Young offender institutions

Locked-up young offenders know each other… now we know why

Research shows incarcerated children come from particular areas and many were in FE – and knowing this can help us help them

Research shows incarcerated children come from particular areas and many were in FE – and knowing this can help us help them

2 May 2025, 5:35

My first visit to a Young Offenders Institute (YOI) left me reeling. I’d been inside adult prisons before, but nothing prepared me for the heart-wrenching reality of children in that environment.

I remember my sadness at seeing a pile of familiar children’s books, including Jacqueline Wilson’s book Sleepovers, outside the cell of a boy who had to be unlocked by three prison officers wearing riot gear.

The biggest shock was that the children seemed to know each other from before they were incarcerated.

To understand why this is shocking, you need to understand what’s actually a huge success story. For the last two decades, the number of incarcerated children has fallen drastically; from almost 3,000 in 2008 to around 400 now.

There are roughly two million 15-17 year olds in England and Wales. Yet when these 400 arrive in custody and are asked to name anybody they know inside (to help minimise gang problems), many reel off a list.

Some in the sector have long suspected the only way this is possible is if many of these children came from a very small number of hyper-localised areas, but we’ve never been able to prove it. Until now.

In February, groundbreaking data was released by the Children’s Commissioner’s Office. By matching local authority data for each child in custody between 2017 and 2022 with the National Pupil Database, we could see for the first time at an aggregate level where this group went to school. The results are fascinating.

The headline findings paint a clearer picture as to how these children know each other. What jumps out is startling geographic concentration – 36 per cent of children in YOIs had attended schools in the West Midlands. And 20 per cent of all those in custody between 2017 and 2022 went to the same six schools!

It’s also striking that the most common setting for these children pre-custody was FE college (30 per cent). 

So, what needs to be done?

Many children in custody are extremely challenging, but most are also hugely vulnerable. Rather than lowering our expectations of what they can achieve, we need to hugely ramp up the support we offer them to get there.

Educational attainment, specifically English and maths GCSE, is the strongest protective factor against becoming NEET, and one of the most common traits seen in prisoners is functional illiteracy and innumeracy. 

Our compulsory education system ends at 18, but funding to support young people falls off a cliff at 16. Meanwhile, FE disproportionately picks up those with furthest to go: over 90 per cent of students retaking English and maths GCSEs are not in mainstream school settings.

In FE there are twice as many students who were eligible for free school meals in year 11, but many 16-17 year olds still need intensive help to engage with education.

Targeted funding for disadvantaged young people, provided to schools through pupil premium funding, needs to extend post-16. It can then be spent on, amongst other things, helping them catch up with literacy and numeracy.

I sit on the board of FE tutoring charity Get Further, and see firsthand how hugely impactful targeted interventions can be for this cohort.

Teacher pay in FE is also considerably less than in schools, making it harder to attract and retain the best staff.

Ten years ago, I contentiously suggested that schools subsidise FE colleges to help fund maths and English retakes. This isn’t feasible in the current funding climate, but the rationale is sound: we need to reallocate funds to those institutions that serve the young people who need more support to achieve academic success.

When I speak to children in YOIs about what works, they talk about highly structured education settings with high behaviour expectations and intensive pastoral care. It’s notable that only 8 per cent of children in custody came from an education setting rated outstanding by Ofsted.

Early intervention isn’t a silver bullet: some people will get great education and wonderful support but still make terrible decisions and have to be remanded in custody.

But there are too many avoidable cases of young people without the right support. We need to be more deliberate about meeting additional need with extra resource.

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