Executive Summary
In April 2022, Cleveland was notified that it would be in receipt of three-year Violence Reduction Unit Funding from the Home Office. I
The Unit is known as CURV – Cleveland Unit for the Reduction of Violence.
The Strategic Needs Assessment
As a mandatory requirement, VRUs need to produce a Strategic Needs Assessment (SNA)
The SNA clarifies the nature, scale and drivers of serious violence acting in the local area. It also supports effective identification of populations and locations most affected.
Crime and justice specialists Crest Advisor produce CURV’s SNA annually. Crest secured the contract in 2022 through a procurement process.
The current version is accessible via the CURV website here. The updated SNA will be published no earlier than February 2024.
The primary measures of success are for VRUs to deliver:
- A reduction in hospital admissions for assaults with a knife or sharp object and especially among victims aged under 25.
- A reduction in knife-enabled serious violence and especially among victims aged under 25.
- A reduction on all non-domestic homicides and especially among victims aged under 25 involving knives.
Current data confirms that school age children remain a priority group in Cleveland to support with prevention activity.
24% of recorded serious violence offences are committed by at least one individual recorded as aged under 25. At least 9% involved a vulnerable child or young person. In addition:
- 20% of recorded suspects are aged under 20.
- 25% of recorded victims are aged under 20 years.
Analysis by the Department for Education links educational factors such as poor school attendance and achievement with greater risks of involvement in serious violence.
The Role of the Schools and the Wider Education Sector
In January 2023, the UK Government introduced the Serious Violence Duty via the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act 2022.
The duty requires named (specified) authorities to work together to reduce serious violence. They should do this by approaches including data sharing and collaborative development and delivery of a response strategy.
In Cleveland, CURV has been designated as the focal point for data sharing and response coordination under the Duty. The education sector is defined as a ‘relevant’ authority under the Duty: being required to be involved if requested, or by their request.
Progressing towards sustainable, data-driven support of schools in violence prevention.
School-based interventions offer an important opportunity to deliver prevention interventions to young people.
Currently, emergency services, statutory authorities, voluntary and private sector organisations offer interventions to schools. They are aimed at reducing the risk of violence.
As a result of the availability of limited prevention resources, any intervention must be appropriately targeted to maximise impact.
Currently, there is no standardized method of comparing risk in schools and schools are unable to benefit from a multi-agency package of support tailored to individual school requirements. No standardized evaluation method is available to assess and compare the value and impact of intervention options. These factors undermine violence prevention through school-focused interventions.
School engagement
As part of the most recent SNA data gathering exercise, extensive engagement took place to encourage schools to facilitate completion of an anonymous youth survey. It covered experiences and views around serious violence. Over 2,700 students participated over a 3-week period in October 2023 representing 35 schools across Cleveland.
The same survey was completed in 2022, receiving approximately 900 returns; 19 schools represented in last year’s survey results were not represented in this year’s returns and key feedback received was critical of the inability of schools or educational sector staff to access results relating to their specific schools or to make comparisons with the wider Cleveland data.
School report
A key element in a sustainable approach is producing an interactive report, where survey results can be securely accessed. Schools across Cleveland, and the wider education sector, can continue to use the results to shape internal safeguarding and violence prevention measures. Such a tool supports decision making in a data-driven manner, incorporating youth voices and experiences.
OPCC system restrictions prevent an interactive report from being produced and shared with school recipients; no cost-effective sustainable internal solution has been identified for the short-medium term and failure to delivery this tool soon after the SNA is published risks loss of school engagement with CURV and the violence reduction agenda.
Crest Advisory have relevant subject matter and analytical expertise, local knowledge, an existing relationship with CURV and immediate access to restricted SNA data. Their existing contract includes handover of survey delivery to CURV in 2024. Extending their SNA contract through additional funding of £15,057.60 will allow immediate progress in key ways to support development of a sustainable, data-driven, multi-agency strategic approach to educational and school based intervention design, delivery and evaluation:
- Conversion of youth survey results into a shareable school survey dashboard.
- Workshop content preparation: Presentation and training in relation to the dashboard tool at 4 education sector briefings, including presentation of high-level findings of the collective responses.
- Support of the CURV Analytical and Insights Manager to create a Cleveland school risk index which used publicly available and restricted data sets combined with student survey results to quantify the vulnerability and risk attributed to each school. The risk index will rank schools across categories and geographic area. It will support development of a multi-agency tiered violence reduction programme. The index will include multiple metrics. They can be used and incorporated into evaluation work. The index can be adapted for use by partners in other public safety/public health contexts.
Preventing, reducing, and tackling serious violence is a key priority in the PCC’s Police and Crime Plan.
CURV will monitor performance against the agreed outputs and manage in accordance with the existing contract management process.