Speakers
Lee Manning
Parallel Workshops
The Your Rights, Your Journey (YRYJ) initiative was developed in response to persistently high re‑offending rates among children and young people leaving custody. In the year ending March 2021, the overall re‑offending rate for young people was 30.2 per cent, rising to 62.9 per cent for those released from custody. Despite relatively low numbers in custody (458 children as at April 2023), the cohort is highly vulnerable: most are aged 15–18, almost half are from Black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds, and a significant proportion have experience of care, trauma, abuse or neglect. Custody itself is often characterised by exposure to violence and instability, compounding existing vulnerabilities.
Transition from custody to the community presents further risks. Children frequently leave custody without stable accommodation, education or employment arrangements, basic documentation, or adequate preparation for family reunification. At the same time, resettlement systems are often under‑resourced and poorly coordinated, particularly across children’s and adult services.
This workshop explores findings from the evaluation of Barnardo’s Your Rights, Your Journey pilot, a resettlement model designed to address these systemic challenges. The project is distinctive in four key ways: it provides consistent support both ‘inside’ custody and ‘outside’ in the community; adopts a holistic, strengths‑based approach; operates as a trusted, non‑statutory advocate for children and families; and places equal emphasis on supporting families as a source of long‑term stability.
Early evaluation findings suggest that this integrated model can make a meaningful difference to children’s experiences and outcomes on release.
My name is Lee Manning and I am the Head of Operational Contract Management for the Youth Custody Service in the United Kingdom. I am responsible for overseeing Secure Children's Homes, a Secure Training Centre, Education in Youth Offending Institutions, Children's Rights and Advocacy and a number of other contracted provisions.
I have 14 years of experience across His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service working as a Juvenile Prison Officer at the very start of my career, moving through the adult male and female estate in a number of roles and then managing private probation contracts and working in our approved premise estate for high risk offenders.
I am the National Development Programme Manager for Barnardo’s, Your Rights Your Voice - we provide advocacy and children’s rights information to children in the four youth offending institutions, one secure training centre and one Secure Children's Home across England and Wales.
I started my career 20 years ago in open access youth club settings teaching dance and completing my Connexions Careers Advisor training.
For the bulk of my career, I was a case manager for the Oldham Youth Justice Service (supporting children to complete their court mandated sentences in the community) and in the last 7 years I have been managing the Early Help family work teams (which sits under statutory children’s services) and Youth Justice Service teams in a borough of Greater Manchester. I have now worked on Your Rights Your Voice for four years and thankfully, we have been commissioned for a further seven years. I spend a great deal of my working time challenging the systems within the secure estate which are not child focused or trauma informed and encouraging decision makers within those systems to review process and policy which impact how children are cared for in secure settings. I am very passionate about this group of children who are not portrayed well in the media in the reporting of their offences , and in the culture of name and shame on social media. This group of children are victims of offences as well as perpetrators, and their struggles and lived experience go largely unnoticed.