continuously call the latter into question and act while maintaining appropriate distance. They also need to be able to rely upon a management structure which guides and controls their initiatives, guaranteeing the consistency and justification thereof. Teams that are left entirely to themselves expose minors to the risk of incompetence, inconsistency and arbitrariness. The risks inherent to improvised teams, whose action is for the most part based upon the manager’s intuition and charisma, are also well known: they have given rise to abuses which in some cases have ended up before the courts. - tools for the assessment of minors’ capacity for autonomy: the “points licences” often used in CEFs are more oriented towards punishment of bad behaviour than analysis thereof; assessment of a young person’s capacities for autonomy demands real observational skills and the ability to give an account of one’s observations in shared media (manual or IT liaison register); this not only presupposes the elaboration of criteria, but also means these criteria need to be shared by the various different persons who act in succession 99 to contribute to the assessment; in one CEF, the inspectors thus encountered a young person whose “capacities for autonomy” meant that he was allowed to return to the CEF on his own after college; he arrived late, ate on his own and then went immediately to his room (unlike the others), officially in order to do his homework; his autonomy was emphasised in order to justify this unusual status; after verifications, it emerged that this young person was hanging around after lessons, was not doing his homework and was in fact in a situation of academic failure; moreover, this minor was at the centre of a group conflict which the team had not managed to control, and it appeared that the tutors had accepted this situation of pseudo-autonomy without providing themselves with the means for real assessment; - respect for the rights of the person: encouraging a minor’ autonomy means placing the latter in the position of a person capable of owning and exercising rights and being subject to obligations; the minor needs to be able to have information at their disposal, thus giving them a certain independence – including in relation to the team working with them – and establishing their citizenship; it would be desirable to organise access to legal information in particular, as well as more general information; the place of the holders of parental authority should be respected; On the part of the authorities: - 99 judges need to demand to be specifically informed of the content of the educational action conducted; in CEFs more particularly, they need to be placed in a position to be able to assess the risks and, if they consider the proposal to be in accordance with the minor’s interest, to support the team; the inspectors ascertained that judges often content themselves with cursory regular reports; in CEFs, numerous teams expressed their regret to the inspectors that judges do not interview the young person when they are informed of significant incidents; in reality, it appears that, for the most part, the authorities assess the credibility of CEFs in terms of the number of cases of minors running away and other visible incidents and that they scarcely question, or even ignore, the details of educational projects; the worst case scenario is, in general, when judges entrust the young person to a distant institution, unknown to the latter… and sometimes to the judges of the administrative district itself, who do not use it; In CEFs, day tutor, technical tutor, teacher, employer etc.; in EPMs, prison officer, tutor, teacher etc. 119