"Everything's Changed but Everything's Stayed the Same": Continuity and Change within Youth Justice Services

Recent youth justice policy and practice reforms within England and Wales have placed increasing emphasis upon service decentralisation and professional autonomy. They have thus provided room for manoeuvre for local youth justice services to develop both innovative forms of service delivery and frontline practice that represent a departure from a siloed and risk-centric YOT model of service delivery (Byrne and Case, 2016). Drawing upon empirical data gathered from a comparative case study within two contrasting youth justice services, this thesis explores the extent to which these opportunities have been capitalised upon on the ground. It argues that whilst there have been some examples of innovation in line with emerging critical evidence bases, the local negotiation of the reforms has been problematically characterised by varying degrees of continuity with the largely discredited risk-centric reforms of the New Labour era. The drivers of both continuity and change within local youth justice service delivery are thus explored, as well as the implications of this for service delivery and service users.