ABSTRACT
There can only ever be one answer to the question, ‘what is the most valuable asset in a secure unit?’ It is the staff. Of course attention must be paid to the standard of the residential accommodation, the availability of resources for education and training, access to relevant materials to provide challenging offending behaviour programmes and facilities for physical and other kinds of leisure activities. However, to make the full use of these, in a purposeful way and for the benefit of young people, requires the presence on a regular and consistent basis of highly motivated and multi-skilled groups of competent staff who are committed to delivering the regime. In order to achieve this there must be a team of managers in place who share a clear vision of how they want the secure unit to be, and who collectively have the experience and skills to provide the organisational structures and leadership that sustain the day-to-day work. We have already seen how secure units are made up of multi-disciplinary staff groups working together. Teachers, psychologists, psychiatrists, probation officers, social workers and other professional groups are appointed on the basis of their own profession’s arrangements for qualifying and post-qualifying training. Although none of the initial training for these professions necessarily prepares people for work in secure accommodation with adolescents, it may be reasonably expected that through their qualifying training they are equipped to develop the professional expertise which, given time and further experience, may be applied within this particular setting. This is not at all the case for those who make up by far the greatest number of staff in a secure unit, namely residential care staff and prison officers. Their work brings them into constant and direct contact with young people in what are probably the most critical tasks of all those performed in the residential unit. Given what we have previously described about the nature of this work and the demands made on staff, it would not be unreasonable to make the assumption that any person wishing to work in a secure unit with young people should have a proper professional training before so doing. It is not a great leap from that assumption to believe that such opportunities for formal initial training are therefore available and accessible on a regular basis. The astonishing fact is, however, that despite the importance of this area of social policy, for those staff who in so many respects carry the weight of responsibility for the experience of young people in custody, specific professional and qualifying training is not available. The work is difficult enough, indeed at times it seems as if the demands it makes border on the impossible, so that not having a framework of training and professional development for staff does indeed seem like making the impossible even more difficult!
