Barriers

Recent research has taught us about the ways in which young women who are often themselves the victims of serious crime or have experienced other forms of adversity (including early contact with the criminal justice system) can find themselves stigmatised, punished and ultimately abandoned by multiple state agencies, including the education system, social care system and criminal justice system. For many young women this builds upon similarly negative experiences during childhood.

This new study for PET echoes many of those findings and underlines how improving young women’s access to good quality education opportunities, both in prison and in the community, could help disrupt this negative narrative.

Like the eight individuals in this study, all young women are different and no single approach to education in prison is going to suit every young woman. There is, however, a strong evidence base indicating common barriers faced by young women, which must form the foundation of future work to develop better educational opportunities for young women in prison.

We know that:

• Young women in prison are disproportionately likely to be suffering from mental health needs, often due to childhood trauma and abuse.
• They are disproportionately likely to be at risk of ongoing gender-based abuse and exploitation.
• Our understanding of girls’ experience of exclusion in education is under-developed.
• The overrepresentation of Black women and women from minority ethnic backgrounds throughout the criminal justice system is particularly acute for young women and even worse for girls.

Findings

Most of the women in this study were readily able to recall the areas of school life which they had enjoyed and achievements of which they felt proud, whether this was in sport, maths, cookery or psychology. This was accompanied for many by vivid recollections of negative experiences, including bullying and feeling unsupported by teachers, of which they clearly still felt the impact.

Some women described experiences of domestic abuse and coercive control which had had an impact on their experience of school and, in at least one case, continued to pose a risk to them while they were in custody.

For all the women in the study, it was clear that having access to purposeful activity in prison was fundamentally important. Whether through education, sport or employment, this was described as a source of satisfaction, distraction and relative normality, which helped them cope with incarceration.

Time spent inactive, on the wing, was something the women avoided wherever possible. For those who found themselves “stuck on the wing”, this appeared to lead to feelings of desperation and hopelessness.

Recommendations

The study recommends that the Young Women’s Strategy and its delivery plan should be developed and implemented through co-production with young women with relevant lived experience and specialist services, and
should include seven priorities:

1. Cross-government investment in cross-disciplinary, gender-specific support for young women in contact with the criminal justice system
2. The removal of barriers to participation in education that might arise from the particularly high prevalence amongst young women of mental health needs and backgrounds of childhood trauma, gender-based violence, abuse and exploitation
3. Investment by the MoJ in a wider range of education and employment opportunities for young women in prison
4. HMPPS, in partnership with relevant expert organisations, to provide high quality information, advice and guidance to young women in custody
5. HMPPS to increase the use of ROTL to enable young women in prison to access education and work in the community in the latter stages of their sentence.
6. Probation to support continuation of education and employment of young women on release
7. MoJ to collect and publish data on young women’s educational needs and progress in prison.

Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here