Making Space

Naomi Horlock

Making Space: establishing a role for creative thinking and learning in work with young people at risk of offending and re-offending.

Making Space is an ambitious creative learning programme that aims to engage young people at risk of offending or re-offending in Lancashire, UK.

The programme, currently in development, is central to Lancashire Youth Offending Team’s (LYOT) commitment to embedding creative thinking and learning into the culture of the county’s seven Youth Offending Teams and eight prevention programmes. LYOT works with young people aged between 10 and 17 who have committed crime referred to them by the Police and the Courts. Our highly skilled staff also work with the victims of youth crime and with young people at risk of offending.

Established in 2000, Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) operate in every local authority of England and Wales, bringing together the skills of specialists from the fields of youth justice, social care and education. These multi-agency teams include: Social Workers, Probation Officers, a Police Officer, an Education Worker, a Connexions Worker (training and employment), a Health Worker, Substance Misuse Workers, Victim and Family Support Workers.

I was appointed to LYOT’s first Arts Development post in April this year. My role is one of six national strategic posts funded jointly for the first twelve months by Arts Council England and the Youth Justice Board of England and Wales. Funding of my post for a second year has been agreed, emphasising LYOT’s commitment to this groundbreaking work.

Since taking up the post, I have been working collaboratively with staff to develop approaches that mobilise the use of creative thinking and learning within the context of LYOT’s strategic aim of protecting the public by working to prevent offending and
re- offending by young people.

Establishing a culture of sustainable creative learning that is embedded within the practice of LYOT staff is key to the future success of Making Space. Therefore, this first year is focused on developing staff and giving them ownership of the programme’s direction. Six Action Learning Sets (project teams) have been set-up around the county consisting of LYOT staff and colleagues from cultural organisations. These groups are exploring ideas and themes for arts-based interventions that will be designed and delivered by LYOT staff in collaboration with art specialists. The planning process will allow for dialogue and exchange of practice between sectors. Cultural partners are keen to develop knowledge, understanding and experience of the youth justice sector in order to better engage with harder to reach young audiences. LYOT staff are interested in extending and enhancing the methods and resources available to them for working with young people with complex and challenging needs.

On the whole, LYOT staff work with young people on a one-to-one basis, establishing trust and building a relationship with them that supports the terms of their Court Orders. Through this process specialists from a range of agencies are mobilised to deliver interventions that directly and indirectly engage young people, to reduce their offending behaviour as well as supporting the personal and social development of the individual concerned. Although staff at all levels of LYOT recognise the benefits that the arts can bring to working with young people, the emphasis on group work that most artists and agencies employ (for very sound reasons!) is less workable within the YOT context, and more importantly, very often inappropriate for the majority of our clients. During this development year, Making Space will explore the idea of the Artist as Mentor, a role that will be piloted to support the aims of the Individual Intervention plans of some young people. In this way, contact with an artist will be integral, rather than additional, to the strategies employed to effect attitudinal and behavioural change in the young people we work with.

Initiating and developing partnerships with arts/cultural organisations, recruiting and training artists from a range of disciplines for this specialist work, and delivering meaningful arts-based interventions to young people that enable YOT staff to project manage the process, are recurring themes of the Making Space programme. Involving young people in the programme’s design, and in some contexts its delivery, will over time underpin the ethos of Making Space, and will go some way to informing LYOT’s thinking on extending User Participation methods across the service.

Naomi Horlock,
Development Co-ordinator, Creative Learning
Lancashire Youth Offending Team
naomi.horlock@yot.lancscc.gov.uk