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Education: Young People in Custody

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, in her maiden speech. It was refreshingly direct and well informed. I am sure that it augurs well for her contributions in the future. I am just sorry that she only had four minutes; I would have liked to listen to her for longer. Her wider experience in corporate responsibility and self-regulation are badly needed in much of our deliberations. We look forward to all that she will have to say. My noble friend Lady Massey of Darwen is also to be warmly thanked for giving us the opportunity for even a brief word on this important subject. She was right to emphasise that many in young offender institutions have been failed by society and we must face that reality. The reasons that they have been failed are complex; there is a matrix. There are many things to be tackled in society itself. The challenge is to have fewer people falling into crime rather than discussing how we help those who have fallen. In the midst of all that we must never forget the issue of mental illness which is a highly relevant but very difficult issue. Many people in young offender institutions and prisons should not be there at all because they need more specialist support, analysis and help from professionals than can possibly be provided by dedicated staff in the institutions which basically provide custody. Rehabilitation, as I never tire of saying in these debates, must be the top priority in our penal system. Not to have rehabilitation as the top priority is madness: it fails the young; it fails the prisoners; it leads to more wasted, and continued wasted, lives;it is economic nonsense because of the cost of reoffending later. If we are to make rehabilitation the key priority and mean it, then education is central to that; and if education is to be central, then it must be not only formal education, certainly, but also skills education and wider social education, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, sensibly argued. I was president of the YMCA in England. The YMCA works with young offenders in young offender institutions. I was fascinated by that work. It brought home to me how serious the lack of education is among many of those who end up in this situation. It also brought home how much could be done. With education we have the living evidence—people who have gone on to make a success of their lives. Indeed, they have gone on to become university graduates and postgraduates, having been given the opportunity to release their talent and put it to good use. I commend the Government for the interdepartmental work that they are undertaking in recognition of the matrix. I am glad that my noble friend Lord Adonis is replying tonight; I just wish that his department had the lead responsibility for ensuring that education happens in all our penal institutions. He will forgive me for making this point, but I never understood why in the last Act we did not endorse that principle. Our approach to young offenders has seen far too much emphasis put on punitive attitudes and policy. The challenge is to rebuild with the young people themselves their lives and to turn those young people into positive citizens. If we want to do that, resources are essential.