Creating Justice brings together three of London Bubble Theatre's creative programmes that support children and young people who are at risk of being involved in, or currently have experience of, the criminal justice system. The programme seeks to develop a fuller understanding of the impact these programmes have on children and young people, build the evidence base for cultural activities as interventions, and improve practice and learning exchange between stakeholders and practitioners.
Ambition
The ambition for Creating Justice is to develop an evidence-rich programme of cultural learning activities that supports children and young people who are at risk of, and currently have experience of, the criminal justice system.
By better understanding, proving, and improving our practice we will be best able to support those children and young people to develop protective traits and behaviours that lead to lower rates of engagement with criminal behaviour. Furthermore, we will seek to influence the social, educational, and arts sectors.
The Creating Justice programme includes three creative programmes that support children and young people most affected by youth violence and gang involvement: Way Into Work, Creative Voices and Playing Safe. They have been developed in partnership with Southwark Council’s Family Early Help and Youth Justice Department, the Met Police Gangs Unit (Southwark) and various primary schools in the borough.
Outcomes
The most ambitious outcome for the programme is to have a system-wide influence – promoting the benefits of creative activity and cultural learning opportunities within a new public health model of supporting vulnerable children and young people.
The programme will:
- Improve the confidence, creativity, communication, and social interaction of the participating children and young people, leading to evidenced lower rates of risk-taking behaviour and lower rates of offending and reoffending
- Build the skills and knowledge of the practitioners and statutory staff to work in a Trauma Informed and Adverse Childhood Experiences-aware way, and have an understanding of the impact of communication difficulties on vulnerable children and young people
- Build networks and partnerships across the cultural learning, education, and statutory sectors that lead to future successful collaborations
We will work closely with researchers from the University of East London’s School for Social Sciences to identify appropriate outcome measures and the range of possible options to gather comparison group or control group data. This will be supported by a process evaluation that will seek to understand: what happened, the causal mechanisms that led to any changes, and the contextual factors that affected the implementation and outcomes.
Download the end of project report
Challenge London investment from A New Direction: £79,750 over three years
Image credit: Jonathan Vines
