Tag Archives: youth custody

Youth Custody: an update

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Following on from my last blog post about an incidence of knife crime in a school in Wales, I thought that I would look again at the latest statistics regarding youth custody for uder18s in England and Wales.  Youth justice statistics: 2024 to 2025 – GOV.UK

The table below is abstracted from Table 7.2: Youth custody population, year on year monthly trends (under 18s only), years ending March 2001 to 2025 omitting the data for the years before 2014/15

Financial YearAprJulOctJanFebMarAverage monthly population
2014/15         1,078         1,111         1,033            976            988         1,002         1,031
2015/16            999         1,003            997            921            877            881            946
2016/17            906            857            872            862            863            858            870
2017/18            910            914            898            874            865            922            897
2018/19            938            882            853            806            827            832            856
2019/20            795            811            791            751            770            737            776
2020/21            664            563            535            532            536            516            558
2021/22            493            479            449            426            414            422            447
2022/23            432            457            434            437            467            452            447
2023/24            457            443            429            397            411            410            425
2024/25            427            437            400            406            398            402            412

The decline in custody numbers even during the period between 2-014/15 and 2024/25 is significant, especially taking into account the growth in the number of young people in the older age groups 11-18 during the period under review.

In April 2014, there were 1,078 under-18s in custody. In March 2024 that number had reduced to 402. This was just five above the lowest number in recent history, recorded in January 2024.

For girls, the average number in custody in 2025 was just 10, compared with 42 in 2015. So, the girl convicted of stabbing teachers in Wales really does join a very small number of other girls in custody.  

The most worrying number within the 402 is the number on remand. This number stood at 183 in March 2025, some 44% of the total. This compared with just 23% in March 2015. The backlog of trails post-Covid is well known. There is surely a case for fast tracking cases for those under-18s on remand. No child of school-age should be locked up a day longer than necessary. A backlog of trials is not a good enough reason to leave a young person languishing in custody.

Violence against the person offences, offences that would include attempted murder – the offence the girl in Wales was sentenced to custody for – now account for 68% of the primary offences for young people under-18 in custody, compared to just 31% of those in custody in 2015. One should always be wary of using percentages, since the absolute numbers have declined from 317 in March 2014 to 284 in March 2025. It is just that custody for other offences, especially for both domestic burglary and robbery producing custodial sentences have declined even faster than custody for offences of violence against the person.

One concern about the decline in custody is that under-18s in Young Offenders Institutions may now be serving sentences or on remand further from home than in the past, as the number of institutions in use reduces with the reduction in the custody population. This is an issue that policymakers may wish to address. When Cabinet Member in Oxfordshire, I did my best to keep young offenders out of Feltham YOI, but acknowledged that the alternative YOIs were further away., should there have been no alternative to that form of custody.

The use of custody for undr-18s has come a long way since the bleak days of the Blair government and police targets, when August 2006 saw more than 3,000 under-18s in custody. Even with this massive reduction, I think we are less violent society, despite some headlines in the press and on social media. 

Young people in custody: all too depressing

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At the beginning of August, the DfE together with the Ministry of Justice, published what is described as ‘a joint experimental statistics report’ on ‘Understanding the educational background of young offenders’. The report makes depressing, but possibly not unexpected reading. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/understanding-the-educational-background-of-young-offenders-summary-report

The results are from a data sharing project between the DfE and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), conducted in 2015. The analysis is of those young offenders sentenced in 2014 matched to DfE data.

Not all young people with the observed characteristics either offend or, if offending, are sentenced to one or more periods of custody. There is no causal relationship between any lack of education progress and offending, but those that offend are more likely than not to have below average educational outcomes regardless of their actual ability.

This lack of educational progress, although apparent by the end of Key Stage 2 for the cohort studied in this exercise, is magnified when students reach secondary school. The largest gap between the outcome for all pupils and those that became young offenders was in ‘writing’ at Key Stage 2 and the smallest gap was in ‘reading at this Key Stage.

By Key Stage4, although the majority of young offenders in the study did achieve a pass in something at Key Stage 4, no more than 7%  of young person sent into custody achieved 5 A*-Cs including English and mathematics, using the grading then in place for these subjects. The most depressing figure is that just one per cent of the 399 individuals sent into a short period of custody achieved the 5 A*-Cs outcome including English and mathematics.

A third of young offenders receiving custody of longer than twelve months when age 16 or 17 on their sentence date were ‘looked after children’ on the 31st March 2014.

Even more depressing is the very high percentages of young offenders with a record of persistent absence from school, presumably mostly in their secondary school careers. Apart from those sentenced to Referral Orders and Cautions that are likely to be first time entrants into the criminal justice system, all other categories had more than 90% of the group with a record of persistent absence, peaking at 94% for those with custodial sentences of less than six months. This group also top the percentage that had been subject to a permanent exclusion.

At the period this study was undertaken ‘off-rolling’ and home educating of Key Stage 4 pupils was not a significant feature of secondary schools. However, it would be interesting to know the percentage of young people ‘off-rolled’ that enter the criminal justice system at the present time.

Schools and colleges are currently facing financial challenges, and it is worrying that the figures in this report come from a period when schools were better, even if not adequately, funded.

Interestingly, this report does not include either regional data or data about the ethnicity of the offenders. One can assume, however, that most are young men as the number of young women sent into custody is generally very low.

Hopefully, this report will inspire the new Ministerial team in the DfE to address how the education of this group of young people can be improved and the use of custody reduced.