Responding to Neurodivergence in the Youth Justic

14 Governors, senior staff, and Youth Custody Service staff who transition from the adult estate to the youth estate should receive specific training in child development, recognising that this is a specialist population. Reflective supervision models should be adopted for frontline staff. 7.10 Establish mechanisms of accountability Many of the actions proposed in this paper require implementation not by a single agency but across every stage of a child's pathway - and often well before justice contact, in health, social care and education, as well as in policing, courts, custody and probation. This creates a recurring risk: where responsibility is shared across many sectors, it can end up being held by none, and reforms that depend on action at several points can fail in the gaps between them. Mechanisms are therefore needed to make responsibility clear within and between systems, and to hold the relevant bodies to account for the actions that fall to them. One example is the void of responsibility that exists for a child's EHCP when they enter the secure estate. Currently, legislation indicates that the Local Authority must hold financial responsibility for the EHCP to be met, but in practice the MoJ/YJB contract education providers who include EHCP provision in their budget. This means the Local Authority often ceases to maintain, review and update the EHCP, leaving children with gaps in implementation when released from custody. Clarity is therefore needed about where responsibility lies for maintaining an EHCP, and for ensuring appropriate provision continues for a child who is on remand. Finally, an independent investigation into the reasons behind the over-criminalisation of neurodivergent children should be commissioned, with explicit attention to intersectional disproportionality (race, gender, care experience and poverty). 8. Conclusion The empirical evidence unambiguously sets out that children with neurodivergent conditions are over-represented in the youth justice system, with prevalence rates significantly higher than children in the general population. Our obligations under the UNCRC and UNCRPD are equally clear – these children should not be in youth justice systems, and where they are, they should be receiving specific assessment, and age-appropriate adaptations and support. However, our practice is falling behind, largely because of systems acting in fragmentation. We have exclusionary school discipline, a diagnostic infrastructure that systematically misses the children who need it most, and a justice system which is ill-equipped to respond to the complex needs of the population it serves. The ten actions proposed in this paper are designed to span the sectors implicated, to anchor reform in the rights framework the state has already accepted, and to identify levers specific enough that progress against them can be measured.