About us

How we'll support the prevention of violence and exploitation of children and young people, and disadvantage, particularly race and sex.

We'll expand access to positive opportunities and provide development into employment, training, apprenticeships and further education.

Focus on developing stronger and more resilient families to better support young people.

Promoting healthy relationships and inclusive practices to reduce exclusions and disengagement with education.

Providing communities with the support and resources to deliver sustainable reductions in violence.

Professionals working with children and young people are often the most likely to identify when someone’s at risk of violence and exploitation.

Falls in school attendance, exclusion, neglect, child exploitation are just some of the signs that something is going very wrong for a young person. Teachers, teaching assistants and education support workers can be the first to spot these signs. 

They are also able to provide the stability and support needed where adverse childhood experiences are impacting on a pupil, especially in circumstances where children and young people are not getting this support at home. 

Our partnerships with education providers include:

• training and resources for mainstream schools to prevent exclusions
• mentoring schemes to support children in pupil referral units (PRUs)
• taking on secondees to build and distribute our evidence base on ‘what works’ for children in alternative provision education settings.

NHS London has prioritised its role in the prevention of violence with the appointment of a Violence Reduction lead. 

NHS London’s programmes focus on developing new models of care, including:

• mental health: developing a psychological model of care in the community for those at risk/impacted by violence
• mental health trauma services: Better integrating mental health into major trauma clinical pathways and major incident responses
• in-hospital: defining best practice standards for in-hospital violence reduction services that are currently embedded within A&E departments
• social prescribing: defining a specialised social prescribing pathway to support vulnerable youth in the community, through community health professionals (GPs, dentists, pharmacists) working with specialist link workers.

NHS London leadership and practitioners are represented on the Partnership Reference Group, contributing to our strategy and sharing their insights, expertise and learnings on violence prevention. This work provides direction to the various programmes we work on with other partners, as well as to advocate and champion preventative violence reduction approaches across all NHS London services.

We work closely with the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). Where the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime oversees the work of the MPS and works on an enforcement, the Violence Reduction Unit is focused on prevention, following what we call a ‘public health approach’ to violence reduction.

Working with the Met, our work involves:

• coordination between the Metropolitan Police Service and the other partners we are working with
• providing funding and grants to diversion and  prevention projects and programmes that supports the Metropolitan Police Service
• having Metropolitan Police Service staff embedded within the Violence Reduction Unit to provide invaluable knowledge, understanding and insights.

Currently, the Violence Reduction Unit has the full-time support of a serving Chief Inspector who is responsible for embedding violence reduction work with colleagues in the Met. The Chief Inspector is:

• helping to recruit and train 12 VRU local police champions
• creating a network of officers and staff to capture and share operational learnings for the prevention of violent crime within the communities in which they work
• connecting our work with the work of established and successful programmes and organisations working on prevention work across London.

When the Violence Reduction Unit was created, we knew that we could only succeed in our goal of preventing violence and making Londoners feel safer if we worked with organisations and networks already working to this end. This is especially the case for the 32 Community Safety Partnerships across London’s 32 Councils. 

Here our role has been to identify where prevention work is being done well and provide support for greater consistency of prevention across all of London.

Variations between London Boroughs have existed regarding the link between violence and vulnerability. Our partnership allows for greater collaboration. For example, each borough produces a violence reduction plan. We assess these plans and hold peer-to-peer sessions. 

The work we do with Community Safety Partnerships and individual London Boroughs strengthens our partnerships with organisations and service providers ‘on the ground’.

We work closely with charities and grass-roots organisations. Our charity network consists of experienced voluntary and community support organisations in London working on issues relating to supporting young people, youth work, safeguarding and gender based violence. 

We have prioritised listening and working with grassroots organisations, which are often community-led. They have the trust of their local communities, alongside extensive local knowledge gained from working on the frontline for years. Their insights and intelligence have enabled us to better respond to local needs.