Education Cuts Chance of Youth Offending by 18 Percent: Legal Service

‘Every single thing that we can do to help to keep kids in school, and help schools keep them there is the solution,’ said the co-director of Wejustice.

Part of a collection of knives seized by police around transport hubs in the last six months is displayed at the Victoria Police Centre in Melbourne, Australia, on April 1, 2010. Julian Smith/AAP Image

Educating young Australians can cuts the chance of committing a crime by 18 percent, says the head of Victorian legal service Wejustice.

Anoushka Jeronimus, co-director for the children’s rights program, made the comments during a Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee hearing in Parliament examining the issue of youth crime.

“Every single thing that we can do to help to keep kids in school, and help schools keep them there is the solution,” she told the hearing, while citing the 18 percent figure.

Jeronimus said encouraging school attendance was vital.

“And so that’s why I say, for example, if it’s working with the child, the family, the school, helping teachers teach, looking at what the gaps are, but also then looking at the community around the school,” she said.

“And I think that is the that is the best and most sustaining way of change.”

Jeronimus said governments needed to work on “micro barriers” within the education system such as funding and red tape to keep kids in school.

Other issues were being able to afford school uniforms or travel for sporting events.

“We’ve got data that we were recently made privy to relation to the analysis of the needs of students in the western suburbs [of Melbourne] that also highlights that a lot of the time you’ve got single-headed families and that parent is working as hard as they can, they are often in casualised labour and it’s not because they do not care about their children, it’s because they’re trying to meet the needs of everybody.

“When we talk in colloquial terms of ‘it takes a village’ [to raise a child], ideally the support government provides would be to enable that village to be built and sustained.”

Children Major Victims of Crime: Professor

The hearing also revealed that the majority of victims of crime are children, while children only make up around 20 percent of perpetrators.

In 2024, research from Emeritus Professor Ross Homel and Jacqueline Allen from Griffith University found reductions in youth crime could be established by focusing on students as early as preschool.

The Pathways to Prevention project was a collaboration between Griffith University, Education Queensland and Mission Australia which operated from 2002 until 2011, with the project team finding an enriched preschool program reduced the number of court adjudicated youth offenders by more than 50 percent, and when combined with a support program for parents and families, up to 100 percent.

“The power of early childhood education combined with support for families should not be under-estimated,” Allen said.

They reported a 20 percent reduction in offending among a high-risk category of youths affected by socio-economic and lifestyle factors.

“Programs like this work by levelling the playing field and improving the lives of children early in their developmental pathways, with those pathways including events and experiences that follow on from each other, or cascade, across the course of life.”

“We’re not saying what we did with Pathways to Prevention needs to be replicated exactly, but our findings show it could certainly be used as a model to achieve similar positive outcomes,” Homel said.

Similar findings were also reported by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC), which found a reduction in contact with the criminal justice system when children were better educated, because they had greater access to jobs, better income and more opportunities.

The AIC’s 2025 Crime and Justice Research report found school completion rates had a positive impact even when other factors usually associated with crime were present.

“As with income, employment and social embeddedness, education greatly increases the opportunity costs of involvement in crime or conflict with police,” the report stated.