Storing up real problems for the future
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10 Years of declining quality of education in young offender institutions: the systemic shortcomings that fail children.
The review sets out a bleak picture of steadily declining educational opportunities and quality, reduced work experience and work opportunities, and sharply reduced time out of cell for children. In the worst case, in one setting some children had only half an hour out of their locked cells per day.
Children have far fewer hours of lessons per day than their counterparts outside the secure estate. They have lower levels of attendance at classes, usually for reasons beyond their control. Because staff lack proper training, they cannot meet the needs of children with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND). Work experience opportunities and links to employers have become more limited during the past 10 years. This means that children are poorly prepared for their release and generally lack the skills and training that might help them secure employment.
Chief among the reasons for the poor quality of education is the fact that YOIs are struggling with severe staff shortages. This makes it difficult for staff to build relationships with children and maintain order. They rely on very complicated regimes that keep large numbers of children separate from each other.
Restrictive regimes mean that staff do not release children from cells to attend work or training. A vicious cycle develops whereby children are isolated, disheartened and frustrated, then develop poor behaviours that lead to further restrictions being imposed.
Poor leadership and poor cooperation between education providers and YOI leaders mean that, across the past 10 years, leaders and managers have put in place very few effective and sustainable measures to deal with the rapidly declining standards at YOIs.
Sir Martyn Oliver Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills
I am pleased to introduce our review of the quality of education in young offender institutions (YOIs), which we carried out jointly with His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP). HMIP and Ofsted are concerned about the declining quality of education in YOIs over the past decade. Many of the children in these institutions are extremely vulnerable. They are in urgent need of high-quality education: at present, the system has already failed them and continues to do so at this most urgent and crucial point in their life.
We are particularly worried about the decline in teachers’ ability to manage the behaviour of children in YOIs. We are also concerned about children’s access to education. They spend far too long locked in their cells. It cannot be right that some children spend up to 23 hours each day alone in their cells with no access to education or other pursuits that might improve their chances of rehabilitation and successful future lives. A lack of access to education seriously reduces their quality of life and future life chances. YOI leaders do need to ensure their institutions are safe, but they must also find a way to improve children’s access to education.
It is very important that children in YOIs benefit from a broad curriculum at the right level, including in reading. They need expert teachers who can plan the curriculum well, use effective, evidence-based teaching methods and manage behaviour effectively. They also need well-resourced classrooms. At present, many of these things are in very short supply in our YOIs.
We recognise that children in YOIs are some of the most vulnerable children and learners that we encounter in our work. Not only are they deprived of their liberty, but they also have hugely complex social, behavioural and educational needs.
These children need to receive a substantial, high-quality education that enables them to catch up on their missed schooling, and thus be better prepared for the future. It is our duty to ensure that they do.
While we acknowledge the challenges that leaders and managers must navigate in these establishments, these children deserve to access a full education through a purposeful and productive day taught by experienced and able teachers. Anything less would be an injustice.
Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons said: “Children living in YOIs have often had a disrupted education. Many have very low levels of literacy for their age, and the large majority have also experienced either temporary or permanent school exclusion.
“The youth estate is significantly more violent than prisons holding adult men. We are storing up real problems for the future by failing to help children learn better ways to manage frustration and conflict and giving them access to the education many of them have missed out on in their lives before they were incarcerated.
Worsening relationships between children and staff, and increasing conflict.
Two-thirds of the children in custody reported having been in local authority care. For many, prison may therefore be the most stable environment they have known, and it should be an opportunity for them to build trusted relationships with staff who can help them to confront and move on from their past choices. It is therefore particularly disappointing to see that relationships with staff have deteriorated over the past year, and not even a third of children could name a single member of staff they believed would help them if they had a problem.”
The number of ‘keep-aparts’ spiralled. At Werrington in 2023, for example, inspectors found that staff were managing 388 non-associations or ‘keep-aparts’ in a population of 89 children. These ‘keep-aparts’ have an impact on every element of a child’s life while in custody. They also affect staff and the time they have available to spend with children, and to develop the meaningful relationships that are the foundation of effective behaviour management.
YOIs have become characterised by a vicious cycle of high levels of conflict, resulting in complicated ‘keep-apart’ lists, which in turn reduce time out of cell for all children.
This often leads to more conflict, as children with little else to do antagonise other groups by disrupting the daily routine or shouting abuse at their counterparts. Until this cycle is broken, it is hard to see how the decline in time out of cell, and access to education, skills and work, can be addressed.
When discussing this topic with Ofsted, education providers also spoke negatively about the overuse of ‘keep-aparts’ as a way of managing behaviour. They felt that, rather than being so risk-averse, YOI leaders should instead focus staff on engaging with children on ‘keep-apart’ lists.