Education for offenders has to make the grade

Transforming Youth Justice, the green paper issued by the Ministry of Justice last week, proposes to establish a number of “secure colleges”, with education as their centrepiece. It argues that reoffending levels make the £245m current outlay on the secure estate poor value for money. The move comes as the current contracts for many secure settings approach their end, providing the MoJ with an opportune time for a radical look at what youth custody is supposed to achieve.

Better education provision – in the form of basic literacy and numeracy, vocational, and emotional and social skills – would help rehabilitate young offenders and prepare them for life on the outside. But the green paper shows little appreciation of the challenges of educating young prisoners. It acknowledges that they are statistically likely to have poor literacy levels, special educational needs, mental health problems and an upbringing in unsuitable accommodation with experience of abuse or neglect. What it does not acknowledge is the kind of expertise required to “educate” and thereby transform the lives of society’s most damaged adolescents. It is not simply a case of furnishing them with new skills, but addressing their complex problems. This requires skilled specialists such as therapists and educational psychologists, not just inspiring teachers. And while current expenditure on the secure estate might be high, this kind of intervention does not come cheap.

The MoJ is encouraging academies and free schools to come forward, but this should be about the expertise offered, not the model of provider. It also wants to apply a payment-by-results approach to rewarding successful providers. Results are, however, difficult to capture and measure for young people with intractable problems. There is rarely a neat linear journey in transforming the lives of the most vulnerable; it is often a case of one step forward, one step back. Transforming Youth Justice presents a simplistic approach to a complex problem. But with rehabilitation at its heart, it is at least a start.

Gove must visit youth projects while they still exist
Our analysis of “section 251 returns”, which pinpoint local authority expenditure, lays bare the pattern of public spending on children and young people. While spending on child protection and looked-after children has remained remarkably static, resources channelled into more preventative services – Sure Start children’s centres and youth services – have plunged by 21 and 26 per cent respectively in just a year. Education Secretary Michael Gove’s recent assertion that “youth policy is a priority for local government and not central government” will not help the latter’s cause. More than 100 charity chiefs have written to demand urgent clarification of his remarks, while a group of young people have invited him to break his duck of never having visited a youth project. He should take up their offer.

ravi.chandiramani@markallengroup.com