SHiFT IN PRACTICE
WHERE ARE WE?
Since 2021, SHiFT has launched eight Practices. Six are currently operating, each tailored to meet local needs and priorities for children and systems change.
SHiFT Practices are ‘insider-outsiders’, and are able to be alongside and part of the organisations that host them while at the same time retaining their SHiFT identity.
MIDDLESBROUGH, REDCAR AND CLEVELAND, MANCHESTER, ESSEX, KINGSTON AND RICHMOND, BEXLEY
The national SHiFT team is based at the Coram Campus near King’s Cross.
HOW DO WE WORK?
Each young person who works with SHiFT is supported by a SHiFT Guide — a highly skilled practitioner who works as part of a SHiFT Practice.
Every Practice is embedded in a Host Organisation (often a Local Authority) and tailored to local needs and ambitions. SHiFT Practices include at least four Guides, a Lead Guide, and a Practice Coordinator. Colleagues in SHiFT Practices are employed by the Host Organisation and receive intensive, ongoing support from the national SHiFT team.
We know change is hard.
Many young people in conflict with the law have complex, overlapping education, health, and social care needs. They have typically experienced short-term, piecemeal, risk and deficit focused intervention that has not necessarily given the time and support required to get to the root of challenges that they are experiencing.
Using the Breaking Cycles ingredients, underpinned by a systemic approach, SHiFT commits to doing whatever it takes to break cycles of crime.
SHiFT Guides work intensively with a small number of children, unconstrained by age, geographic or professional boundaries. We start with aspiration and belief in all young people and meet each young person where they are, building high-trust, anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and strengths-based relationships with them, their families, friends, and communities — including the professionals already in their lives.
We create opportunities for change by taking a curious, non-judgmental position – considering relationships, context and the power of stories. We think about ourselves in the work, holding multiple ideas tentatively about what might be happening for children and families.
SHiFT Guides support children and young people with unrivalled flexibility, longevity, and ambition – our work with young people finishes when they are set on a path for success.
WHO ARE WE?
SHiFT is a movement that exists to break the destructive cycle of children and young people caught up in, or at risk of, crime.
SHiFT is scaling high impact ‘insider-outsider’ Practices across the UK.
SHiFT Practices are multidisciplinary teams that work with children and young people up to the age of 25 who are causing and experiencing harm and for whom things are getting worse, not better – young people who would benefit most from an intensive, therapeutic relationship.
SHiFT Practices are supported by a national SHiFT team. Together, we are demonstrating that
Public services can work differently with children and young people at highest risk of crime;
By working in this way, secure better outcomes for children and public safety and save money.
Through practice and evidence of its impacts, we seek to influence policy and practice locally, regionally, and nationally so that ‘the SHiFT way’ becomes business as usual for all services working with children caught up in, or at risk of, crime.
SHiFT uses the Breaking Cycles ingredients to inform all aspects of its systemic, anti-racist and anti-oppressive practice.
BREAKING CYCLES
SHiFT uses the Breaking Cycles ingredients, a dynamic and evidenced approach to enabling change, created by Sophie Humphreys OBE.
Using the Breaking Cycles ingredients, SHiFT wants every child and young person caught up in, or at risk of, crime, to have one intensive, high-quality, trusting, and persistent professional relationship through which most of their needs are met: a flexible, tailored, and tenacious relationship through which professionals do whatever it takes to set children and young people up for safe and bright futures.
