Between April and July 2026, I undertook a three-month policy placement as a Policy Fellow with the Youth Custody Service Analysis team – a specialised policy division within the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) Youth Justice and Vulnerable Offenders Analysis Directorate – in partnership with NERC and the Grand Union DTP. My primary objective was to lead a comprehensive international evidence review addressing the following policy question: What works for children in youth custody? 

Given the truncated project timeframe, which is shorter than that which would usually be reserved for a comprehensive evidence review, I synthesised existing academic literature, UK policy reports, and international evidence across the USA, Spain, France, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand.

A core focus of the placement was facilitating two-way knowledge exchange between academic research and active policy/governmental pipelines (especially during a period of governance transition and stability across the country). Notably, I found that translating forward-looking, complex theoretical frameworks (like those buttressing DPhil research) into actionable insights for civil servants required continuous cross-agency collaboration and robust stakeholder engagement between both the MoJ and our partner organisations (which ranged from charities to universities). On this, and during the placement, I delivered four key outputs:

1. Systematic Evidence Report: A 25,000-word synthesis of contemporary evidence on what works for children in youth custody, designed for internal governmental use (with plans to refine and publish at a later time).
2. Search Protocol & Strategy: A comprehensive overview of primary research questions, search terms and phrases to be coded for in the included literature, and a summary of existing MoJ evidence to be built upon throughout the evidence review.
3. MoJ Evidence Packs & Matrices: Fully updated internal data sheets summarising all international evidence collected by the Youth Custody Service since January 2024 and shared with stakeholders via Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
4. Stakeholder Briefings: Executive summary decks and PowerPoint summaries of the key research findings were presented (3) times across multiple partner organisations.

To construct these deliverables during the course of my placement, I collaborated directly with key partners across the youth justice estate in England and Wales – including NHS England, the Lincolnshire County Council (who are piloting a new Secure Children’s Home that delivers trauma-informed support), HMPPS, the recently-formed Women’s Justice Board, and the US-based NGO Vera Institute of Justice. Beyond this project-specific work, I engaged in over 20 1:1 knowledge-sharing sessions with MoJ staff (as part of my onboarding and introduction to the team) to explore how empirical research/the work of the Civil Service directly informs strategic priorities, political decision-making, and future academic knowledge production.

In brief, the final summative evidence review generated several key findings that directly addressed the question of ‘what works in youth custody’ and further served to update the MoJ's internal evidence base on youth confinement outcomes across international jurisdictions:

• International evidence confirms that custodial/punitive models are less effective in reducing reoffending (recidivism) in young people than community-based interventions, thus supporting the continued focus in England and Wales on reserving custody strictly for high-risk or violent cases.
• Punitive, adult-style models (such as ‘Scared Straight’ initiatives in the United States) increase distress and reoffending likelihood in at-risk children. Key interventions grounded in a ‘Child First’ model – that which prioritises developmental, speech, and mental health needs on a case-by-case basis – produced significantly better rehabilitative outcomes (as a recent pilot study by researchers in Scotland found).
• Smaller, welfare-oriented environments (such as Secure Children’s Homes like those piloted in Lincolnshire) far outperform large Young Offender Institutions (YOIs) when it comes to child safety, mental health support, and improved staff-child relationships. To that end, staff training and a well-informed workforce was critical to the improvement of youth custodial outcomes across England and Wales.
• Importantly, my review of the evidence determined that roughly 50% of children in custody present with special educational/unique learning needs (SEND). Integrating targeted speech therapy, adaptable educational models, and academic knowledge on education into the youth secure estate directly reduces institutional conflict and improves programme/successful sentence completion.
• Finally, the included international evidence strongly supports Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and family-focussed, multi-systemic interventions (also known as ‘whole systems’ approaches to criminal justice). However, custodial programs were found lose efficacy if release planning is fragmented. As such, seamless transitions into stable housing, education, training, or employment are essential to prevent recidivism and guarantee successful re-entry for vulnerable children.

Reflection & Recommendations for GUDTP Students

Overall, this placement provided invaluable professional skills and perspectives on working in the public policy space – from navigating a complex and diffuse civil service architecture and understanding policy/political jargon (there is no shortage of acronyms being formulated across the youth custody estate) to managing classified datasets under strict ethical and privacy standards.

Furthermore, for doctoral researchers, the placement experience offered me a productive and clarifying trial in navigating the tension between abstract and/or theoretical academic research and the resource-constrained, reality-oriented policy space. While academic work in the social sciences may encourage open-ended theoretical exploration (especially during the early stages of a doctorate), government analysis like that being conducted by the MoJ demands rapid, empirically grounded evidence to address immediate policy goals and manifesto promises. As such, the work can at times be limited or frustrating – but the tension is worth examining before considering post-doctorate steps and career choices. The following advice emerged from my time with the Ministry of Justice: 

• Recognise that policymakers/civil servants often work within tight budget constraints and political boundaries that dictate what is actionable in the short term, in contrast to the projects we are able to undertake as postgraduate researchers. In this way, government research often mimics a more bureaucratic university system (rather than the experiences of PhD students themselves), and trade-offs are necessary when undertaking policy-based research.
• Students on these placements should take advantage of any divergence between academic literature and policy reports (and there is plenty) and treat these tensions as generative. Importantly, they highlight key questions that policymakers may not yet be asking and reveal where academic research can offer real-world/political value beyond the academy