Youth in Focus (YIF) is a Big Lottery Fund initiative aimed at supporting vulnerable young people through difficult changes in their lives.
Beyond Youth Custody (BYC) is one of three England-wide learning and awareness projects funded under the Big Lottery Fund’s YIF programme. BYC has been designed to challenge, advance, and promote better thinking in policy and practice for the effective resettlement of young people after release from custody. BYC brings together Nacro, the social justice charity, with three research and evaluation partners: ARCS (UK), and Salford and Bedfordshire universities, all of which have exceptional track records in action-based research focusing on youth offending and resettlement.
The programme was initially funded for a five-year period ending in April 2017. During that period, the partnership delivered a multi-faceted programme of research, networking, publicity and awareness-raising activities. The BYC team produced a wide range of publications and resources for practitioners, policy-makers and researchers.
The YIF programme also funded service delivery projects across the country to work with three different client groups: young care-leavers, young carers and young custody-leavers. There were 15 individual YIF projects that worked with young custody-leavers, although some of these projects also worked with care-leavers and young carers.
The BYC work focused specifically on young people leaving custody, working alongside these projects and supporting them to evaluate and monitor their own service and compare and contrast different models of resettlement, facilitating young people’s participation and providing ongoing feedback about effective practice and lessons learnt through the research. A key part of BYC’s work involved close and regular involvement with individual YIF projects that worked with young custody-leavers, focusing on issues concerning data collection and evaluation but also on wider practice and policy issues. That involvement with YIF projects generated a substantial set of evidence concerning the implementation and effectiveness of resettlement practice and informed the team’s critical understanding of key resettlement issues
