Youth Justice News

Abstract

A statistical report published by the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Education, in March 2022, provides detailed information on the educational and social care backgrounds of children who received a formal sanction for offending in England. The analysis considers all children who commenced formal primary education between 2002/2003 and 2004/2005 and who received a caution or conviction for an offence when aged between 10 and 17 years inclusive. A cut-off for inclusion was imposed at school Year 13 for each year cohort ‘to ensure that each child had the same amount of time to offend’. The analysis identified a total of about 77,300 such children, equivalent to 5 per cent of school students in that age range over the relevant period. As might be anticipated, children who had been formally sanctioned for offending were much more likely to be male than the wider pupil population, with boys accounting for just over three-quarters (76%) of those receiving a caution or court sentence. Black and mixed heritage children were also overrepresented in the former group by comparison with the overall student population; as indicated in Table 1, Asian children were, by contrast, underrepresented.