Oversight and Funding of Youth Justice Service: A question by question response

14 Sep 2026

TM’s central message 

A fairer and more effective youth justice system must make unequal outcomes visible and actionable for Romani (Gypsy), Roma and Irish, Scottish and Welsh Traveller communities.

TM’s evidence base shows that the pathway into youth justice is shaped by poor ethnicity monitoring, school exclusion, unmet need, poverty, discrimination, cultural misunderstanding and weak access to early support. Reform should therefore mean better data, meaningful voice, culturally competent practice, properly funded prevention and diversion, and accountability across the whole system. 

Evidence base: TM’s response is grounded in our published youth justice, education and equality evidence base, including Overlooked and Overrepresented, Effective Practice for Youth Offending Teams, Disrupting the School to Prison Pipeline, the Pre-Sentence Report Toolkit, Fought not Taught and Tackling Institutionally Coercive Exclusions. Across these publications, TM has combined policy analysis, community insight, practitioner learning and case-study evidence to show how poor ethnicity monitoring, school exclusion, unmet SEND and mental health needs, poverty, discrimination and cultural misunderstanding can increase the risk of justice involvement for Romani (Gypsy), Roma and Irish, Scottish and Welsh Traveller children and young people. This evidence base should be read alongside the response below because it explains why oversight and funding reform must make unequal outcomes visible, actionable and properly resourced. 

In summary, TM recommends that the reformed framework should: retain a dedicated focus on disproportionality and embed equality throughout all standards; require reliable 18+1 ethnicity monitoring and action on missing data; protect early intervention and diversion funding; include culturally competent practice and trusted community engagement within quality measures; hold statutory partners accountable for education, health, housing, social care and family support; and apply equality impact assessment to any funding redistribution.