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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.