Page 3474 - Week 08 - Thursday, 18 August 2011
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The Education and Training Directorate inform the Public Advocate and Official Visitor if a young person is denied permission to attend school for two consecutive days in a row, to ensure transparency of segregation or behaviour management decisions that impact on young people’s right to education.
That is just one reason why we need to be looking at how we can provide the training so that segregation and restraining are places of last resort.
The minister and Mrs Dunne this morning talked about the importance of bedding this into the community, engaging a whole lot of players in our community youth justice system. There is very good sense in doing that. As part of those players, we need to consider how the diversionary-type framework that is out there at the moment is going to engage at the very early stage—for instance, first contact with police. The first contact with police can be a critical time when an intervention can happen that can change the path of that young person. We need to be looking at how we can also support and train police and how we can ensure that there are services that are connected and engaged with police to which they can refer children and young people and their families so that we can stop them even entering the youth justice system. That is what we need to be doing.
When I was over in the UK I met with the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales. One of the things they are starting up in a number of local areas is embedding youth workers in police stations. I think there is also an on-call operation. It means that when a young person comes into contact with the police there can be a rapid assessment of what is going on. Hopefully, at that point you are starting to get some diversion away from the youth justice system and into other sorts of programs that could be about supporting the family and young person, but certainly achieving a better outcome than if they continue to travel down that path and end up in our youth justice system.
Not only does it make a lot of sense for those children but also it makes a lot of sense for all of us because with any child going into the youth justice system there are obviously costs for the community around community safety. There are also costs that go along with courts and incarceration. We need very much to look at that diversionary end and what we can put in place to ensure that they are not going to get to the last resort, which is incarceration at Bimberi.
There needs to be better engagement with the community agencies out there. We need to see how we can foster that and how we can ensure that through-care and after-care are properly resourced and happen. A number of families have contacted me saying that through-care and after-care has not happened or has not been very well implemented. It is essential. If we do not want a revolving door of young people going back into Bimberi and back through the youth justice system, we need to have good exit planning in place. We need to ensure that there are organisations, natural supports, that are locked in and that are part of that planning process.
Families are absolutely critical here. I understand that in some cases the natural family is not necessarily of great benefit to the young person. But in many other cases they are. So we need to be looking at the natural supports; we need to be looking at the
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