Coram Innovation Incubator (CII) has today announced it has partnered with PA Consulting (PA), the global innovation and transformation consultancy, on the creation of a national digital outreach solution platform to help detect and prevent youth crime.

The platform will be accessible to children and young people who find themselves experiencing – or feel at risk of becoming involved in – criminal exploitation. It will signpost and refer those at-risk individuals to appropriate local organisations who can support them. The intention is that through early intervention, we can prevent those young people already in the criminal justice system from being drawn deeper into criminality.

The CII recommendation for this important solution was developed with young people and featured in the Commission report on Race and Ethnic Diversity’s call for a national digital strategy to establish a more contemporary and relevant means of identifying young people at risk of criminalisation and encouraging them to accept support.

CII will convene participating local authorities including Southend, Hertfordshire and Newham to provide expertise and insight in the field of adolescent safeguarding and children’s services. PA will bring its market-leading technical capabilities to support the design and build of the new digital tool. As one of the founding technology companies of the WePROTECT Global Alliance that’s helping to fight CSEA, PA is a natural partner for this project.

The CII, launched earlier this year, brings leaders of children’s services together with Coram and private sector partners including Microsoft and EY to develop innovative solutions to the biggest challenges facing the children’s social care sector. The founding members have now been joined by Warrington, and participate in innovation labs, identifying and testing game changing innovations by bringing together the best ideas from within and outside the sector, and developing the expertise and capacity to create, pilot and implement solutions.

The recent report by Coram-i, the Coram Group’s insight and innovation specialist which operates the CII, highlighted the need for greater innovation across the children’s social care sector. Initial key priorities identified are youth safety, high cost placements, and adolescent mental health.

Dr Carol Homden, CEO of Coram said: “Creating change that lasts needs more than a description of the problem – it needs the capacity, creativity and expertise to create tools which enable work to be done in new ways. Coram is proud to welcome PA Consulting as a partner in the Coram Innovation Incubator to help do just that.”

Amanda Kelly, children’s services lead at PA Consulting, commented: “We are delighted to join the Coram Innovation Incubator as a strategic partner. The challenges faced by children’s services are some of the most complex in society. Our technical capability combined with our expertise in innovation delivery makes us well placed to support Coram to turn ideas into tangible solutions that will have a lasting impact on the most vulnerable in our society.”