Member

Some years ago, I visited a young offender institution when I was doing a report for the Howard League on the use of physical restraints on children in custody. A young lad, aged about 16, beckoned me into his cell saying that he wanted to show me something. I went into the cell with a prison officer, and he pointed to his grade A* GCSE maths certificate on the wall and said to me that he hoped he could be a maths teacher when he was an adult. I hope he is, as it was some years ago. I asked him a silly question to begin with: “Do you like maths?”. Then I asked whether he was very good at maths when he was at school. He said, “I never went to school, sir”. I said, “What do you mean, never?”, and he said, “I haven’t been to school since I was 11 years old”. There you have a child who was diverse, immature for his age, who came from a terrible and difficult background, and who had been convicted of a serious crime—he was serving quite a long sentence—but he had a talent that had never been properly harnessed. To be fair, it was harnessed in the young offender institution, but I do not know what happened to him when he was released a few months after I spoke to him.