Skip to content

Toggle service links

You are here

  1. Home
  2. Learning
  3. Free Learning
  4. Youth and Youth Offending

Youth and Youth Offending

Image of free learning

These free resources are organised into categories aligned to the College of Policing Curriculum and in agreement with police experts. You can study them at any time and anywhere.

Select the duration of study below and you will be taken to resources that match that duration

1-7 Hours of study More than 7 hours of study

1-7 hours of study

Issues in research with children and young people

Many people express their opinions about the lives of children and young people, whether from first-hand experience of their own families, from working with children or engaging with accounts in the media. This course considers how children and young people can be involved in the research process. Different definitions of research are explored through first-hand accounts by researchers across a range of disciplines and studies. Attention is drawn to the role of both researchers and participants.

Type of activity: Course

What children and young people say

This course looks at how practitioners and other adults talk to children and young people, and considers how this influences what they tell us. It identifies how children and young people would prefer to be engaged with, what would encourage their confidence in authority figures, and outlines the ways in which adults can improve on their listening techniques.

Type of activity: Course

Youth work: Introducing policy

In this course we will look at the meaning of policy, how it works as a mechanism for persuading people to behave in particular ways, its role in shaping our understandings of young people, and the role practitioners can play in mediating and influencing policy. This course tries to understand policy as both shaping and reflecting our sense of priorities, values and expectations about the future.

Type of activity: Course

Back to top

More than 7 hours of study

Children and young people’s participation

Listening to children is a first step in the participation agenda, which is reasonably well established. By contrast, enabling children to share in decision making lags some way behind. This course emphasises that the adoption of an integrated approach to participation by different sectors of the children's workforce is of crucial importance. 

Type of activity: Course

Discovering disorder: young people and delinquency

This course introduces two approaches to understanding juvenile delinquency. The psychological approach focuses on examining what makes some individuals, but not others, behave badly. The sociological approach looks at why some individuals and some behaviours are defined as disorderly

Type of activity: Course

Introducing observational approaches in research with children and young people

This course introduces you to analysing academic writing and, in particular, the way an article might be structured to clearly explain an investigation to other researchers. It explores observation of children and young people using qualitative observation approaches in small-scale studies. 

Type of activity: Course

Partnerships and networks in work with young people

The term 'partnership' is used to describe a wide range of organisational arrangements and ways of working: from informal networking between individuals, to more formal partnership structures. This course explores a range of meanings for the word 'partnership', and identifies both the difficulties, and the potential benefits, that can come from working in partnership. 

Type of activity: Course

Professional relationships with young people

In some people's eyes the development of relationships is a good end in itself, because it is in relationships that we express our humanity. Young people with few good-quality relationships often find that entering into informal relationships with adults who respect, accept, like and really listen to them is a new life experience. This course explores different approaches in developing relationships and working practices that can inform work with young people.

Type of activity: Course

The range of work with young people

This course identifies some features that we might use to describe the various settings where work with young people takes place. This encourages us to identify similarities and differences between settings. It then introduces some theoretical perspectives to help us review these settings and thus understand more about the experience for young people and workers. Finally, it uses these perspectives to analyse examples of different settings, relating the theoretical ideas to the realities of practice.

Type of activity: Course

Working with young people: Roles and responsibilities

In this course we look at roles taken when working with young people. We focus on what those working with young people do, starting with analysis of roles. We show that, in the context of work with young people, the term says something about the kinds of relationships we form with young people and the values we bring. We discuss roles in relation to the 'bigger picture' of organisations and projects that are concerned with young people.

Type of activity: Course

Back to top