The Child First guiding principle and its components (see children as children, develop
pro-social identity for positive child outcomes, collaboration with children, promote diversion)
have an extensive evidence-base in international policy and research, yet remain relatively
underdeveloped in practice. Consequently, the Child First ‘Strategy Implementation Project’
was designed to examine implementation of the guiding principle in practice, focusing on
stakeholder perspectives of how Child First is understood, issues affecting its implementation
(eg enablers, barriers, challenges, opportunities) and the support needs crucial to making
Child First a strategic and practical reality.
The Child First ‘Strategy Implementation Project’ was underpinned by a series of workshops
with key stakeholders from across the youth justice sector: policymakers, strategic leads,
managers and practitioners working in the community, custody, inspectorate, research
and strategic fields. Each workshop explored the central questions of how Child First is/
should be understood and operationalised (ie realised, made sense of) in practice and what
implementation support is required. Stakeholder feedback consistently identified three key
features (each with associated themes and sub- themes) as central to the implementation of
Child First for all stakeholder groups:
• Child-centrism: Child-friendly and child-focused strategies for working with children focused
on engagement, realising rights and entitlements, prioritising needs, positive intervention
focus on developmental sensitivity;
• Professional relationships: components and practices of inter- and multi-agency working
relationships, particularly philosophical and cultural differences, interagency partnership
working, educating others and organisational identity;
• Cognisance: knowledge, understanding and information regarding Child First, underpinned
by the themes of knowledge, development of understanding, guidance/information/support
and incongruence.
Thematic analyses identified commonalities and differences within- and between-stakeholder
groups in their reporting of each feature and the themes across different questions, all of
which are explored further. The report concludes with a series of recommendations for the
future implementation of the guiding principle in practice – recommendations focused on
supporting and enhancing child-centrism, professional relationships and cognisance as
vehicles to realising Child First.
Funding
Commissioned by: Loughborough University
History
School
Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy
Published in
The Child First Strategy Implementation Project: Realising the guiding principle for youth justice
Publisher
Loughborough University
Version
VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This report is available at https://www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/social-policy-studies/research/child-first-justice/