Arts and young people at risk
As an independent consultant working to commission, my involvement in actual policy making is at most tangential and my influence on practice, if any, is hard to quantify though I naturally hope that what I write will make some kind of difference. A lot of my work over recent years has been documenting and evaluating arts interventions with young people at risk in some way - perhaps excluded from school or on the way to or from custody - and in 2005/06 I had the opportunity to work with Arts Council England on a policy document on the arts and young people at risk of (re)offending. Nikki Crane, then the Head of Social Inclusion at ACE, was the driving force behind the strategy, which arose from the partnership she had forged with the Youth Justice Board, and we canvassed opinion across the arts and criminal justice sector in creating the text which you can download here. The practical result of the publication was a three-year national programme of funded arts work with young offenders and those at risk. The sequel publication was to have been a collection of case studies about the work but by the time I had cleared the decks to write it, the moment had passed and the Social Inclusion Unit at the Arts Council had vanished. However, I still have tapescripts of my interviews with artists and arts organisations working in the field and with the criminal justice professionals involved, which I hope one day will see the light of day in some useful form.
