It’s Groundhog Week for youth custody, as the
Justice Secretary is told today to take urgent action to improve Oakhill
Secure Training Centre (STC) where inspectors have found serious and systemic
failures putting children there at risk of harm. On Monday, inspectors reported
that only a third of children at Werrington Young Offender Institution felt
cared for by staff with most spending too long locked up and not getting enough
education.
The Oakhill failings are particularly troubling, the latest
in a long line of crises to engulf STCs
over the last 30 years- and the second time Oakhill itself has been subject
to an Urgent Notification. Four years ago it “barely met minimum standards of
human decency” and despite some short lived improvements it’s back in a
shocking state- unsanitary conditions, unresponsive healthcare, inappropriate
use of separation and restraint and safeguarding in disarray.
Perhaps the most worrying part of the Ofsted Chief Inspector’s
letter to Shabana Mahmood is the revelation that the Director of the G4S run
centre and one of the deputy directors were formally suspended from their
duties earlier this month and the other deputy director was recently fired.
30 other staff have been suspended in the last eight months,
most because of concerns about “conduct with children”. All of the 18 investigations completed have
led to “various managerial actions including dismissals”. Some staff facing
serious allegations have been allowed to continue to work with children. Staff
convey a culture of fear, mistrust and reprisal, with some saying they have
been left feeling unsafe while working alone on a unit.
Ministers should be worried too that the Youth Custody
Service (YCS) -responsible for contractual management of private sector sites- has
failed “to identify and/or take sufficient action to help safeguard children
and to ensure that children receive good quality care”. After the first Urgent Notification, in 2022 YCS
assessed that despite limited improvements in G4S’s management of Oakhill STC, “there
remained a risk that these improvements may not prove sustainable”. YCS should
therefore have been much more on the case since then.
So what is to be done? It’s almost nine years since the then
government agreed that Young Offender Institutions (YOIs) and STCs should be
replaced in the longer term by smaller secure schools situated in the regions
that they serve. Since then one Secure School finally got off the ground last
year. It’s
progress has been disappointing- an inspection coincidentally out today
finds it needs improvement to be good.
Oasis Restore is not yet delivering good help and care for
children and young people- and it’s of concern that the effectiveness of
leaders and managers there is rated as inadequate. However, “there are no
serious or widespread failures that result in children’s welfare not being
safeguarded or promoted”, unlike at Oakhill. Such failures tend to be even less common in Secure
Childrens Homes, whose capacity in my view should have been expanded instead of
creating the Secure School. But we are where we are. That doesn’t mean we have
to stay here forever.
The Oakhill contract runs until 2029 and would probably cost
too much to end early. But that could and should be the target date for the government
to remove children from YOI’s and STC’s using Secure Children’s Homes and
Secure Schools instead.
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