Youth Justice Intensive Support Service

Quarriers Youth Justice Intensive Support Service is a new, innovative and exciting area of work for Quarriers Young Adult services.

We work with young people in South Lanarkshire aged between 12-18 years who have become involved in offending and anti social behaviour and have been referred by a social worker.

Our project workers aim to build supportive relationships with young people and appropriately challenge negative behaviour to help them to resist from offending and achieve a more positive and hopeful outlook on life. Our project workers are skilled, enthusiastic, creative and imaginative with the ability to problem solve and engage positively with young people who have had adverse life experiences.

We use a variety of structured learning tools with young people as we recognise that ‘not one size fits all’ and will be dependant on the young person’s age and stage of a development.

Quarriers Youth Justice Intensive Support Service works in partnership with statutory services to provide added value to existing interventions and supports. We recognise that effective partnerships can create a quality of support leading to positive change for young people which is sustainable in the longer term.

The outreach work with young people in the communities offers the young people and their families positive support with the aim of empowering them to develop and build pro social lives free from offending.  The project has adopted an ethos of viewing offending as a symptom of an underlying problem or issue in the young person's life, and therefore recognises that with offending behaviour there are usually other issues in their life which need sorted out. These issues can include homelessness, drug and alcohol misuse, relationship breakdowns, money problems, fragmented family relationships – to name a few.

The project staff believe that all young people have the ability to change for the better, with appropriate support and guidance.  To really make a positive impact on a young persons life, offending behaviour cannot be viewed in isolation and therefore a person centred, multi-faceted, holistic approach is what we offer.

Research has shown that maintaining good family ties can significantly reduce a person’s risk of re-offending.  Therefore we recognise the importance of engaging and supporting the young persons family in the work we undertake with them, where possible and appropriate.

The staff team will tailor the supports to suit the individual and their needs.  The staff can offer the following:

  • Intensive community based support and supervision
  • Social Skills work
  • Alcohol and drug action plans and workshops
  • Engagement with leisure / community activities as diversionary work
  • Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
  • Family / Parent work
  • Anger Management
  • Family Solution Focused Therapy
  • Pro-social modelling
  • Relationship building / effective disapproval
  • Consequential thinking and victim empathy programme
  • Gangs work
  • Managing emotions programme
  • Confidence and self esteem building work
  • Sexual health awareness work
  • The Friday night project

We base our interventions with young people on the ‘Getting it right for every child’ principles of integrated working and seeing the whole young person – physical, social, emotional and educational needs, seeking to use resources in the most effective way.