'Kids in sport stay out of court' - Sport NZ to help curb youth offending

The government wants Sport New Zealand to help curb youth offending, but says the funding being redirected for those initiatives will not be put into the young offender "boot camps".

Sport and Recreation Minister Mark Mitchell - who also has the Police and Corrections portfolios - unveiled the findings of a review into the Crown agency last month, resulting in savings of $2.9 million a year and moving its strategic policy arm to the Ministry for Culture and Heritage.

He also pointed to plans to have Sport NZ "work collaboratively alongside my other portfolios, particularly in relation to priorities to reduce youth offending and recidivism".

The government has set a target to reduce child and youth offending, aiming for a 15 percent reduction in the total number of children and young people with serious and persistent offending behaviour.

Sport NZ group manager for play, active recreation and sport Jim Ellis told RNZ said they had been working on pilot projects with police, Corrections and Oranga Tamariki for the past three or four years.

"Our ability to say to the particular police agency or district 'here is some funding that enables that particular young person to have an experience that is likely to lead to less offending, less reoffending' is an example that we've got live in Auckland at the moment, and we may well look to scale around the country as an option," he said.

"We've also engaged very strongly over the last three to four years with a pilot attempting to look at the value of sport for young people growing up in state care and often on the edge of the youth justice system... really positive as a way of changing the potential course of those young people's lives."

They were excited about taking the next step with the new funding.

"[It] speaks very strongly to the work the Sport New Zealand wants to do, to see more youth - and in particular youth at some level of disadvantage - have opportunities for sport and to be active in ways that work for them, and we know that that historically just worked well," he said.

"Kids in sports stay out of court - but also they do better at school, and their communities are healthier when they're engaged in being active through sport or other means."

'Sport is one way kids can be positive engaged'

Blue Light NZ chief executive Brendon Crompton said 'kids in sport stay out of court' had been the catchphrase of former Principal Youth Court judge Andrew Becroft - who went on to be the Children's Commissioner - when he was patron of the group 15 years ago.

"If you kind of dig down into that, what he's actually talking about is kids who are positively engaged - and sport is obviously one way kids can be positive engaged - tend not to get into trouble because their time is filled with things to do and obviously positive adults in their life.

"For our youth offender program, 80 percent of kids who engage with us... don't reoffend."

He pointed to New Zealand Open golf champion Ryan Peake as an example of how sport and other activities could turn a person's life around.

It was more than just providing some shoes and uniforms, or paying team fees, he said.

"The kids we're talking about, if that's who they're really targeting, they need a bit more support. And it's not ongoing forever, but going down and meeting the coach, attend the first couple of practices, meet the other kids, attending one or two games - that sounds like it should be the role of the parent, but the parent isn't doing that job, so we just have to accept that.

"Often, once kids are engaged, then they'll walk to their games, they'll cycle to their games - but they were not going to do that as a cold call."

But Sport NZ was likely not well set up to handle that pastoral care approach, he said, so he would hope to see it invest the funding into organisations like Blue Light.

Ellis said the $2.9m a year found in the review - launched by the previous Sport Minister Chris Bishop in November - all came from internal programs or costs, and was not being recouped from any other sport and recreation sector investments.

All of it will be redirected back into Sport NZ programmes, but which programmes it goes to will depend on the minister.

Mitchell told RNZ he was expecting to hear back from the agency next month about options for reinvesting the $2.9m, but potentially all of it could go to curbing youth offending.

"Obviously the overall strategic focus of the use of that money is to make sure we get young people into sport and exercise, get some good mentors and role models around them - particularly those ones that aren't engaged at the moment, and particularly those ones that are at risk of coming into the youth justice system," he said.

"There's some programs running at the moment... using sport and rec, some of our best young sports people and role models to actually to spend time with them, get them active and mentor them. So just programs like that."

Mitchell ruled out spending the funding on the government's Young Offender Military Academy "boot camp" schemes.

"No, this fund is not designed for that, they've got their own funding that's done through OT (Oranga Tamariki)," he said.

The young people on the pilot programme had asked to be involved in more sport, recreation and team-building exercises, he said.

"And we're changing so that instead of being limited to three months, we can keep them in that residence and that program longer - that's exactly what they've been getting, they've been getting access to sport, recreation and team building exercises, and they've loved it, and they've asked for more of it."

Children's Minister Karen Chhour's office confirmed the Military Academies would have the timeframes for the residential phase extended from the pilot's three months, but said the exact timeframe would be finalised after an independent evaluation was complete following the first pilot's conclusion next month.

Crompton said the "boot camp" label - which was used by National when the party campaigned on the policy - was misleading.

"That's a 1960s term. Essentially, they're intensive residential based programs, and we know intensive residential based programs work.

"What I know they're doing is they're trying to have longer, more therapeutic residential-based courses. The problem you have then is that kids still have to come back to the community and in the last pilot, I think ... [where] they placed some of those young people post release, probably needed a little bit more thought."

The Culture and Heritage Ministry had $2m cut from its Budget last month, and has proposed cutting 24 roles - about 15 percent of its staff - to make savings.

Asked if the ministry would receive more funding to cover the new sport policy responsibilities being transferred to it, Mitchell said it would come out of baseline funding.

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