Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to the oral evidence given to the Justice Committee on 7 November 2017, HC 419, what information his Department holds on contractual performance relating to (a) education provision, (b) levels of activity, (c) time out of cell and (d) any other measures recorded for the youth custodial estate in each year since 2010.

In the youth custodial estate three establishments are currently operated by providers under contract: Parc Youth Offending Institution (YOI), Oakhill Secure Training Centre (STC) and Rainsbrook (STC). HMPPS took over the running of Medway STC in May 2016.

Education provision

In both STCs and the private sector YOI, the contractual expectation is that young people spend 25 hours in education. Performance against this measure is set out below.

Table 1: The number of hours expressed as an average per young person per week of taught education and vocational training delivered in contracted STC and private YOI, in each calendar year for 2010 to 2017.

Notes:

1. Data for Medway STC is up to May 2016. This is when the centre transferred from being a contracted service to HMPPS.

2. Data for Oakhill and Rainsbrook STCs is up to May 2017.

3. For Parc YOI the data for 2017 cover the nine months from January to September.

4. This information is drawn from operational management information.

   Time out of cell

   The expectation in STCs is that young people will be unlocked for 14 hours per day. At Parc YOI the expectation depends on the young person’s Incentives and Earned Privileges (IEP) level. IEP is set against behaviour and can range from 9 to 12 hours during the week and between 7.75 and 10.75 hours at the weekend.

   The table below shows the average number of hours a young person spent unlocked from their room.

   Table 2: The number of hour’s young people spent unlocked from their room expressed as an average per day in contracted STC and private YOI in each calendar year from 2010 to 2017.

Notes:

1. Data for contracted STCs is available up to May 2017.

2. Data for Oakhill 2014 is an 11 month average due to a data reporting issue.

3. For Parc YOI the data for 2017 covers the nine months from January to September.

4. This data has been taken from data submitted each month by secure establishments via the YJB’s Youth Justice Application Framework (YJAF) database.

General notes:

Administrative databases; All data above has been drawn from administrative IT systems, which, as with any large-scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing and can be subject to change over time.

Other Activity

As well as education (which can take the form of classroom based education, vocational training and Physical Education) young people may also receive a range of other interventions based on their specific needs, for example, a young person may require specialist mental health or speech and language support to enable learning and improve behaviour. Young people may also participate in enrichment activities at evenings and weekends.

Other measures recorded for the youth custodial estate

A broad range of data is collected from establishments to inform commercial, commissioning and performance management processes. These measures do not necessary relate to commissioned targets, but offer an indication on how a particular service is operating.

The Youth Justice Annual Statistics document provides further data and information relating to the youth custodial estate. This document is a snapshot of the cohort and describes its characteristics. For example, it provides data on the average population of young people in custody in the youth secure estate, both remanded and sentenced as well as the average time spent in custody.

The document can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/youth-justice-statistics.