County lines is complex, subsequently presenting a challenge in the prevention, identification and disruption of county lines exploitation.

The Youth Justice Board’s Strategic Plan for 2019-2022 sets addressing Serious Youth Violence as one of YJB’s priorities, including an aim to see “a reduction in the number of children being exploited through involvement with county lines”. The Youth Justice Board has provided Pathfinder funding to support the Youth Justice Services in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire to work collaboratively to identify and disseminate emerging practice in the prevention, identification and disruption of County Lines exploitation.

The work of the County Lines Pathfinder concludes in February 2022 and this event provides an update on the work and learning thus far which broadly covers governance models and collaborative practice approaches; workforce development; enhanced support models; prevention and early intervention; and direct practice approaches.

As a predominantly importing area, we will share initial learning from all four counties highlighting findings from research, emerging practice, and new approaches which are currently being tested. Additionally we will share high level findings from a policy review which will be publicly available from late summer 2021, and our work to develop a recommended minimum dataset to standardise data collection enabling effective identification and a richer understanding of the county lines landscape.

There is a waitlist enabled for this event and we encourage you to register on the waitlist in the event that there are no tickets left. This will allow us to contact you if a ticket becomes available, and also to measure the interest in a duplicate event to share learning further, which is likely to be on the afternoon of May 25th. We will contact those on the waitlist directly with notice of any duplicate event details.