01 July 2026
After three years, four police force areas and 364 young people, the results from Re-Frame are in, and they aren't what we expected.
At WithYou we believe in diversion. Pulling a young person out of the criminal justice system and into support is, in almost every case we see, the right thing to do. A criminal record picked up at 14 tends to follow you, closing off training, employment and education at precisely the point a young person needs those routes open.
So when the Youth Endowment Fund offered to support the UK's first randomised controlled trial of a youth diversion programme, we jumped at it. Three years on, with the evaluation published, we have something the sector hasn't really had before: rigorous evidence about what happens when you divert a young person from custody into a substance use intervention.
Re-Frame is a two-session brief intervention designed by WithYou and delivered across Kent, Cornwall, Sefton and Wigan. Independent assessors scored delivery quality at 3 out of 4, and young people consistently praised the non-judgemental tone, the practical content on law and harm, and the flexibility to meet virtually or in person.
When we compared the 364 young people randomly assigned to either the full Re-Frame intervention or a single session of basic advice, the result was more modest than we'd hoped. Both groups reduced their substance use, with a higher reduction among those who got the full intervention. But on offending, Re-Frame had a small negative impact compared to the control. The cohort as a whole reoffended at 26%, well below the national benchmark of 32.5% - but the structured two-session programme didn't beat basic advice in the way we'd expected, and on reoffending it came out slightly worse.
There are good reasons the structured sessions struggled to show an effect: most of these young people didn't see their cannabis use as a problem, the cohort were light users with little room to improve, and our staff questioned whether two sessions were really enough to build the rapport that changes behaviour. It also raises a bigger question. If a structured intervention doesn't clearly out-perform a one-off advice session - a bit better on substance use, slightly worse on offending - the active ingredient may not be the curriculum. It could be the broader experience of being diverted: the police contact, the avoidance of a criminal record, the conversation with a practitioner who isn't a police officer or a parent. Some combination of those things may be doing the real work.
"This is useful for commissioners," says Agnes Wootton at WithYou. "It tells us you don't necessarily need a heavy, expensive programme to get a result. The pathway itself has value. The harder question is who needs more, and how we spot them earlier."
That second question matters because the trial also told us a lot about who is actually in the system. Three-quarters of the young people referred to Re-Frame had no recorded offences in the six months before they were stopped and substance use frequency was relatively low. For most of this group, a light-touch diversion was probably the right response, and a more intensive intervention was unlikely to add much.
Cannabis was overwhelmingly the substance of choice, partly because the diversion criteria restricted referrals to class B and C offences. A future programme that reached young people with class A offences, or more problematic use, might see a very different result. Those young people are more likely to recognise their use as a problem, which gives an intervention something to work with and more scope to shift behaviour.
In the qualitative interviews, young people also told us repeatedly that they were using it to manage something else: ADHD, autism, anxiety and insomnia. Most were waiting years for an assessment or a medication review, which mirrors what we see across our young people's drug and alcohol services for those already in treatment.
89% of young people in the trial were White, and only 3% of those referred were Black, despite Black young people making up 20% of stop-and-searches and 12% of arrests nationally. Police recording of ethnicity across the four sites was inconsistent so we couldn't fully analyse the disparity. If diversion is working, it needs to work equitably, and we don't currently have the data to know whether it is.
The officers we spoke to were strongly supportive and wanted to do more - referring young people for alcohol-related offences, antisocial behaviour, and across all classes of substance, with real consensus that anyone in contact with the police should have access to support. Diversion clearly has friends in the system, and at £78.50 per young person the pathway is cheap to run and slots into existing structures.
What we'd say to the sector is this. It's worth being precise about what this trial tested: Re-Frame as a specific intervention, not diversion as a whole. Diversion remains a genuinely promising response to low-level offending, and nothing here changes our belief in it. But Re-Frame has shifted our thinking about how the offer should be designed. The next generation of programmes needs two things the original didn't quite get right: sharper targeting, so we reach the young people with more problematic use who are actually positioned to benefit, and enough intensity to change behaviour once we've found them. Two short sessions may simply not be enough where real change is needed. Build that in, join it up with mental health pathways, and design it to address the ethnic disparities in referrals.
That's the conversation we'd like to have with the sector, and we think it's overdue.
