The latest inspection reports on Oakhill secure training centre, run by Group 4 Securicor, are damning. Staff have had to resort to force due to the very high levels of violence at the centre - by children on other children as well as on staff. Seems like there is a lack of training for staff in dealing with challenging behaviour - leading to a high turnove - 59% in a year.

Has anyone worked there or had experience of working for any of the other privately-run secure training centres?

Hi Muriel

Before i edited the Community Care website, I was a reporter and covered the patch of youth justice which I found incredibly interesting. About five years ago, Rainsbrook STC was given a glowing report by the Social Services Inspectorate and suprise suprise they invited the media along to visit the establishment.

I have to say though, it was a very well-run centre with a high staff to child ratio, lots of purposeful activity and an incentive scheme for the children to be allowed posters, photos, a tv etc in their room in return for good behaviour.

I spoke to a few children there and I've no doubt the handful I met were model children wheeled out while the more badly behaved children were kept in the background but I did leave the centre with a very different opinion than I arrived with.

Shortly after that visit, it was announced that Gareth Myatt had died after being restrained. It seemed to raise the question of whether STC's were suitable to hold children although I personally felt that Gareth's death was not as a result of a badly run centre, but the policy of restraining children and since that terrible tragedy the restraint argument has rumbled on, still without being resolved.

As I said, this is all a long time ago so i wonder how things are now?

you wonder whether the inspections are adequate. Overall, I would say these privately run child prisons lack accountability -- their contracts with the Youth Justice Board are confidential. Unfortunately, it has taken tragedies like Gareth Myatts' to force at least some openess about what goes on in these places. Campaign groups like Inquest and the Howard League for Penal Reform act as vital watchdogs, because inspections are obviously not enough

I agree - The Howard League, Inquest and Prison Reform Trust do an amazing job in terms of unearthing bad practice and publicising it - the systems need to be transparent. In my time reporting on the area, there seemed a feeling in the sector that local authority secure children's homes were by far the best type of establishment for dealing with troubled youngsters with highly trained staff. It seems though that the cost of running laschs became the problem and as a result Secure Training Centres were seen as a cheaper option but with not quite such a child centred and welfare based policy. Of course both seem far more preferential to placing a child in prison. I know there are some serious crimes whereby a time in custody is necessarybut I see little that can be achieved in prison with the sheer numbers that make purposeful activity and rehabilitation pretty difficult to achieve. 

It all boils down to funding.  The training and support of staff working in these places should be fully investigated .  Too many organisations go down the cheaper road with minimal attention to the quality of services being provided.

I've had some experience of a couple of STCs. These both seem very different to each other, highlighting the role of the management system and the prevailing culture. I'm always concerned by any explanation of weakness that seeks to focus on individual bad practice. Yes, I acknowledge that bad apples exist, but I think that we need to start by looking at the role of the organisation, its supervision and support culture. One thing that seems to make it very hard in one setting is the very nature of the contract set up between the STC and the YJB which makes for some very challenging arrangements re staffing etc. Staff turnover seems extremely high in STCs, making it very difficult to establish consistent positive cultures - I'd suggest that one way to reduce turnover and therefore to help the development of a positive culture, would be to look at the role of supervision.

 Hi topcat

I think you make some good points. It's been mentioned elsewhere on CareSpace that supervision or lack of it is a real problem in social care - some have mentioned the idea of introducing clinical supervision like they have in the medical world.

Also, do you think YJB needs to look again at its contracts with STCs? 

Simeon - re the contracts issue, I think its important that we should look at the nature of the task that STCs are being asked to do, and the resources that they are being given in order to do so. Secure training centres are set up to be different from young offenders insitutions and prisons in that they have more of an emphasis on caring, educating and training young people so that they do not fall back into the same habits. (I know that this is of course a key role for all the judicial system but its even more of a priority for STCs, along with a desire to be more of a nurturting environment). I think, therefore, that it is crucial that contracts with STCs enable there to be a sufficiently high staffing level and models of deployment that allow trainees to form relationships with staff that will in turn help them reflect on their behaviour.

It would be great to see one of these contracts but they are confidential, so it is really hard to see what criteria STCs have to meet. There is a lack of accountability all round I think. Anne Owers recently went to Oakhill alongside the usual inspectorate Ofsted but that was only because of the seriousness of concerns. How can STCs be made more accountable when their contracts are kept secret?

Just had a chance to read this week's Community Care. Its good to see recognition at the highest level re the need to achieve a child-centred approach. The director at Oakhill is quoted as saying, "Companies made assumptions at the time when the government was talking about boot camps and child jails. They assumed the government wanted a short, sharp shock for young offenders, rather than the type of care provided by secure children's homes."