It is absolutely essential that all professionals in the youth justice system (YJS) have a guiding philosophy of practice for their work with children; a sense of objective and purpose to frame and animate their knowledge and skills bases. Without a coherent and explicit philosophy, policies and practitioner knowledge are simply information and understanding; practitioner skills are simply abilities, expertise and techniques; lacking in foundation and application. A youth justice philosophy ‘gives purpose to action … [and]… shapes the way in which we use knowledge and skills to achieve certain outcomes’ (Haines and Drakeford 1998: 69). Since the inception of a YJS in the UK and latterly in the constituent countries of the UK (England and Wales together, Scotland, Northern Ireland), youth justice policy and practice has been characterised by tensions between welfare principles and justice-based approaches to dealing with children in conflict with the law and the youth justice system (for a detailed historical account of the development of youth justice in England and Wales, see Muncie, Hughes and McLaughlin 2002; Newburn and Morgan 2007). These overarching philosophies have fluctuated between dominating youth justice priorities and each has been marginalised at the expense of the other, although elements of both have persisted in successive manifestations of policy and practice targeting children in conflict with the law and the youth justice system, rendering youth justice a messy, complex and contested domain (see Smith 2006).

The ambiguity and ambivalence that has pervaded youth justice in England and Wales was compounded from the late 1980s onwards by the emergence, on the one hand, of a corporatist philosophy that sought to engender multi-agency partnership working between youth justice stakeholders and to manage the YJS effectively and efficiently (see, for example, Pratt 1989) and ‘New Orthodoxy’ (see, for example, Haines and Drakeford 1998) practice, on the other. A so-called ‘third way’ approach (not welfare, not justice) to the delivery of youth justice emerged following the Misspent Youth report (Audit Commission 1996) and New Labour's commitment to a managerialist, actuarialist risk agenda manifested in risk assessment and risk-led intervention (see Smith 2006; Case and Haines 2009).