Section 1. Summary Section 1. Summary 1.1 Prison Service rules allow managers in young offender institutions (YOIs) to separate children from their peers as a method of maintaining good order and discipline, or for their own best interests. This separation can take place in a designated separate segregation unit, on a specialist residential unit or on normal location. 1.2 In 2017, the Prison Service was found to be in breach of its own rules regarding separation of children in a court judgment involving a child who spent more than 100 days separated from his peers and who was deprived of adequate education. The child, identified in court documents as AB, was locked in his cell for over 22 hours a day, sometimes for more than 15 consecutive days. The court accepted that during some periods, when he had no education provision at all, ‘the lack of mental and physical activity contributed to his frustration and so to his disruptive behaviour’.1 1.3 In response to this judgment, HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) extended rule 49 ‘removal from association’ (good order or discipline) oversight arrangements (see paragraph 2.3) to all children spending more than 22 hours a day in their cell. The aim was that management oversight would improve the regime that these children received. 1.4 This inspection has found that the approach has been unsuccessful. At the time of our inspection in spring 2019 around 10% of children in YOIs were separated from their peers under rule 49. Several other children were informally separated and spent more than 22 hours locked in their cell without any management oversight. 1.5 Many of the safeguards under rule 49 were not consistently implemented, and where they were they had not had any meaningful impact on the time that separated children spent out of their cells or the amount of education provided to them. 1.6 It is current HMPPS policy to prohibit the use of separation as a form of punishment and not to subject children to a regime that amounts to solitary confinement. 1.7 Our review of the separation of children in YOIs – based on analysis of surveys conducted in 2018–19 and fieldwork that took place in spring 2019 – has found that separation was used as a punishment, both implicitly in the case of many children separated on rule 49 and explicitly for children given losses of association or demoted to the basic regime in response to poor behaviour. We have found that most separated children experienced a regime that amounts to the widely accepted definition of solitary confinement (see paragraph 2.6). For a minority of separated children, solitary confinement had been prolonged in nature. 1.8 The experience of children separated on normal residential units – two-thirds of separated children at the time of this inspection – was particularly grim. Mainstream residential units were simply unable to provide children with their basic entitlements of a daily shower, telephone call and exercise. We met several children living on these units who received only 15 minutes out of their cell each day during the weekend. 1.9 The key finding of this review is that the current oversight arrangements and model of delivery of separation have failed to improve the day-to-day life of separated children across the estate. Daily visits to separated children by managers, chaplains and nurses, and weekly visits by governing governors, did not always take place. Reviews of separation did not focus 1 See <https://howardleague.org/news/felthamsolitaryconfinementhighcourtjudgment/> accessed 24 October 2019. Separation of children in young offender institutions 7