in the summer.
Using the arts as a channel back into education provides another key way that the arts can be integrated into youth justice work. The YJB?s education audit, published in November last year, revealed the shockingly low literacy and numeracy levels of young offenders in custody, over a third of whom have a numeracy level of less than seven years. Board Chairman Norman Warner sees the need for a new approach, ?Clearly, these young people have not responded to conventional forms of education and we are now trying new ways of ensuring they have access to learning which appeals and realises their ambitions.?
As a result of the audit the Board is investing £40m to improve educational standards of young offenders in custody. Part of this money is going into a new literacy and numeracy programme called PLUS, developed by education consultants CfBT. The PLUS programme is finding new ways of motivating young offenders to learn, using a range of exciting and practical activities with the arts playing a large part.
Variety of interventions
The YJB has also undertaken an audit of arts work across the youth justice system, carried out by the national charity the Unit for Arts and Offenders. The work showed that many Yots and parts of the secure estate have already seen the benefits of arts interventions with a range of young people. The diversity of the arts mediums means that there is something for all ? from young people on the margins of offending, right through to young offenders in custody.
Steve Toye, Manager of the Calderdale Yot, recently employed performing arts company X-Plosion to run a music and dance project to ease racial tensions in the area. He describes the impact on the young offenders referred to the project: ?As music and dance are so important to young people as they grow up, it is not surprising that performing arts activities have proved very popular. Some young people with serious offending histories have been profoundly affected by XPlosion. The encouragement they have got from working closely with professional musicians and dancers has made them feel they can achieve things which they never ever saw themselves doing.?
The Barking and Dagenham Youth Inclusion Programme works with Stage One music company to help young people on the margins of offending. They teach youngsters mixing and lyric writing, rap poetry, as well as knowledge of audio equipment and a general history of music. Project Manager Lee Harper-Penman uses the similarity between rap music and poetry to draw the youngsters in and use the art as a tool for literacy and self-expression. He said, ?Rap is the rawest form of street poetry. We tell them [the young people] all good rap artists have a notebook to write down their lyrics. On the back of that you can sell literacy. Not being able to read and write is embarrassing and no one likes to admit to it.?
Young people are interested in music, dance and rap which make up part of today?s ?youth culture?, but arts projects with young offenders need not rely solely on modern art forms to engage with young offenders. Gillian Wolfe, Head of Education at Dulwich Picture Gallery has run a pioneering outreach project ?Does Art Make A Difference??, supported by the Department for Education and Skills. The project went to Orchard Lodge Secure Unit to work with young boys on remand. She explains the impact of the project: ?A fine art education project for adolescent boys on remand sounds completely absurd with nil potential for success. Yet, after two years on our programme, boys who could not make eye contact, or would not remove their hoods, let alone speak to us, were queuing at the door eagerly awaiting our sessions. It was a steep learning curve for us, but we did it. These boys became without doubt the most rewarding participants in our outreach programme.?
Uncovering talent
Work from arts programmes such as those mentioned above has shown the benefits of an arts approach with young offenders. Not only can great talent be found that might otherwise go unnoticed but involvement with arts programmes has helped the emotional development of young people and had an impact on their offending behaviour. Different government departments are working together to look at the issues of funding and how to provide a good evidence base for arts work. The work to improve the educational standards of young offenders will also put the arts in the forefront and recognise the value of different mediums which appeal to a diverse range of young, troubled, but often highly talented young people.
Susannah Brown is Press Officer at the Youth Justice Board. t: 020 7271 3014 e: susannah.brown@yjb.gsi.gov.uk w: http://www.youth-justice-board.gov.uk