New Horizon Youth Offending Project: Interim Report

The Youth Offending Project (YOP) at the New Horizon Youth Centre (NHYC) supports young people to reduce offending behaviour and make positive life choices through one-to-one support, drop in services and group work sessions. The project is delivered by the New Horizon Youth Centre and is funded from 2016-2019 by the Big Lottery Foundation.

The YOP provides open access to drop-in services, including accommodation advice and referrals, accredited education and training programmes, counselling, and music production workshops. One-to-one support is tailored-to-need and provided alongside group work to meet young people’s needs. Life skills workers deliver a wide range of taster sessions and other activities for young people. Transitional workers provide outreach and pre-release support as well as one-to-one and group work with some young people (e.g. young women at risk; young men in gangs). The project is London-wide and targets young people aged 15-25 leaving young offender institutions and leaving care, as well as those identified by referring agencies as high-risk.

The aim of the evaluation will be to understand the experiences of young people with the project (including high, medium, and low risk clients), all of whom will have complex needs. Specific indicators have been set out by the Big Lottery to capture the impact of the project on young people, and on the safety of the wider London population. It is one of the only projects of its kind to capture such rich data - with findings that would illuminated and direct a number of policies related to youNo people,