Evidence-based skills in Welsh youth justice settings
This chapter presents the findings of a study that examined supervision skills within three youth offending teams. The study focused on youth justice practice in Wales and its objective was to explore how best to integrate research evidence into frontline practice. It found that participating practitioners employed mainly relationship skills. This is a positive finding but there was limited use of evidence-based skills embedded in what is described as the ‘structuring principle' of effective interpersonal interactions (Bonta and Andrews 2017). The skills are change-focused and they impact on what young people learn during interactions with practitioners and the quality of the influence the practitioners exert over them. This chapter examines the factors that impede the application of structuring skills and concludes with a discussion of the ways in which gaps between research and supervision practice can be bridged to enhance the quality of youth justice practice.