The seamless sentence: making the link between custody and community

For many practitioners and policy makers embracing the youth justice reforms in 1998, the potential for integrating education into offending behaviour work through the new Detention and Training Order (DTO) introduced by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act was greatly welcomed. Nearly all of the young people who have received a custodial sentence since 2000 have had DTOs that require the first half of the sentence to be served in custody and the last half in the community imposed by the courts. The minimum length for DTOs is four months and the maximum is two years. Young people on DTOs are held in one of three types of institutions: young offender institutions (YOIs); secure training centres (STCs); or secure children's homes (SCHs). The majority are held in the Prison Service environment of a YOI.

The Youth Justice Board (YJB) revised its vision for custody over three years ago, setting out a commissioning framework for the newly named Secure Estate for Children and Young People (YJB, 2005a). In the early days of the DTO, there was an assumption at a local level among youth justice specialists that the multi-agency work to be brokered by Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) with education departments would improve young people's access to mainstream education. At national level, there was a commitment from policy makers that the new custodial sentence would locate education at the heart of all sentence planning, enabling much more effective work to be undertaken with young people in custody to address both protective and risk factors. Indeed, the early evaluation of the DTO (YJB, 2002) was broadly positive, indicating that the sentence was well received by sentencers and practitioners. A number of recommendations were highlighted, and the researchers emphasised that crucial planning and resettlement work failed where interventions were dependent on agencies immediately outside the YOT. Clearly, education provision was one key area that appeared to break down fairly rapidly and, despite much effort over the years since 2002, little improvement has been made. Following this work, the Audit Commission highlighted in some detail the continuing problem of young people not gaining access to suitable education, training and employment (ETE) opportunities.