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HMP/YOI Woodhill near Milton Keynes and HMP Swaleside on the Isle of Sheppey are similar-sized men’s prisons that are part of the long-term, high-secure estate. Both house prisoners mainly from London and the South East who are often serving long sentences. Both jails have recently been in the headlines: Woodhill has been forced to close temporarily its high security separation centre, where prisoners are moved to prevent them radicalising other inmates. Swaleside, meanwhile, experienced serious, concerted indiscipline requiring the intervention of specialist tornado teams to restore order.

Today, there are fewer than 500 children in custody in England and Wales. This is down largely to the success of diversion schemes over the last 10 years and, more recently, the impact of the pandemic. While this decline in the population is positive for children and society in general, it has created its own set of challenges, notes Angus Jones, Team Leader for Children and Young People.

In this blog, Charlie Taylor explores purposeful activity findings from inspections of four category C prisons: Rochester, The Mount, Brixton and Coldingley.

It is almost three years since my predecessor Peter Clarke announced an Urgent Notification for HMYOI Feltham A following an unannounced inspection. He pointed to a “dramatic decline” in performance at the YOI and “numerous significant concerns about the treatment and conditions of children” held there.

Sandra Fieldhouse, Team Leader for Women's prisons at HM Inspectorate of Prisons.

As a former teacher, I often ask prisoners how they got on in school; the answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is often ‘not well’. Many describe having struggled through but survived primary school, only to be expelled in their first two or three years of secondary school. Others never spent much time in education at all, having somehow through slipped through the net, often because of frequent changes of address or time spent overseas. A large proportion of prisoners also have a learning difficulty that added to their problems at school.

When I first became a head teacher, my school was in a troubled state. Some established staff members had just left, the children were anxious and physical restraint had become the first rather than the last resort. There were many things that needed to be fixed, but I knew that if we did not get the basics right, we would never make progress. For the first six months I had three main priorities: find and recruit effective staff, keep the children in the classroom (they were in the habit of jumping over the fence) and rigorously enforce our behaviour management policy, establishing clear expectations and making sure that rewards and sanctions were consistently applied.