Youth crime workers must improve protection

A team from HM Inspectorate of Probation visited the town earlier this year and today released a report on their findings, which scores work with young offenders under three headings. Under two of those criteria, "action to protect the young person" and "action to stop an individual reoffending", work was broadly in line with the national average, but public protection work was judged to be poor.

Alan MacDonald, assistant chief inspector and part of the inspection team, said: "We judged that the safeguarding aspects of the work were done well enough 64 per cent of the time.

"With the public protection aspects, work to keep to a minimum each individual's risk of harm to others was done well enough 57 per cent of the time, and the work to make each individual less likely to reoffend was done well enough 66 per cent of the time.

"Overall, we consider this a disappointing set of findings in relation to work to reduce the risk of harm to others, but other areas of work required less improvement, and the service was motivated to learn from this inspection and improve practice for the future."

Youth offending workers have been told that they have to make a "moderate improvement" on the first two headings, but must make a "substantial improvement" on public protection.

The Government is currently overseeing work at Doncaster Council after the Edlington attacks, in which two young brothers carried out a sickening and sadistic attack on two other young boys. The local authority was severely criticised over its dysfunctional children's services department.