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Education: Young People in Custody

My Lords, it is just as well that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is listening to us today. If it was a Minister from the Home Office, it would be on their last day and there would not be much point in talking to them. I hope that he has a slightly longer timescale in mind. We wish him well with the new Prime Minister. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, for giving me the chance to talk on this subject, albeit briefly. I will address a couple of points. One is the curriculum in custody. It currently appears to be very much at the LSC’s level of thinking—courses designed basically for people out there in the community. For a lot of these kids, we need to reach much deeper. We must get right back to the level of socialisation—equipping them with the underlying human skills necessary to tackle life and education. We should start by creating a structure where they can develop a trusting relationship with staff. A lot of these children do not have any experience of that kind of relationship or, if they have, it has broken down. Once that is in place, we should work from there to offer a real experience of teamwork, getting on with people, giving and taking orders, and learning how to exist in relationships. If kids are only in for four months, that sort of thing might be achieved in that timescale. We must focus everything on that set of achievements. We must do away with things like 24-hour in-cell TV, which is immensely disruptive of any attempt to build relationships. Kids just hide themselves away in their cells, and do not need to engage with the outside. We must really concentrate on having a proper PSHE programme. You cannot learn anything unless you know the basics of PSHE; I do not mean the condom-on-a-banana sort of PSHE, but the kind of programme that is really well developed in schools like Wellington and others which are really taking this forward. We need a big emphasis on the sort of activities where you can really appreciate teamwork, such as team sports and others, which kids can really involve themselves in. Once a kid is becoming socialised, you want to reintroduce them to education. That requires giving them a hook—something that they can hang on to as a real motivation to get involved in education. Whether it be art, music or practical work, that must be the emphasis, and not some precipitate rush back into the academic curriculum which these kids have rejected, or which has rejected them. We can do a lot more to make these institutions educational institutions. We want to see the teachers in these places having a real career structure, with training at the bottom. I know that the Government want to see proper training, but it must be prison-specific. Teachers need to learn how to deal with extremely manipulative young men. They need to learn prison craft and how to build relationships in a way which is just not necessary for teachers outside; they are required to give that sort of one-on-one support. They need a career structure which leads upwards. It ought to be possible. I cannot see why a teacher should not aspire to become the number one governor of a YOI. That would give education a real status within the Prison Service. These institutions ought to have much better links with pupil referral units and the other educational institutions outside, which these children will be going on to. I see no reason why that should not be possible. Teachers run boarding schools. There is not an awful lot of difference.