Sarah is highly skilled in evaluation and analysis of performance within children’s services and youth offending teams. She has a wide range of skills and expertise in these fields and is a respected member of our team, delivering continued high quality insight into the work she audits. Her work includes:

• Auditing of children’s services and youth offending team cases to identify areas of effective practice and areas for improvement. This includes specialist areas such as child protection cases and children with disabilities. Auditing of youth offending team cases has frequently focused on risk assessment and safeguarding to improve understanding and raising performance levels in the assessment and management in these areas.
• Coaching of staff on a one-to-one basis to reflect on practice, recognise their own areas for improvement and improve skills in delivering work to a high standard.
• Coaching of managers to improve their ability to drive through change and improvement amongst their teams of staff.
• Developing and delivering training for practitioners on good practice in writing pre-sentence reports, assessment, risk of harm, safeguarding and case management.
• Supporting fieldwork for research and evaluations, especially in relation to effective engagement with children, young people and parents/carers.

The experience Sarah brings from her time with HMIP has meant that she has been effective in supporting organisations in the run up to inspection as well as post-inspection work. Whilst with HMIP she was also involved in conducting Thematic Inspections regarding MAPPA arrangements and Sex Offenders. She also has specialised knowledge on domestic violence and was a facilitator for the domestic violence programme in the Probation Service. She has also worked in prisons and youth offender institutions whilst with the Probation Service and has critical understanding of the issues arising from periods of incarceration and resettlement.