Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many children and young people under 18 years old who entered the youth justice system had a diagnosis of a (a) personality disorder, (b) speech or language problem or (c) learning difficulty for each year for which data is available since 2010.

We do not collect this data centrally

We hold the following information, which is of relevance:

A data matching exercise between DfE and MoJ found that, of children sentenced in 2014, around 45% of children with short custodial sentences, and 46% with a high-end community sentence have Special Education Needs without a statement (compared with 17% of pupils in state-funded secondary schools).

There are high numbers of young people with special educational needs including speech, language and communication needs in youth custody. Data collected to inform the custody placement decision for young people shows that 32% were recorded as having ‘learning disability or difficulty concerns’ between April 2014 and March 2016.