Heartbeat: Trust-supported youth offending service scoops national award

July 17, 2019

Congratulations to the Sandwell Youth Offending Service for winning the Youth Justice of the Year Award at the 2019 Shine a Light Awards, which celebrate innovation and best practice in supporting children and young people’s speech, language and communication development.

The service, which is based in Tipton, employs the support of our children’s therapies team. It was recognised for ensuring that the speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) of the young people they work with are considered at every stage, from police officers working with those on caution through to others serving long custodial sentences.

Claire Westwood joined the SWB family in 2014. Along with her colleague Jordanne Doody, who is currently on maternity leave, she works for the Sandwell Youth Offending Service two days a week as part of her role. “It’s our job to receive referrals and to do a communication assessment,” explained Claire.

“Around 60 per cent of young offenders have speech, language or communication needs. That involves difficulty understanding what’s said to them, remembering what’s said to them, expressing themselves and social skills, like being able to have a conversation, being able to make appropriate friendships and being assertive rather than aggressive.

“I assess all of those skills and will do some intervention sessions with the young people to try to improve their skills. I also do lots of training with schools, social workers, youth offending staff and police officers to help them understand the young people’s needs.”

The work of Claire and her colleagues was recognised at the Shine a Light Awards, which were organised by learning company Pearson, in partnership with the Communication Trust. The ceremony took place in London and was hosted Sally Phillips, a comic actress and writer whose eldest son was born with Down’s syndrome.

“The manager of the youth offending team, Michael Botham, thought it would be good to nominate us for this award because we’ve worked really hard on improving access to speech therapy for young offenders, and also improving their skills and supporting them,” said Claire.

“We went down to London and we won the Youth Justice of the Year Award. It was a whole day event and it was really good. It was nice to feel recognised by others for the work that we do because we work really hard.”

The team were up against others from across the country but were chosen as the winners for successfully demonstrating how their work had changed the lives of young people. “There was a 16-year-old who had undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome which we were able to pick up on and support him to understand that, and also help the court to understand what that means for him and how that might have affected what happened.

“Another case study they mentioned was about a young man with learning difficulties. We supported the professionals around him to engage with him so that he wouldn’t breach his order and end up getting in even more trouble for being late to appointments or for not taking on some of the information that might have been delivered to him.”