11th March 2025
Children's Commissioner: The educational journeys of children in secure settings (February 2025)
The Children’s Commissioner has published a report examining children's experiences of education before and during their time in the secure care system. The report finds a system resulting in children with severely disrupted education and poor educational outcomes. She proposes a number of bold recommendations to overcome these.
Details
The report highlighted the level of need of the children who arrive in secure settings:
- Two in five had special educational needs, with this likely to be underestimated due to lack of assessment.
- Most have experienced child poverty, with nearly 90% from the poorest neighbourhoods.
- More than half (54%) had been out of education for at least one academic year with a quarter having been permanently excluded.
- 77% of children in the secure care system were persistently or severely absent during their last year in state-funded education prior to entering a secure setting.
The report also addresses the current state of children’s education in secure settings. It highlighted the difficulty of providing education for those serving short sentences or on custodial remand, leading to a lack of continuity in their education and an inability to plan. It also notes that children are assigned to classes based on who they associated with, rather than their interests or educational ability. Moreover, it highlights the difficulties of retaining staff in secure settings (many of whom had only been in the roles for 12 months or less) and it is similarly challenging to recruit experienced vocational teachers.
The report (at pages 59-73) ends by setting out recommendations to improve education for children in secure care and to prevent children from entering the youth justice system. They span a number of different areas including school exclusions, changes to the youth sentencing framework, review of the education providers, safeguarding, SEND and others. The recommendations include, among others:
- An ambitious national reform that re-designs the secure care system to treat children as children who need specialised support. This should be based on a therapeutic model of care and delivered in homely settings, phasing out Young Offender Institutions (‘YOIs’) and Secure Training Centres (‘STCs’).
- For the Department for Education to assume direct responsibility for the delivery of core services for children.
- That the minimum custodial sentence for children should be 12 months.
- That the Ministry of Justice should conduct reviews into custodial sentences for breach of Detention and Training Orders and the use of custodial remand.
- That every secure setting should have a Youth Council where children can serve as representatives to provide feedback and amplify their voices.
- Governors of secure settings should have greater control over the education provided in their setting, and contracts of education providers should be reviewed to improve their delivery.
- For vocational pathways in schools to be improved and greater opportunities for children to undertake traineeships and job trainings in the community.
Commentary
This report proposes bold changes to the youth justice system and educational provision in schools and secure settings. These include phasing out YOIs and STCs in favour of a more therapeutic model, and reforming youth sentencing so that the minimum custodial sentence is 12 months.
The proposals are made on the back of a strong evidence base of the profile of children in custody and having examined the problems in the provision of education both in the community and in secure settings.
As the Children’s Commissioner points out in the report, every child has a fundamental right to a good quality education. These recommendations should be welcomed by those who want to ensure that this is the case, even for those at society’s margin.