Recommendation 153

Witnesses identified best practices in the management of Youth Offending Services (YOSs, see section starting at paragraph 130 on “borrowing best practices from youth justice”) to make the case for the local delivery of adult probation services. Phil Bowen, who agreed that “we need to ground the Probation Service’s organisational locus in its communities”, told us that “we need to professionalise and localise the Probation Service, fundamentally taking a leaf out of the Youth Justice Services’ book”. 283 Justin Russell, too, mentioned the operating model of Youth Offending Services, explaining that “YOSs feel locally empowered and locally governed”. 284 He told us that “they are an integral part of children’s services now in local authority areas” and that “they are also tied into a very strong multiagency governance process”. He explained further: “A typical Youth Offending Service has an embedded Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) worker, an embedded speech and language therapist and an embedded educational psychologist. They are specialists who really know their stuff. They are in the office and can interact on a daily basis with case managers. There is no real equivalent in probation.” 285