Here’s something I wrote in 2013 in response to a conversation about ‘illiterate young offenders’.
Reading deficits in ‘young offenders’ exist for many reasons, not just a lack of good instruction in primary school because they often have complex educational, social and emotional needs. I also don’t talk about young offenders separate from any other marginalised young person because those in YOIs are just the ones who got caught and sentenced to an institution, not the ones who got a community sentence or an ASBO or who are just hanging with the wrong crowd or who are at risk but have never done anything to break the law. Most ‘young offenders’ I’ve met are really just 50% teenager, 30% risk-taker and 20% up to no good for a variety of reasons. Most of them won’t offend as adults whether they can read or not.
Those young people who are at odds with their communities and have no way into the secondary school system, need more than just a good reading method.They need a reading method that will make them feel safe and a person delivering it who will make them feel safe – educationally and emotionally – and who will make them laugh. They need to learn that making a mistake doesn’t make you ‘thick’, a message they have picked up from school.
Some have genuine learning difficulties that may or may not have been identified officially but when a young person announces ‘I’m dyslexic’, I always ask who told them that. ‘My nan’ and ‘my mum’ are more common answers than ‘my teacher’ or ‘my educational psychologist’. I don’t tell them they are or aren’t dyslexic but I do let them know that dyslexic people can learn to read and we’ve got a great way to get there.
That is important because some have just missed learning to read.Even if they were offered the best phonics instruction possible, they weren’t at primary school often enough to grasp the principles and put them into practice. When you ask a young person if they remember learning to read and their answer is, ‘Nah – I was too busy throwing chairs at the teacher’, then you know you’ve got a hope of moving them along quickly. These are the students who make you feel like a miracle worker because they just get on with it and are reading in hours.
Some learned to read quite well but, because of being constantly in trouble in the classroom, can no longer access what it is they know. This is the young person who, after about 6 hours, was reading the travel section of the Telegraph and voicing his opinions about justice. You can also reach these young people through spelling which is something they think is beyond them because they weren’t good at memorising strings of letter names.
One thing I’ve learned is that prisons house a lot of sensitive souls. They may have bravado in certain situations but not when they’re sitting in front of a printed page. I remember describing a young man as the most vulnerable teenager I’d ever met. His YOT worker laughed and said he was the terror of his street, fearing nothing and no one. Well I can promise you that he feared looking stupid because he couldn’t read. The reason we have “The Deal” in TRT is to reduce to nothing the chance of a young person feeling like they did in school when someone said, “Come on, you know this one. It’s easy.”
By allowing them to make mistakes with no fear of humiliation, we have a chance to help these young people develop a much healthier sense of self, where they can be proud of accomplishments that don’t involve violence or intimidation. We can also help them begin to perceive themselves as learners. These aren’t measured by any reading test.
There are so many young people coming to mind as I type this. I don’t know where they are or how good their reading is. I do know that they all finished TRT many steps ahead of where they started. This is a huge thing for young people who don’t see education as a viable part of their lives. I’m sad that we’ve ended up doing more work in schools than out but funders like numbers and for the cost of getting one marginalised young person through TRT, we can work with five who have the life skills to get out of bed and get to school in uniform.
The Shine Trust described our work as “urgent (but unglamorous)”. Who will walk with the young people who don’t show up on anyone’s league table?
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