Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many hours people in each Young Offenders Institution spent in (a) work and (b) education on average in each year since 2010.

Youth Custody Service (YCS) holds public YOI education contract data since 2015 when responsibility transferred from the Education Funding Agency (EFA) to the Youth Justice Board (YJB). Operational contract management of these contracts is now undertaken by the YCS.

Table 1 : The average number of Classroom-based Learner Hours provided per Young Person per week

Notes:

(1) For 2015 this information is for the period August to December.

(2) This information is drawn from operational management information.

Parc is the only privately run YOI and the contractual expectation is that young people spend 25 hours in education, including physical education, per week.

Table 2: The number of hours expressed as an average per young person per week of taught education and vocational training delivered in the private YOI, in each calendar year for 2010 to 2017.

Note:

(3) This information is drawn from operational management information.

We are committed to reforming youth custody in order to improve outcomes for children and young people, which includes expanding frontline staff capacity in public-sector YOIs by 20% - that’s 123 new recruits - and we will introduce a new youth justice specialist role. We have already started to make progress and currently over 100 frontline staff are enrolled on a new vocational youth justice foundation degree.