Salzburg Global: A Sum of its Parts: The Whole System Approach

Published date

Feb 08, 2022

Written by

Martin Silva Rey

Peace & Justice Update

How the UK is shifting the focus of a long-running problem and taking a whole-system approach to stop youth violence

Published date

Feb 08, 2022

Written by

Martin Silva Rey

Two women at a protest, holding up a sign saying "stand up against violent crime"

Serious youth violence is a critical issue across London (photo credit, Catholic Church of England)

Serious youth violence is a critical issue across London (photo credit, Catholic Church of England) - Photos by the Catholic Church of England

How the UK is shifting the focus of a long-running problem and taking a whole-system approach to stop youth violence

Glasgow, 2007. Math teacher Maureen McKenna arrives in the most populous city in Scotland, where she will lead a landmark education reform later triggering a U-turn in policing, youth justice, and housing – marking a major precedent in the United Kingdom.

“It was about changing culture, changing mindset,” McKenna, Glasgow’s longest serving executive director of education, explains.

“Understanding that a child acts out maybe as a method of communication rather than bad behavior.”

With a longstanding culture for gangs and violence, the city was back then marred by exclusions in schools, and young people carrying knives was commonplace.

Fourteen years later, school exclusions have reduced by 88 percent, while attainment is steadily rising.

“People weren’t looking at the causes behind” the violence, McKenna explains.

“Why did the child bring a knife into school? Did anybody go back and ask the child why? Was it an act of violence or was it that they felt they needed to protect themselves? Therefore, could we look at why they needed to protect themselves and resolve that?”

Like nowhere else in Scotland, 60 percent of Glasgow’s 80,000 children live in the country’s most deprived areas*.

“Rather than just going straight to the crime... [we must] take more restorative approaches and think much more about the context of the child,” she stresses.

“We have children who are living in poverty. They might have a pretty poor lived experience at home, living in chaos, not knowing when they were getting food, maybe a peer with addiction problems. So, is it no wonder when they come to school that they react badly when a teacher gets in their face.”

But change was not achieved “on a Wednesday afternoon,” she points out, and has required the gradual implementation of a holistic approach.

“You have to think of it as a great, big oil tanker. So, if we are all standing on the oil tanker, and you want to change direction, you have to start miles back to make that decision to change, and it’s a very slow turn.”

She tells the story of a boy called David. He was a secondary school student in Glasgow who one night in the early 2000s approached a stranger and stabbed him without reason.

“The man died, the young boy David ended up in a young offenders institution and then in prison. And what was done was they traced back his life, what his school, nursery, and family experience was, picked out all the causes and showed that actually the only way to change David’s life was by taking a holistic approach to it,” McKenna remembers.

In the decade following the implementation of this approach, recorded incidents of handling an offensive weapon fell by 69%, according to Police Scotland statistics. This multifaceted system is clearly playing a key role in youth justice.

“Ten, twelve years ago, the government was talking about building new jails for young people… All those plans were shelved because we now have fewer and fewer young people [convicted].

“That’s a massive cost to society—£200,000 (US$268,000) a year to keep a young person in secure care, and we’ve reduced all those numbers because what we’re doing is finding alternative pathways and different supports for these young people.”

Glasgow’s system sees schools as the heart of the community and assigns them a crucial preventative role. Police officers are community trained also and work alongside education professionals.

McKenna explains that they “go in and out of schools, and are there to bond with the young people to allow the young people to see them in a different light… It is about looking at that cause and effect. Rather than seeing the police just as a criminal body that takes people—it’s about safeguarding.”

And, as experience over the years has taught her, the whole systems approach saves lives.

“A little ten-year-old boy didn’t come to school in the morning. They didn’t get a phone call from home, so they phoned the housing association that he lived in, the housing officer went up to the door, she knew somebody was in, but couldn’t get an answer.

“She phoned the police, they opened the door and the mom was out of her face on drugs and that wee boy didn’t want to leave her in case she died.”

Rather than just discipline the boy for truancy, the family were able to access the much-needed support it needed. That was the result of bringing in many different partners and knowing who can do what.

* The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) is a relative measure of deprivation across 6,976 areas of Scotland, examining deprivation across seven domains: income, employment, education, health, access to services, crime and housing. "SIMD ranks data zones from most deprived (ranked 1) to least deprived (ranked 6,976). People using SIMD will often focus on the data zones below a certain rank, for example, the 5%, 10%, 15% or 20% most deprived data zones in Scotland." Click here to explore a detailed map of Glasgow.

“Ten, 12 years ago, the government was talking about building new jails for young people… All those plans were shelved because we now have fewer and fewer young people [convicted].”

– Maureen McKenna

Lived experience

“Children need to feel they belong and they need to be part of their local communities, so we need to value their experiences even if they are radically different from ours,” McKenna continues.

“And that is a real challenge for teachers, as it’s a challenge for me—I wasn’t brought up in poverty, so I don’t have that lived experience, and it can be too easy to be judgmental. ‘If only they didn’t do this, they would be so much better.’ But maybe they don’t have a choice or maybe, at this point in time, they don’t have the personal capacity to be able to manage.”

Down in England, the story is different—exclusions are going in the opposite direction. Local leaders are trying to make a change, taking the Scottish success as an example.

Health and social care consultant and local politician Jacqui Dyer has a similar take to McKenna on the place of lived experience, and emphasizes the importance of having a diverse workforce that looks like those it is serving.

“If you don’t have an inclusive workforce... then you won’t have that understanding or lens of experience that infuses the decision making,” says Dyer, who is deputy leader of South London’s Lambeth borough council, having entered politics after years in mental health care provision.

“Part of the catalyst for that was growing up in a family where I have three siblings that experience severe mental illness and wanting to really understand the system in order to better advocate for my siblings and my family...

“I made complaints all the way to the chief exec of the system and realized nobody's listening to me: a Black woman making noise about her sister and the failure of the services to care for her appropriately. And that’s when I realized I’m going to have to go to a different level to influence, to help, to shape at that lowest sort of level where that face-to-face at the grassroots care is being delivered,” she candidly explained in a 2021 Salzburg Global webinar on why we need more diversity in public policy.

“It’s important to try and include the populations that you are serving in some of the works that you are doing, so you are working with them—not to them, not at them, but for them, with them.”

In Lambeth, people of African and Caribbean descent are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and among children in pupil referral units.

“The system by default is relentlessly racist, so we are trying to transform the system to move towards being anti-racist,” Dyer explains.

But that result cannot be achieved without transforming the mindsets that keep replicating a way of thinking, a way of dealing with situations and challenges that lead to poor outcomes for African and Caribbean communities.

“If you don’t have that experience of oppression, your insights can never really be from that source… As a Black woman, that would be my experience of relentless racism from the cradle to my current age.”

According to Graham Robb, a former secondary school headteacher and now consultant in youth justice mainly in England and Wales, current practices like stop and search for weapons on the streets “may actually achieve something in terms of community confidence, but it’s proven to put more young Black children into the justice system than should be there.”

“For our non-racialized counterparts, the white experience is one of privilege,” Dyer continues. “If you have a body of pure white men sitting around a table, making decisions for a Black community, that is going to be really incongruent with what that Black community needs or wants.”

She is the mind behind Black Thrive, a partnership between the community and those who pay for and deliver services to reduce the inequalities in mental health outcomes for Black people in Lambeth.

Like McKenna and other Fellows participating in Salzburg Global Seminar’s Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety and Justice initiative, she believes that prevention needs to be at the center of a whole systems approach to youth justice.

“You’re not just dealing with the symptoms – what is really visible – but you’re actually dealing with some of the structural inequalities that lead to these very poor outcomes that are particularly experienced by groups that suffer from poverty, discrimination, and disadvantage.

“It’s just relentless and ruthless,” Dyer laments. “If you got people like crabs in a barrel, and there’s no way out, they are gonna implode! It’s quite obvious.”

A whole systems approach is “very effective” because “it’s one that focuses more on prevention as opposed to one that focuses more on enforcement and stigmatization,” says Haydar Muntadhar, an expert in countering violent extremism, working in the nearby London borough of Croydon.

“Sometimes, things aren’t as they seem, and they require digging deeper to uncover what’s going on. Collaborating with partners can help us bring all the pieces of the puzzle together and help us identify what the best solutions are,” he adds.

Dyer is trying to make sure that opportunities are created in education, skill development and jobs “where they are not usually the case,” and use all the resources available in Lambeth to help those who are “most at risk of having an alternative experience, which leads to a long-term career in criminal justice pathways.”

“Wherever you are in the world, wherever poverty, disadvantage, oppression exist, you find crime. How are you gonna get out of that unless you start creating some other levers? So that people think, ‘I don’t wanna go down that road—that one looks like I could lead a good life from that, so let me go down that road.’”

To achieve the ambitious goal of addressing causes and challenging the mindsets of decision-makers, she is advocating for “Lambeth-made communities” that work in partnership with the police, counselors, and officers, as well as residents and businesses, around what their priorities are.

“It’s important to try and include the populations that you are serving in some of the works that you are doing, so you are working with them—not to them, not at them, but for them, with them.”

– Jacqui Dyer

“Political buy in”

Serious youth violence is a critical issue across the British capital. There are 32 London boroughs; each of these local authority districts is governed by a council, and some of their policies vary substantially across the city.

In Newham, East London, children and young people’s commissioner Geeta Subramaniam-Mooney is championing the whole systems approach. In a city of more than 9 million people, governed by multiple authorities, this is a challenge.

“The politicians are absolutely critical because they give you resources and leadership to act,” explains Subramaniam-Mooney, who like fellow Londoners, Dyer, Robb and Muntadhar, is taking part in the Salzburg Global youth justice initiative.

“If you have the political buy in, what you get, therefore, is resources. You get commitment, be that for four years in the case of the UK... but you get some sense of funding, resource commitment from the politicians, and then as partners we can all align to that,” she points out, also emphasizing the importance of having the right data to inform policy and policymakers.

With over twenty years' experience in local government, Subramaniam-Mooney is the first to serve in her role—also the first of its kind in local government—and is responsible for children’s health and well-being.

Another part of the challenge, she says, is explaining to the community what a whole systems approach is and why it is beneficial for them: “agree the philosophy and agree the narrative.”

And her narrative is: “prevention at all stages and ages.”

“What that means is that prevention starts very much as universal services,” she stresses. “Let’s not wait for things to go wrong.”

No single recipe

With a population of approximately 350,000, Newham is London’s third largest borough. The 2001 UK Census identified it as the most ethnically diverse district in England and Wales.

That diversity must shape any approach to youth violence for it to be effective.

“You need to have a menu of options for young people and try to find the one that works for them,” says McKenna.

Subramaniam-Mooney, in turn, speaks about a “recipe.”

“What’s the recipe for reducing violent crime in South London? You might need more flour and less eggs. In East London, you might need more sugar and flour. So, it’s really important that you have those core ingredients, but they actually might need to be blended differently to make that recipe that fits for the locality,” she explains.

“It’s not one size fits all.”

“What’s the recipe for reducing violent crime in South London? You might need more flour and less eggs. In East London, you might need more sugar and flour. So, it’s really important that you have those core ingredients, but they actually might need to be blended differently to make that recipe that fits for the locality... It’s not one size fits all.”

– Geeta Subramaniam-Mooney

When local governments need help to better understand each community and gain their trust, the third sector comes into play.

“The volunteering community sector and the faith sector are absolutely critical in that local response…” Subramaniam-Mooney adds. “They understand the local community and they also have trust, so they are able to engage in a much different way to statutory services.”

In McKenna’s experience, “voluntary organizations that are based in local communities... are very effective as a bridge between statutory services and the family, so you’re likely to get a stronger level of trust from a third-sector organization, a community-based organization than you will with statutory services.”

“You are going to look at the lives lived and then shape the services around that,” says Robb, a member of the national Youth Justice Board. That requires knowing “how to engage with the particular community or group in their part of London,” because otherwise, “we can’t design services as responsive as they should be.”

The former schoolteacher explains that the way to deal with the rise in violent crime is “by early prevention and intervention,” and that means “having a core set of approaches that all of the services share, as the way in which they are going to deal with prevention of youth violence or deal with its consequences.

“Any government tends to look at things in sections: look at justice, or education, or health, whereas actually a chance life is lived in one whole in which the various services impinge,” he adds.

“What you might be trying to do in education can be completely undermined by what police are trying to do” when there is no partnership focus, he warns.

He says there has been “a debate in London for about three years that we need a whole system approach” but “we are not there yet in terms of what the long impact will be.”

“However, what we have got England and Wales-wide—and I really don’t want to overclaim this for a whole system approach—is a drop in what is called the first-time entrance measure. In other words, children coming into the justice system for the first time. And we’ve also got a very significant drop in the number of children in youth custody.”

Still, too many politicians only care about immediate results, rather than longer-term outcomes, such as those who demand more policing after a crime that received widespread media coverage, to which some politicians react with a “uni-focused response.”

“People want delivery tomorrow, they want outcomes tomorrow, and taking a whole systems approach is about taking a long-term view,” Subramaniam-Mooney remarks.

“A forever job”

Each is at a different stage and facing unique challenges, yet all these initiatives are proving effective in tackling youth violence in the United Kingdom, and at least slow down the steady rise in homicide and knife crime that is hitting the country.

“I would like to see this become an absolute blueprint for London about how we really do shift the narrative and shift the dialogue around system change, around youth violence and violent crime,” Subramaniam-Mooney concludes.

“At the end of the day, it’s about education and it’s about using education to make a difference to young people’s lives,” assures McKenna, as she prepares to retire.

“It’s not rocket science... but it’s a forever job. We will never reach the point where it’s OK.”

Topic

Peace & Justice

Program

Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety and Justice

Session

Empathy and Human Dignity