Young Offender Institutions: a decade of decline

Here's the report discussed in this episode of the podcast: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/thematic-review-of-the-quality-of-education-in-young-offender-institutions-yois

 

Mark Leech  0:03  
Hello. Welcome to Ofsted Talks. My name is Mark Leech, and today I'm hosting a conversation about young offender institutions, or  YOIs for short. I'm very pleased to be joined by not one, but two of His Majesty's chief inspectors. We have Sir Martyn Oliver, His Majesty's Chief Inspector here at Ofsted, and we have Charlie Taylor, His Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons. Now both are here because the inspection of young offender institutions involves both His Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons, HMIP and Ofsted. Also with us from Ofsted is Maria Navarro, one of Ofsted specialists in this area, and heavily involved in the report we're going to be talking about today. Welcome everyone.

We'll get on to the report I mentioned in a moment. But first, let's talk a bit about young offender institutions and how they work. Charlie, before you joined HMIP, you were Chair of the Youth Justice Board, so this is an area you know really well. Could you give us a bit of a background, please, about YOIs and the children who they cater for? 

Charlie Taylor  1:05  
Yes, certainly there are four YOIs in the country. One is private sector,  the other three are public sector. They house about around 400 children at the moment, which is a dramatic reduction from when I did my review in 2016 when there are about 1500 and an even more dramatic reduction from the the early 2000s when there are about three and a half thousand children locked up in England and Wales. The age of kids who end up in a YOI is 15 to 18, but the vast majority of them are about 16 and 17, with most being 17 at the moment, because of the prison population crisis, they're also housing more 18 year olds than they would have done in the past. So in the past, unless you had a very short time to serve, you would move on into an adult prison. But they're now hanging on to 18 year olds for longer as well, which represents a challenge. 

Mark Leech  1:57  
And YOIs do they cater for boys as well as girls? Or is it all boys? 

Charlie Taylor  2:02  
Well, there are a few girls in YOIs due to some anomalies, because of the closure of parts of the youth custody sector, particularly secure training centers. And what that meant is that provision had to be made for a small amount of very vulnerable girls who who were unable to be placed either in secure children's homes or or into secure training centers. So Weatherby YOI, up in Yorkshire, has a handful of girls there, and certainly that's an issue we've raised many concerns about during our inspection reports over the last couple of years, and in terms of the sort of the way YOIS operate.  

Mark Leech  2:43  
Obviously, you've mentioned secure training centers, then and secure children's homes. What's different about the YOIs, would it be more recognizable as a sort of prison environment, or is it more of a children's home environment? 

Charlie Taylor  2:54  
No, certainly it's much more of a prison environment. So the populations are higher, around 150 or so in somewhere like Weatherby, around 120 in someone like Wellington and in Feltham in West London, again, around 120 something like that. So they have a much more prisony feel, unfortunately, than than secure children's homes, the secure school, or even, indeed, secure, secure training centers. And I think that's been one of the criticisms for many years, is actually that they often appear to do a better job of preparing kids for a life in prison, rather than a life on the outside going on and being successful when they leave. 

Mark Leech  3:36  
That's probably a good point to bring in Martyn from Ofsted. Our involvement might come as a bit of a surprise to many people. Obviously, we do have that role in in adult prisons as well. Could you tell us a bit more about why and how Ofsted are involved in YOI inspections?  

Sir Martyn Oliver  3:49  
Well, Ofsted works with a number of providers across the 92,000 people that we inspect and regulate and in YOIs, and indeed in prisons. We're really grateful to work with Charlie and his team at HMIP and we look very specifically at the education that children receive in these settings. So for example, in YOIs, we've just done a thematic joint review with Charlie's team, and we've looked very specifically at leadership and the quality of education, and it's actually quite a damning report, where between the two of us, we find that there's been a decade long decline in the quality of education for our most vulnerable children, and when you think about the very need for rehabilitation, clearly education has a massively important role. And the fact that we find that there are systemic failings, it's a really concerning moment that I think Charlie and I now say, this needs to say, enough is enough. This now must improve. 

Mark Leech  4:52  
So you've mentioned our report there, which is published this month. It's called, as you say, 'A decade of declining quality of education in Young Offender Institutions.' So it is quite a quite a bleak picture. Maria, could you just pull out some of the headlines from that report for us please? 

Maria Navarro  5:09  
Yes. Certainly. There are two bubbles that we have looked at together with our colleagues in HMIP. The one is the leadership of the YOIs and and the other one, which is of particular interest to all of us here today, and certainly Ofsted, the bubble of the quality of education that the children receive. So if I start with with the leadership band, there are a number of recommendations that we have picked up in in this thematic review for the leaders at each local YOI and also centrally at the Youth Custody Service. The absence of continuous and prolonged leadership in these YOIs, we will have identified that the governance of these YOIs get moved rapidly and very quickly, often before they have an opportunity to create improvement and bring about better quality of provision for the children. There appears to be in the work we have done, in analyzing 10 years worth of inspection, evidence that there has been a breakdown in the staff and child relationships in the YOIs, again, which hasn't been led and managed well internally. As a consequence, both staff officers and managers are displaying an inability to manage behavior and challenging behavior of the children. From our colleagues in HMIP, we also learned throughout the review that this has led to increased segregation of these children, and as a consequence, has reduced their time out of cell and they remain locked up for far too long. There has been a vacuum of investment in infrastructure and learning resources. For example, the YOIs are very poorly suited and equipped to deliver ICT and technology and digital skills to the children. There has been a lack of expert teaching staff, staff who are really good at a particular academic or vocational subject, both the children accessing the YOI in terms of education and vocational training is nowadays incredibly narrow and not good enough for meeting their needs. 

Mark Leech  7:27  
Thanks, Maria. So, Martin just picking up on the education part there that Maria ended on, what in an ideal world would we be looking for in terms of the education provision in a YOI? 

Sir Martyn Oliver  7:40  
Well, certainly we need just children to have good access to education, starting format formally, with reading. It's hugely important that the literacy levels then numeracy levels of children. And let's remember we're not talking about prisoners here. We're talking about children who are in custody. So let's just use the term children, that children have access to a good, broad and balanced education, starting with reading, then the basic skills of numeracy and mathematics, and then, of course, access to regular teaching and learning. So that's not being locked in the cell, as we find in this report, for some children up to 23 hours in a day, but actually accessing full time education like their like their counterparts are in the school setting. And of course, we're not naive. Some of the behaviors are challenging. And we talk in the report about on on wing support. That's where education can be delivered to support the children in their in their cell on the wing for that period. But we want to see children in good, regular, broad, balanced curriculum with expert staff who can assess the needs, the differential needs, of children, where the starting points that they've got, and then work towards giving them a really good education, and also work experience. Because we want the prison experience, the custody to result in rehabilitation, and without a good education, then I think we're really going to struggle to ever achieve that aim.

Mark Leech  9:09  
Thank you and Charlie, we we've talked a bit about behavior. The report picks up on the part about needing to separate groups of children, and that making it difficult, just in practical sense, to get children to a place where they can, you know, engage in education and learn, learn stuff really. What if you could expand a bit on some of the challenges that are facing these institutions? 

Charlie Taylor  9:35  
I think it's worth just saying to begin with that from a HMIP point of view, we really value the relationship that we have with Ofsted, and I think what is particularly strong is the fact that Ofsted maintain incredibly high standards. Their expectations are as high for children in custody as for children out of custody. And I think that is incredibly important in terms of behavior. This is often something that gets in the way of learning, and it also affects the education as well. So, so what we find is that because of what are called keep-apart lists, so because various children have been in conflict with each other, and sometimes this is to do with conflict that's happened on the outside, and sometimes it's to do with conflict that's developed very often within the context of of the YOI. What we found is certain children are unable to mix. And rather than doing the sort of conflict resolution that you would expect to do in in in the sort of school that I used to run, a special school for children with behavioral difficulties, what happens is, is that children are simply kept apart. And of course, what that ultimately means is, rather than going to lessons with people with whom you have the same aspirations and interests and also abilities. Very often, children are just being allocated to classes because these are rooms in which they can be safe without having a fight. Well, that's just a wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs. And of course, consequently, what it means is that children are bored. Often they don't feel extended in the way that they should be, that sometimes they're on a course that they don't have an interest in, or they're being asked to do work that is simply too easy for them, so inevitably, that is a cause of frustration. The other thing that we see is levels of attendance, which go very closely with behavior, getting to education is not prioritized at the level that we would want to see. Teachers don't always know who's going to turn up, and that makes their job very difficult. And consequently and unsurprisingly, often there have been issues with education providers in YOIs being able to recruit enough really high quality teachers, because at times, the job can seem very frustrating, we know, and the report talks about the complexity of these children. Many of them have special educational needs and disabilities. Many others have had at best a pretty fractured relationship with education through through their childhood. 

Mark Leech  9:49  
Are we seeing that, you know, as a major stumbling block to maintaining their education?

Charlie Taylor  12:01  
Once they're in the YOIs, they've often had a very checkered educational past. Many of them have been in out of the care system, and are often been to lots of different schools on their journey, which ends up in custody. So it isn't surprising that many of them have got special educational needs or other sorts of difficulties, and it's incumbent on the prison and or the YOI and also the education provider, to really get under the skin of that. The way I see it is these children are almost like jigsaw puzzles with some pieces missing, and those pieces might be, for example, the fact that their reading is very poor, the fact that they've got very poor mathematic skills, that some of their practical skills are poor, or that they find it difficult to form relationships, and therefore need to be helped to work in a class. But the objective of the YOI is to find those missing pieces of that jigsaw for each individual child and to fit them into place so that when they leave custody, they're able to go on and to flourish, to get work, to go to college, to get into employment and to go on to lead successful lives that don't involve them in a revolving door in and out of custody, which, depressingly with adult prisoners we see far too often. 

Sir Martyn Oliver  13:09  
Yeah, we're dealing with staff shortages, often in that we find in education within the YOIs, and then because of those staff shortages, we're finding that the training that some of the staff have had is not suiting their need to be expert deliverers of some of the most vulnerable children in society. And then on top of that, those who've got additional needs, and their ability to identify those and actually develop a really unique pathway and a curriculum for those children, that's where we're seeing significantly the biggest issues. And one of the things that we also note in the report is that the support for children with special education needs has declined really very markedly and significantly since the covid pandemic. I mean, it's really interesting. I mean, the time of this podcast going out, I've been the chief inspector for nine months, and it's really a fascinating and unbelievably upsetting area of Ofsted's work, which I did not have enough of a knowledge of before, when I was a head teacher of lots of schools, until I came into this role. And I really urge people to just not only read the report, but to even go and look at the technical annex at the back, where we talk about the quality of the judgment Ofsted have given and HMIP have given in each of the four settings over the last 10 years, the decade of decline. And if you look at it, you'll see a really marked picture for about 2016 17, there's a marked decline, and it's just simply, it will be shocking to see just how many of them have been rated inadequate or requires improvement and just not been good for an awful long period. And you know, since coming into Ofsted, one of the things I've talked about, not just in YOIs, but across the whole of Ofsted, is getting it right for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children. And as a society, that we should pride ourselves on that and if we get It right for them, then we'll get it right for everyone. Well, these are then, these are those children. These are literally the most vulnerable children in this country, and we're not getting it right, right now.

Mark Leech  15:12  
So that decade of decline then is, is that? Does that have a single cause? Is it because of a lack of funding? Is it more complicated than that? Is it because the staff simply aren't available? And we know there's, there's recruitment issues right across education, let alone in some of this more specialist provision? What would what would you say are the root causes of 10 years of decline? 

Sir Martyn Oliver  15:39  
Yeah, we can clearly see the challenges in the economy and how that spills into public services. Like many public services, whether it's schools or a nursery or a further education social workers, the ability to recruit and retain staff is difficult. We know that anxiety and mental health support across the entire system has become really difficult. We know that the SEND system is often described by commentators as broken in this country. Well, now you take all of that, the mental health and the anxiety, the special educational needs, the finances, the resources, the staffing, the training, and you place that then in this unique environment of one of these four YOIs? Well, it becomes a microcosm of what is not working very well in the public services. And it's clearly a real challenge for the for the leaders in these settings, and they have, to some extent, my sympathy, but we do need to find a way through this now. And they are the experts and they are the leaders, and I'm really hoping that the work that they do with us, and particularly with Charlie and his team, can now start to reverse this. This next decade wants to be a decade of improvement that we talk about. It really cannot, not only can it carry on like this, this is a crisis. It has to turn around, and it has to turn around now.

Charlie Taylor  17:01  
I think what's really required is a fundamental orientation of YOIs towards education. And I think in the past, and what I've seen in lots of the visits I've made, education is seen as a nice to have. This isn't a nice to have for any children. This is an essential component of what a YOI should be doing. And as Martyn said, these are some of the most vulnerable children in the country, and they have as much right to getting a decent education as anybody else. And if we want them to come out and we want them to lead good lives, to avoid bringing crime, to avoid creating more victims, then we need to begin to think about how we fill in those gaps. And it's worth saying also that, unusually in the case of the public sector, and I'm not talking specifically about the education contracts here, but in the context of the public sector, YOIs are not badly funded. So with the reduction of children in the population, the amount of funding per child per place is actually much higher than it was four or five years ago. So there are great opportunities to use resources in a way that is really supporting transformational change within our YOIs. Because, as Martyn says, what we need in the future is a decade of success that comes off the back of this depressingly ongoing decade of failure.

Mark Leech  18:14  
Do we see this done well elsewhere? I mean, clearly there's a there's a pattern in this country of pretty poor provision that we see it in other countries in a much better light. 

Charlie Taylor  18:28  
Just head over the border and head over the Severn Bridge into Wales. And I know this isn't part of Ofsted's jurisdiction, the colleagues in Estyn are responsible for the inspection, but HMP Park, where the YOI component is is an important part of that jail, the progress is far better. Children are unlocked from their cells. Many who've come from Feltham and Cookham Wood, children spend far longer out of their cells, 10 hours, 9,10, hours a day. We see that and at the weekends as well, which often we don't see at all in YOIs. And actually the standards of education and the opportunities for education are much better there. It's a more peaceful place. The behavior is far better than we see. The attendance there is far better than we see in the English YOIs. So there is a model that can be used. They're doing some really good things over there with some equally challenging children. So it is disappointing to see that the youth custody service hasn't been able to learn from provision which is on its doorstep.

Maria Navarro  19:26  
Without going very far, we've got a secure training center and a number of secure children's homes who provide education in a really fulfilling way, and are undoubtedly doing much better than any of the Y Oris, and those are within close proximity To these establishments, and there are a lot of rich pickings and low hanging fruit, as we would say, quick wins that could be implemented. For example, the fact that in some of these places, children are not wearing a prison uniform that could have a huge impact culturally in the way that children perceive themselves inside the establishment, the fact that in some of these settings, is the same staff and the same officers looking after the children day in day out. When you go to the YOIs, any officer is patrolling those areas of education, the children don't have the time to build relationships and trust, trusted relationships with them and with the teachers, and yet in some of these other places that can be achieved. I also, lastly, would like to note that in some of the most successful secure children's homes on the secure Training Center, everyone from the leaders to the Support Assistance in classes passing through officers is very proud to call the children by exactly that name, children. They are full of respect and feel very proud that they have been given the opportunity to help these children turn their lives around. And when we go to the YOIs, this is not often the cultural setting that we see from leaders and staff towards the children. And that has to change, and it has to change dramatically in order to bring about any improvement.

Mark Leech  19:27  
So Martyn, what's your hope for the future?

Sir Martyn Oliver  19:29  
Well, I was really inspired.  I met Charlie, in the first couple of months of being in office, and Charlie was telling me about a project that I didn't know a huge amount, where I used to run a large multi Academy trust in England, and one of my fellow large trusts has really lent into developing a secure school, which has been in the process of registration through Ofsted. And so we're now looking and hoping that this might be a model for the future. Clearly, it's got to receive children. It's got to be inspected, and we'll carry out without fear or favor our own independent inspection. But I was really, really struck by Charlie's vision for this, and I know you've worked really closely with them over this, Charlie, so I'm really hoping that this could be a model for the future, that everyone can learn from.

Charlie Taylor  20:18  
Yes, absolutely, and I had very much, and I wish them all the best. It obviously this will be an Ofsted inspection, because, I mean, I felt, when I did my 2016 review, that very, very important, that actually this was going to be a school, and therefore, in effect, with the children's home, and therefore it wasn't for the Inspectorate of prisons to be looking at it. It was for Ofsted to do that. And we're very grateful for Ofsted taking that on. Look,  I think it's a great opportunity to show that actually we can do things differently with these kids. It will be difficult. Inevitably, starting any new institution is always going to be difficult, but I think there is a level of enthusiasm and interest out there that I hope very much that this can begin to change the model that we've seen of YOIs, for many years,

Sir Martyn Oliver  21:04  
I think it will be helpful, for example, that this is an organization which is used to teaching mainstream education, all of the mainstream professional development and the recruitment of teachers, and the fact that they'll be able to pull upon that, that that strong network and lean it towards these children. I think that's clearly got to give us a great sense of optimism for the future. And you know, I look forward to noting what you said, Charlie, about how difficult it is to start any venture but any new venture. But I really do hope that that will be hugely, hugely impactful. 

 

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