Secure estate plans focus on specialist units

With this as a backdrop, the Youth Justice Board (YJB) has published its strategy for the secure estate for the period up to 2015.

The document looks to address the urgent issue of safeguarding through a process of workforce development and an increasing number of specialist units for young offenders with the most complex needs.

However, the strategy, which was published last week, has already faced criticism from campaigners including the Howard League for Penal Reform.

Frances Crook, chief executive of the charity, says: "You wouldn’t put a specialist mobile classroom for a few children in a failing school and deem the whole school a success."

Preferred facility

Instead, prison reformists want secure children’s homes to be regarded as the preferred facility for young offenders as they provide the most intensive form of support, despite the YJB’s strategy to focus future decommissioning on the homes and secure training centres.

But in the face of criticism, YJB chair Frances Done believes the significant drop in custody levels, particularly among 10- to 14-year-olds who are held solely in secure children’s homes, justifies the measure.

"We do understand that many of the organisations that responded to the consultation felt it would be ideal to put young people into secure children’s homes," she says.

"We have decommissioned a number of children’s homes places, but it is very small compared to young offender institution (YOI) places. Yet at the younger end of the age group, the numbers in custody between 2006 and 2010 have reduced by 51 per cent, which is dramatic – we have nothing like halved the numbers of children across the whole estate."

Instead, Done says, the specialist units – such as the Keppel Unit in Wetherby YOI and the Willow Unit at Hindley – will act as the additional support for young offenders with additional needs.

"We are keen to ensure that the most vulnerable and the young people who need the very greatest support are identified and supported through these special units," Done says.

"Safeguarding is the number one priority. The emphasis continues to be on providing individual support for young people by identifying those with the greatest needs as they come in to the system." Done cites favourable reports from the prisons inspectorate to make her point.

In an unannounced inspection of the Willow Unit last September, chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick praised the specialist knowledge of staff.

He described the team in the residential accommodation for young offenders with significant mental health problems as "dedicated", displaying "a high level of knowledge" about the young people in their care.

Training, awareness of conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and care planning were all applauded. Importantly, Hardwick described the unit as "a good model of effective multidisciplinary working".

But Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, believes that such units are a smokescreen to the fact that too many 15- to 19-year-olds are still being held in prisons.

"Young offender institutions are prisons, however kind, child-friendly and specialist you may claim to make them," he says.

For this reason, Garside believes that the secure estate is fundamentally flawed, as it holds too many children for too long even after the reductions in custody levels are taken into account.

"When you engage in policy discussions, you have to be clear about not who is to blame, but where the levers for change are and the YJB doesn’t really hold the levers to make fundamental changes," he says.
"It does have the ability to make a clear case for secure children’s homes provision over prison provision, but when it comes down to it, it has a budget that is set by government."

Workforce development

Workforce development is also central to the strategy, with the YJB pledging to continue and accelerate training for all those who work with young offenders.

Done says that the strategy is particularly important for YOIs, which were formed out of an adult estate.
"Our strategy is to develop a workforce uniquely focused on children, recruiting specifically people who want to work with children," she says.

"We have been doing that in several programmes in the past 12 months and we intend to continue to do that.

"There has been a dramatic improvement over the years that the YJB has been responsible for the children’s estate, but we are very conscious that there is still a long way to go.

"The training programmes have been revised and there is a very strong focus on enabling people to access the specialist courses for youth justice – budget cuts will not be allowed to affect the quality of that."