Here's the report discussed in this episode of the podcast: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/thematic-review-of-the-quality-of-education-in-young-offender-institutions-yois Mark Leech 0:03 Hello. Welcome to Ofsted Talks. My name is Mark Leech, and today I'm hosting a conversation about young offender institutions, or YOIs for short. I'm very pleased to be joined by not one, but two of His Majesty's chief inspectors. We have Sir Martyn Oliver, His Majesty's Chief Inspector here at Ofsted, and we have Charlie Taylor, His Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons. Now both are here because the inspection of young offender institutions involves both His Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons, HMIP and Ofsted. Also with us from Ofsted is Maria Navarro, one of Ofsted specialists in this area, and heavily involved in the report we're going to be talking about today. Welcome everyone. We'll get on to the report I mentioned in a moment. But first, let's talk a bit about young offender institutions and how they work. Charlie, before you joined HMIP, you were Chair of the Youth Justice Board, so this is an area you know really well. Could you give us a bit of a background, please, about YOIs and the children who they cater for? Charlie Taylor 1:05 Yes, certainly there are four YOIs in the country. One is private sector, the other three are public sector. They house about around 400 children at the moment, which is a dramatic reduction from when I did my review in 2016 when there are about 1500 and an even more dramatic reduction from the the early 2000s when there are about three and a half thousand children locked up in England and Wales. The age of kids who end up in a YOI is 15 to 18, but the vast majority of them are about 16 and 17, with most being 17 at the moment, because of the prison population crisis, they're also housing more 18 year olds than they would have done in the past. So in the past, unless you had a very short time to serve, you would move on into an adult prison. But they're now hanging on to 18 year olds for longer as well, which represents a challenge. Mark Leech 1:57 And YOIs do they cater for boys as well as girls? Or is it all boys? Charlie Taylor 2:02 Well, there are a few girls in YOIs due to some anomalies, because of the closure of parts of the youth custody sector, particularly secure training centers. And what that meant is that provision had to be made for a small amount of very vulnerable girls who who were unable to be placed either in secure children's homes or or into secure training centers. So Weatherby YOI, up in Yorkshire, has a handful of girls there, and certainly that's an issue we've raised many concerns about during our inspection reports over the last couple of years, and in terms of the sort of the way YOIS operate. Mark Leech 2:43 Obviously, you've mentioned secure training centers, then and secure children's homes. What's different about the YOIs, would it be more recognizable as a sort of prison environment, or is it more of a children's home environment? Charlie Taylor 2:54 No, certainly it's much more of a prison environment. So the populations are higher, around 150 or so in somewhere like Weatherby, around 120 in someone like Wellington and in Feltham in West London, again, around 120 something like that. So they have a much more prisony feel, unfortunately, than than secure children's homes, the secure school, or even, indeed, secure, secure training centers. And I think that's been one of the criticisms for many years, is actually that they often appear to do a better job of preparing kids for a life in prison, rather than a life on the outside going on and being successful when they leave. Mark Leech 3:36 That's probably a good point to bring in Martyn from Ofsted. Our involvement might come as a bit of a surprise to many people. Obviously, we do have that role in in adult prisons as well. Could you tell us a bit more about why and how Ofsted are involved in YOI inspections? Sir Martyn Oliver 3:49 Well, Ofsted works with a number of providers across the 92,000 people that we inspect and regulate and in YOIs, and indeed in prisons. We're really grateful to work with Charlie and his team at HMIP and we look very specifically at the education that children receive in these settings. So for example, in YOIs, we've just done a thematic joint review with Charlie's team, and we've looked very specifically at leadership and the quality of education, and it's actually quite a damning report, where between the two of us, we find that there's been a decade long decline in the quality of education for our most vulnerable children, and when you think about the very need for rehabilitation, clearly education has a massively important role. And the fact that we find that there are systemic failings, it's a really concerning moment that I think Charlie and I now say, this needs to say, enough is enough. This ...
