At the time of publication almost a decade will have passed since the youth justice reforms introduced a new statutory concept of multi-agency working with children and young people who offend. Working with new structures to oversee youth offending services at local level, the Youth Justice Board (YJB) has overseen policy and practice to monitor the youth justice system. During the same period, the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) has explored ‘what works’ in supervising young adults who offend. The next few months will see a period of even greater change with the new Ministry of Justice taking over all responsibility for offender management, criminal law and sentencing. For the youth justice system, it will be interesting to note how shared responsibility between the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Children, Schools and Families will impact on service delivery.

The preoccupation in working with adults who offend is now very much on public protection. For the youth justice system, the prevailing tone has continued to be on the prevention of youth crime and balancing meeting complex needs with managing risk. However, public and media pressure in the last two years has placed both systems in the political spotlight, with questions being asked about how effectively the risk presented by those who offend is managed. While NOMS has responded with a clear approach to risk management, there are still questions to be asked about appropriate strategies for work with young people. How should the wider issues of children's rights, safeguarding what is an extremely vulnerable group of individuals, and child protection be taken into account? What kind of assessment tools and models of engagement are most effective? Is public protection the most appropriate focus? How should prevention strategies be developed?

The intention behind this collection of papers is not necessarily to find the right answers to these questions but to contribute to a wider debate about the management and oversight of young people who commit serious crime. We hope that policy makers, managers in both criminal justice and children's services and others with an interest in children and young people who offend will all find something of value in the varied contributions and that the book will both challenge and stimulate their thinking.