Responding to Neurodivergence in the Youth Justic

11 from upstream interventions for young children will take a number of years to reflect in reduced justice-system contact further down the line, but most policy evaluations are done in the short term, before benefits have had the chance to be realised. A statutory pooled-budget mechanism for at-risk children should be established, analogous to the Section 75 NHS Act 2006 framework that underpins the Better Care Fund, enabling the Department for Education, Department of Health and Social Care, Ministry of Justice, and local authorities to align spending around shared outcomes for this population. Without this, the structural disincentive against early intervention will continue to derail well-designed individual programmes. 7.5 Diversion as default As a network, we would advocate for closure of the remaining YOIs, with children being supported in Secure Children’s Homes or in the community instead. With enough diversion, this may inevitably come about as the custodial population of children hopefully continues to shrink. Training for police officers should be improved at a national level, through the College of Policing, to help officers recognise the indicators of neurodevelopmental difference, supported by validated brief screening tools. This should include training around what adaptations may be necessary to police interviews, to lower the likelihood of false confessions because of leading questions, for example. Specialist training for Appropriate Adults is also essential. Receiving services in health, education and social care should be resourced so that diversion has meaningful community-based alternatives to divert to . This includes reducing the use of police custody as a place of safety for vulnerable children, by ensuring local authorities are adequately resourced to provide alternatives. A public health framing should be adopted, in which justice-based responses are a last resort among several legitimate responses to harm caused by children, rather than the default. International models should be examined for transferable design features. 7.6 Improve data-sharing between, and within, organisations Systems used in police forces should be standardised, so that data can be universally extracted (for monitoring and reporting) as well as shared across forces. The same principle applies across NHS trusts, which should share an electronic system.