Hi all,

Just an update to let you know what the committee has been up to since the new year.

Lorna Parchment from the committee has been busy campaigning, as a part of the Standing Committee on Youth Justice (of which NAYJ plays a major part), for amendments to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. The SCYJ produced some excellent briefing papers that can be found here.

Progress towards the annual conference (9th - 11th September) continues under the fine stewardship of Spike Cadman, who has gathered together some excellent plenary speakers and well as pulling together an exciting set of workshops. This promises to be another excellent conference, so book early (and tell all your friends). More information can be found here.

As you might have noticed , we've made some changes to the web site that will hopefully help you find what you are after, as well as allowing us to highlight important information. When we first re-vamped the website about three years ago, we had no idea whether it was was going to be successful and whether anyone would find it useful. As we added stories and reports to the site more and more people turned up, so that now we have over 2000 registered users of the website generating about 20,000 page views a month. One of the downsides of an active website is that important stories can quickly get lost if there are a lot of stories around at the same time. Again the changes should help stop things getting buried too quickly.

Another thing that we know about you all is that you've all been upgrading you computer screens. In line with that we've upgraded the site to run best with a minimum resolution of 1024 x 768.  OK, techy bit out of the way.

The committee has been keen to improve interaction with its membership and the changes to the website will allow us more flexibility in this regard. We're keen to find out what you think of the Association and what issues are important to you: so keep an eye out for that.

Also, the committee has decided to take some (limited) advertising on the site. Down at the bottom of the page you will see an Amazon.co.uk banner. By searching Amazon or clicking on a link from our page allows us to generate a small amount of revenue to help fund the site. A great way to help us keep things ticking over.

If you have anything that you'd like to share with the committee or issues that you would like to see raised, then use the new contact page to ensure that you email gets through.

Thanks for reading
Andrew