eAsset

Project overview

Until recently, the secure estate for children and young people often did not receive assessment information from youth offending teams (YOTs) until a young person arrived in custody, and sometimes that information was incomplete. This situation hampered teamwork.

Receiving a complete record of a young person’s assessment in advance of their arrival in reception will enable the secure estate to plan resources, interventions and allocate caseworkers. It will facilitate joint-working between YOTs and the secure estate.

eAsset is the electronic sentence management system for the secure estate for children and young people, designed to meet these needs.

Purpose

The Wiring Up Youth Justice programme created eAsset to bring together risk assessment information about the young person and facilitate end-to-end sentence management, from reception through to resettlement.

eAsset enables secure estate staff to upload the Asset assessment [opens in new window], completed by YOTs for initial sentence-planning, in advance of a young person’s arrival in custody. It includes the community section of a young person’s Detention and Training Order [link opens in a new window], giving unparalleled support for joint-working between YOTs and the secure estate. It is designed to be customised to fit the needs of each establishment.

eAsset encourages a stronger link between interventions in the secure estate for children and young people and those in the community delivered by YOTs. It increases the ability of the secure estate to make sentence-planning decisions on interventions that help improve a young person’s behaviour, and address the risk factors affecting them.

Benefits

eAsset is constantly evolving in line with feedback from the people who directly use the system. The benefits of the current online version or ‘v6’ include:

Joint-working and sharing of information

• Seamless sharing of information between YOTs and the secure estate, promoting joint-working and cooperation.
• The potential to allow information to be shared with other systems, for example, adult criminal justice systems such as C-NOMIS.

Accessibility and accuracy of information 

• Access to the information is made available via encrypted ‘tunnels’ through the Internet or via the Government Secure Intranet (GSi).
• As it is web-based, it is accessible to sites which cannot use the prison service computer network, such as secure children’s homes or privately run secure training centres (STCs). 
• All members of a secure establishment have access to colleagues’ information as soon as it has been saved to the central system.
• eAsset remains ‘live’, in that it can be constantly updated throughout the young person’s stay in custody, following appropriate reviews, by staff in the community and the secure estate. This allows important information to be accessed easily and improves accuracy of information collated. 

Improved transfer of information and support

• It enables the smooth transfer of the ‘mid-point’ Asset to YOTs and the adult Prison Service when the young person goes back into the community or moves to adult custody. This means practitioners can get to work providing the right support for the young person before they are released or move custody, while ensuring that practitioners have a full understanding of the young person’s sentence to date.

Latest situation

eAsset is currently being rolled out across all young offender institutions (YOIs), STCs and secure children’s homes. At a glance, they are:

Live with the latest version of the eAsset sentence management system

Key dates

The next version of eAsset in currently under development. More information will be provided when available.

Contact

For further information, please email wiringup@yjb.gov.uk.