JCPSLP Vol 21 No 1 2019

victim, answer verbally loaded and emotive questions, develop solutions to repair the harm, and use the conferencing process to change their future behaviour. This also requires sufficient executive functioning and metacognitive skills. The Youth Justice SLPs are becoming more involved in preparing young people for involvement in restorative justice conferencing. Collaborative practice Collaborative practice is key to the integration of therapeutic perspectives with educational, health, and youth justice priorities (Department of Education, 2018). In Queensland, it has been essential for youth justice SLPs to collaborate with multiple professionals to build connected and coordinated services for young people in custody that allow for smoother transitions back into the community. This includes within their own multidisciplinary teams, caseworkers, heads of curriculum, education, child safety services, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural units, First Nations Action Board members and Indigenous reference groups, child and youth mental health services, and primary medical services. Language assessment and intervention The scope of SLP service provision is varied – services include 1:1 individualised assessments, interventions, and behaviour support, group work, consultation and building capacity within other professionals and programs, psychoeducation and training, and consultation with stakeholders. SLPs prepare comprehensive reports that may influence various outcomes for the young person – such as, to inform magistrates, judges and legal representatives in the children’s courts prior to sentencing; to medical professionals that may inform their care plans for young people, or to National Disability Insurance Agency planners to determine the level of support required. SLPs also engage in the dissemination of information to relevant stakeholders to ensure smooth transition into the community and access to support post-detention. Regardless of how service is delivered, there is a compelling need for language assessment and intervention for young people in youth justice. Improving communication skills, including reading comprehension, were predicted to reduce the likelihood of re-offending with one study suggesting that if reading comprehension scores improved by one standard deviation, the risk of young people reoffending would reduce by approximately 30% (Rucklidge, McLean, & Bateup, 2009). Young people with SLCN in youth justice will have difficulty receiving and practically applying services if they are not accompanied by intense language intervention (Linares-Orama, 2005). Working with young people with Standard Australian English as an additional language/dialect The Queensland Youth Justice system has a significant percentage of young people from diverse cultural backgrounds, specifically from Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander backgrounds, with 87% and 56% of Aboriginal and/Torres Strait Islander young people at Cleveland Youth Detention Centre (Townsville) and Brisbane Youth Detention Centre respectively in 2016–17 (Youth Justice Annual Summary Statistics – Detention, 2017). Many of these young people have English as an additional language/dialect, which indicates the need for individualised support that draws upon culture-specific knowledge of communication. Young people may code-switch between

different dialects along the Australian Aboriginal English continuum. The majority of Australian Aboriginal languages use between 3 to 5 vowels (Butcher & Anderson, 2008), which requires SLPs to ensure they avoid “misidentification through over-identification of speech errors, or conversely through under-identification, where dialectal difference is held accountable for all errors” (Toohill, McLeod, & McCormack, 2012, p. 102). Standardised assessments are by their very nature culturally and linguistically specific, and therefore, standardised tests in isolation are diagnostically inadequate and inappropriate for bilingual young people (SPA, 2016; ASHA, 2004). However, standardised assessments used in conjunction with non-standardised methods can be appropriate measures of performance, as long as the SLP has adequate understanding of the language differences (Miller, Webster, Knight, & Comino, 2013), and the skills to compare cross-linguistic clinical markers between the two languages (Bedore & Peña, 2008), obtain carer reports of the young person’s abilities in both of their languages, and to understand context of what needs to be spoken and the manner in which it is to be spoken (Gould, 2008). Clinical support In Queensland, access to clinical support has been essential to the ongoing development of the experienced SLPs in youth justice. Supports have included individual clinical supervision, regular peer-group meetings, and specialised professional development which has included topics addressing trauma-informed practice, positive behaviour support, mental health interventions, evidence- based intervention frameworks when working with young people who sexually offend, and evidence-based communication interventions for young people with neuro-disabilities or English as an additional language/ dialect. Gaps in service As SLP services have only recently been implemented in youth justice in Queensland, there are several challenges that must be considered and/or addressed. High turnover The average daily number of young people held on remand in Queensland is 81%. The average stay of a young person on remand in Queensland is 34 days (Youth Justice Annual Summary Statistics – Detention, 2017), which impacts the ability to build rapport, assess and gather collateral information to inform the report and recommendations for treatment. Access to medical and education information There are three different government departments (Youth Justice, Education, Health) operating within the detention centres, with each having its own legislation and policies around information-sharing and confidentiality. There is a need for ongoing collaboration between departments to maximise the quality of service provision and avoid service duplication. Follow-up of health services by young people and their families upon release With the prevalence of dual diagnoses and other comorbidities in young people comes the need to be consistent with medical check-ups and treatment implementation. Examples include the identification and follow-up of young people with hearing and vision loss, accessing further services such as counselling, SLP,

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JCPSLP Volume 21, Number 1 2019

Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology