This report, which spans the decade between June 2014 and March 2024, is a comprehensive and damning summary of the declining quality of educational provisions in England’s Young Offender Institutions (‘YOIs’).
Details
The report draws on 32 inspection reports from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) and Ofsted as well as 5 reports following independent reviews of progress, as well as first-hand accounts from children and young people living in YOIs and leaders at education providers. It identifies that the failings both in leadership and the quality of education are systemic.
The key findings across the report are as follows:
- Children are increasingly being detained in their cells (with 27% reporting less than 2 hours out of cell time during the week), severely limiting their ability to participate in any form of education or work experience;
- Work experience and other educational opportunities have become more limited over the past decade, largely owing to the failure to recruit and retain specialist teaching staff;
- The relationships between YOI leaders and education providers is often poor, and little has been done to address the obvious decline in standards of education across YOIs in England, with YOI leaders often having an inadequate understanding of the education provision within their establishment;
- When children do attend lessons, they are often significantly late due to staff shortages (no one to escort them) or other complex mechanisms within the YOI, such as staggered movement times designed to keep certain children separate from one another;
- Courses are increasingly being allocated to children on the basis of who they are allowed to mix with as opposed to what their interests and aspirations are, which in turn leads to disrupted lessons as they lack the motivation to complete the work;
- There is a lack of investment in the infrastructure needed for children to receive a good education, in particular in relation to ICT equipment;
- The lessons being delivered to children are often not well matched with their abilities and do not focus on the skills and knowledge that they most need to learn.
Concluding, the report offers a number of recommendations for the Youth Custody Service (‘YCS’) and all other relevant parties.
Commentary
While the findings of this report will not come as a surprise to most, that children and young people living in the custodial estate are suffering the additional harm of being deprived of a good education should be of immediate concern to all. The wide-spanning ambit of this report which records the decline of educational provision over a decade is both shocking and promising: shocking because children in YOIs have been failed for so long and at increasing rates and promising because that failure is detailed without minimisation and a number of realistic recommendations are proposed to begin addressing some of the issues highlighted. It is hoped that this report will be seen as a small step in the right direction, rather than an end, and that those responsible for children’s education in the secure estate, including the YCS and education providers will recognise the urgent improvements required and make hasty steps towards remedying the concerns identified, adopting the recommendations as well as identifying their own solutions. Both Ofsted reports and HMIP’s ratings for purposeful activity will no doubt be closely scrutinised in the coming cycles.
Written by
Violet Smart, Doughty Street Chambers