Wear Kids
Wear Kids is a free voluntary support scheme for Young people aged 8-13 and their families in Sunderland. The main aim is to help young people stay out of trouble and prevent anti social behaviour. Young people can refer themselves directly to the scheme or can be referred by parents, carers, teachers or other professionals

Wear Kids work with young people to organise support and access to other services. These could include; health advice, family and parenting support, mentoring, education, local projects.

Once a referral has been made young people meet with their project worker, and a panel is organised where a plan will be developed to work with young people and support them through any difficulties.

YMCA Residential Day

On 15th February 2008, Sunderland Youth Offending Service Prevention practitioners took a group of young people to the YMCA Lakeside on Lake Windemere for a residential day, the aim of which was to involve young people in the recruitment and selection process for Children's Services staff. The team covered most if not all aspects of recruitment. The 10 young people attending all got the chance to design job advertisements and list the qualities and skills they thought staff needed to be good workers, as well as understanding the process surrounding recruitment (the two examples used were Teacher and Foster Carer post).

The young people also had the chance to mock interview each other and worked well as a team. All the feedback received from the evaluations was excellent all the young people gave positive feedback and all the young people showed interest in interviewing staff in future.

Comments received from the young people on the day were:
"Just to say that I really enjoyed and was fun working with different people as a team".

The residential also helped better individuals in relation to personal development.

MP Supports Innovation

On April the 7th Wear Kids had a visit from MP Bill Etherington. Sunderland’s Local MP had been attracted to the development of Wear kids and how their innovative practice was engaging young people and reducing their risks of becoming involved in offending or anti social behaviour.

During his visit the MP was given the opportunity to not only look at facts, figures and results, but also meet the real people who nurture this change of behaviour, the staff. He talked freely about their practice and roles and also discussed their hopes and fears for future prevention work across the city.

To offer a more holistic visit time was also taken to show how the work of the Prevention Strategy linked to the effective work delivered by the wider Youth Offending Service. Mr Etherington was particularly impressed by the way the service was structured, using such a powerful multi agency team to meet the needs of any young person coming in contact with the service.