Issue details

The VRU’s current 3-year funding settlement with the Home Office is due to end on 31st March 2025. The VRU have engaged extensively with the Home Office ever since the new government took power in July 2024 to understand what the landscape for serious violent crime reduction would look like post- March 2025. As a result, all 20 VRUs nationally have been extended, with a new, 1 year funding settlement covering financial year 2025/26 confirmed in a letter to the Deputy Mayor of Greater Manchester and the Director of the Greater Manchester VRU form the Minister of State for Policing, Fire & Crime Prevention.

Due to this being only a 12-month funding settlement, it has been agreed that to avoid interruption of the VRU’s programmes for young people most at risk of becoming victims of- or perpetrating- serious violence, time to re-procure services via the open market is not available. Therefore, the GM VRU will maintain its existing contracts via contract variations for each. This will also mitigate the risk of experienced staff leaving both providers and GMCA VRU positions, which would have a detrimental effect on programme provision. In the first instance, the VRU will extend contracts expiring on 31st March 2025 by 3 months through 30th June 2025. This is due to the fact that a grant agreement from the Home Office will not be received until June 2025. The initial 3-month extensions will be underwritten by Greater Manchester Combined Authority capital financing reserves, to cover the highly unlikely eventuality that the grant agreement from government does not come through.

The 2023 Greater Than Violence strategy contains multiple commitments to work across educational settings over the next decade, particularly concerning pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities.

In order to progress this work, the VRU needed to appoint an individual who could function at a senior level and invoke the necessary changes across the education system. As such, it appointed an independent education lead via the College of Maths. Since July 2022, the education lead has operated in a complex partnership environment, working with multiple stakeholders to identify best practice, implement strategy and effective intervention measures. The independent education lead was appointed as in order to succeed in this work, it was deemed necessary that the individual would need to have had extensive experience as a headteacher, and was both competent and fully conversant with the business landscape of education, including matters pertaining to national and local policy, through to direct operational delivery.

Building resilience within the school community and general education
setting is vital in order to reduce the risk of young people becoming involved in violence but also addressing the outcomes and factors when violence does occur. This work covers all elements of primary and secondary and further education as well as other specialist education provision. The Education Lead also supports delivery of the Mayor’s manifesto commitments around Mbacc and wider education and employment opportunities for young people more generally.