The Longford Lectures, hosted by the Longford Trust since 2002, are held each November reflecting on prison policy and the need for broader social reform. Previous lectures have been given by well-known figures, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, President Mary McAleese of Ireland, and Cherie Blair.
On Tuesday 11th November, the Children’s Commissioner delivered the 2025 Longford Lecture, on the theme of: ‘Guilty until proven innocent: Every child’s right to freedom, fairness, and opportunity’. The lecture included the findings from the Commissioner’s latest report, “A production line of pointlessness”: Children on custodial remand.
Good evening.
It’s a great honour to be standing here on this stage addressing all of you – those here in this hall and those of you listening on National Prison Radio.
I am the Children’s Commissioner for England.
The role has existed for 20 years – following the brutal and preventable murder of Victoria Climbié at the hands of those who should loved her most. Some of you will remember her.
I do, every day, in everything I do.
And so, my role was created, to make sure that children were listened to. Their voices and views reflected in the public debate, in policy, and in promises made.
I speak to children arriving here, cold, exploited and lonely, on small boats. I speak to children in mental health wards who are looked after by guards, not nurses. In children’s “homes” that are actually tents, caravans.
Children who find it hard to communicate, and children who desperately want to be heard.
And I speak to children in schools, at youth clubs. In libraries, at sports clubs. Children whose lives might be considered more ‘ordinary’.
I tend not to think of them in that way, though.
I’ve spoken to a million children since taking office, and I’m yet to meet an ‘ordinary’ child.
Because if there is one thing that animates the work I do, and have done, it is this: there is nothing ‘ordinary’ about childhood.
Childhood is a time that shows the vast and impossible potential of human life.
It is springtime.
It is where you see the beauty of both the person children are right now, and the person they will become.
It is a time of joy, of change, of becoming, and of exploration – exploration where, as Eliot has it:
…the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Regardless of their circumstances, there are a few things that unite children across the country.
One of those things, depressingly, is that so few of them feel heard or understood by those in power. Disenfranchised, forgotten.
And some of those who are most maligned, ignored, are the children in prison. In cells, like some of you are in now. And it is some of those children, their stories, I want to speak to you about this evening.
It is perhaps apt, given the nature of these lectures, that I’d like to begin with the experiences of two people in cells who have been at the forefront of my mind lately.
The first is Saint Kevin of Glendalough, via Saint Kevin and the Blackbird by Seamus Heaney.
Heaney’s poem tells the story of Saint Kevin: He is kneeling in his cell, arms stretched out the window, for the cell is narrow. And a blackbird comes along and nests in his hand, leaving eggs.
Kevin, feeling the warm eggs, is ‘moved to pity’; and ‘finding himself linked into the network of eternal life’, keeps his hands out of the cell like a branch for weeks, to protect the eggs until they hatch.
We’re challenged to imagine being Kevin:
‘Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him?
Is there distance in his head?’
And the whole time, he prays the old prayer, often attributed to Saint Ignatius: ‘to labour and not to seek reward’.
To labour, and not to seek reward.
This poem has always struck me as a clarion call. To do things because they are right, and because righteousness is its own reward.
To protect new life, just starting out.
To nurture.
To live your values, come what may.
For me, the most precious thing, the thing worth protecting and nurturing, is childhood itself.
Because now I want to tell you what happens when you value that innocence too cheaply.
This is the story of a boy, who I met last year in a cell.
A boy who, a few weeks earlier, had been out with a mate on his bike on a summer’s day.
He said, “We could hear shouting so we went around the corner and I thought, hey, what’s happening here?… There was just loads of little kids and grown men egging the kids on to chuck stuff at the police.”
This boy, with many others, was one of those involved in the riots in 2024. He presents us as a society with a question, a challenge, a choice.
Do we say – this boy scared people, he hurt people; he is guilty – he must be punished?
Or do we say – this child scared people, he hurt people; he is guilty – how have we failed him? How do we engage him, so he doesn’t do it again? Break the cycle before it beds in.
Do we place the failings of our society at his feet, label him as guilty and move on? Or do we acknowledge that it is we as adults who have failed him?
This boy, who was lost, uncertain and cleaving to fear and hatred of others because he was not shown a way to love and respect himself.
And what did happen? What choice did we make?
He was sentenced to custody, his education interrupted, his dreams of a career as an electrician and a future irreparably damaged. We simply saw his guilt and didn’t allow for the fact that he is a child.
In my role as Children’s Commissioner, I have been lucky enough to see the joys and achievements of thousands of children – those who are excelling in their education, going on to careers they have dreamed of. Children who are living in homes filled with love and attention.
But I believe we are letting children down. By failing to provide moral leadership and show them what it means to be a child today.
We have left a vacuum in the services that children need, in the moral and social fabric of our country; and nature abhors a vacuum.
We have left it to children to fill it for themselves.
And for these children, we have allowed hatred and despair, fuelled online, to fill a void that should be filled with community.
We have retreated from our moral duty towards these children – our duty as policy makers, as educators, as leaders – to find ways to allow them to be part of something bigger than themselves, to see the beauty in the world.
And then we are surprised when they fall down. It is the way that we treat these children that we should be judged on.
John Paul II said, “As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”
My coda to that would be – As the child goes, so goes the country.
And, the truth is, as a country, I believe that we are failing.
We are facing a crisis in childhood.
And a nation that is willing to endure a crisis in its children has lost all sense of its own future.
What does it mean to be a child in 2025?
This is a question that we are struggling to be honest about. There is a crisis developing in childhood.
For too many, childhood is characterised by loneliness. Fear. Anger. Sadness.
For too many, childhood is characterised by the abject and grinding poverty in which they will grow up.
For too many, childhood is characterised by the things they see on a six-inch screen, which they will spend hours every single day looking at.
And where has that got us?
Children rioting across the country, burning down libraries, after the attacks in Southport last summer because they are bored, lost, and disaffected.
Young people not feeling safe where they live. The world too visceral and real. Hiding and hidden. Disengaged.
Fuelled by an alternate reality and society online.
And we have abdicated this responsibility.
Because, frankly, it was easy.
Because there was money to be made.
Because dealing with these threats as they arose seemed hard.
That is why I want us to reflect on the sanctity of childhood, the fragility of childhood.
Childhood is short and wild and precious.
You only get one.
Let me tell you, no matter how secular a society is, we all sacralise something.
There is always something viewed as intrinsically important.
Something so valuable that we choose to do the hard yards to do right by it, to protect it.
I think that we ought to view childhood in this way.
And I’m sure that many people would say that we do.
Well, we really ought to act like it. Because right now, we are failing.
But we can fix this. No failure is absolute.
This has to start in schools.
I recently conducted a census of all schools in England, asking them what they knew about their pupils, and what form of pastoral support they offered them.
Because that’s what children tell me they want. To be known and understood. Cared about.
To work hard and be rewarded with success. To take part in their communities, and to be welcomed in them.
I was shocked to discover how little some schools knew about the children they are teaching, despite their best efforts.
60% of schools can’t give a figure for how many children have lost a parent or sibling.
Fewer than one in three secondary schools could give an exact number when we asked how many of their children had a parent or carer in prison. The most profound fracture, hidden.
Let us think for a moment what that means – a child going through this life-changing event, scared, uncertain about the future, looking for guidance and safety and care. Patience and love.
And their school, the place where they should be going every day, doesn’t even know it has happened. How can we expect that child to get the help they so desperately need?
And this is what I wanted to make clear in my blueprint for the future, The Children’s Plan.
15 years ago, I was on the front lines of a school reform movement.
I think we did a lot of good. Schools unrecognisable for most children. More children learning to read.
But we did not somehow ‘solve’ education. And the fracture of the pandemic was not given a solid enough cast to heal.
It is time to steel ourselves and once again apply all our care and effort to reform – but this time ensure that it is for every single child, wherever they live.
Not just of education, but reform of childhood. Not a place left behind, a whole generation. The fracture, the polarisation, entrenching as we ignore the cries.
I am not despondent or hopeless. I think we’re in a very strong place to do this.
After all, we stand out against some of our international neighbours in that we have always recognised the role that schools have to play in the spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development of children.
Many parts of our school system derive their roots from philosophies that include the idea of ‘formation’. The idea that schools have duties beyond the imparting of knowledge, to shape the next generation of the nation’s citizens.
It’s a view that bestows upon schools a profound mission.
It means knowing our children better, and having the support systems in place to ensure that they can do well.
We know that when children feel known and cared about, it means they are more likely to attend, to engage. To attain, and to excel.
There is no dichotomy. Happy children succeed. Whether that success is Oxbridge, or matching colours.
It means a focus on the whole child, recognising the intrinsic dignity of the human person within each and every child, and unique value that we ought to assign to childhood.
It means bringing up children as citizens.
As appreciators of truth and beauty.
I have always believed, and still do, that the best path, the most important diversion for a child, is a high-quality education with formation at the core.
Because the ethos of formation recognises the precious value of childhood, and charges the adults in a child’s life with nurturing and protecting it.
Outside of schools, I see that when you fail to value childhood, this failure compounds and ossifies.
Those who are on the margins feel it most acutely.
Take children in care – a group to whom we have a profound social responsibility.
We are all their parents. The question is not, would it be good enough for own children? Because they are our own children.
Everyone in this room is likely aware of the fact that children in care are more likely to have involvement with the criminal justice system than other children.
Later this week I will publish research showing that 2% of children who have never been in care are found guilty of an offence. For children in care, it’s over a quarter, 27%.
But my research is even more damning. Nearly half of those children had their first contact with the criminal justice system after they entered care.
These are children who should be the most protected of all, and yet instead they are being criminalised.
What is perhaps most telling is some of the charges they are arrested for.
These children in care are twice as likely – 15% compared to 8% of other children – to be arrested for criminal damage.
This is not to trivialise this offence, but I am told, time and again, by my advice and advocacy team about children’s homes calling the police when a child breaks things in a home.
Now, I do not for one second make light of just how hard those children’s home staff are working, and how many of them are providing incredibly loving care to deeply traumatised children.
But it cannot be right that we put children into homes and then criminalise them for acting out. Would you call the police if your child did something wrong?
If we have not been able to address their behaviour, then the responsibility lies with us.
Let me tell you a story about a girl I will call Sarah.
Home is where we should feel safe.
If – as Eliot puts it – “Home is where one starts from”, then Sarah’s start was difficult.
Her early life was beset by some of the most fundamental challenges that a young life can face.
When Sarah was about six, it started to become clear that she needed far more help than her family could provide. The consequence of early trauma, her formation, starting to rear its head.
They asked for help.
It didn’t come.
And so, Sarah got older and her behaviour became more complicated – her school and her family struggled to give her the help she needed.
She was harming herself as an outlet. Trying to make her body disappear so her pain would too.
Sarah was permanently excluded from school. At the same time, her distress was growing and her behaviour more acute.
On one night of crisis, her family called the emergency services. They called because they needed help, and the non-emergency services hadn’t answered her calls.
And so the police came, arriving at the home, and finding themselves in the middle of a difficult scene.
They decided to charge Sarah with a criminal offence.
That would not happen to our children. The police would see them as children. Desperate. Sad. Vulnerable. Not as a criminal.
And so, before she was even a teenager, Sarah was remanded.
I imagine that Sarah’s idea of home became an unstable and moving thing.
One placement. Then another.
Placements, places, houses not homes. Places that were unsuitable, inappropriate, illegal.
Where is Sarah in this?
The authorities had arrived, the state had intervened, she was in the system.
Surely, she was getting the help that was being cried out for?
Too often, no. Too often, she was left unwashed, unwell, and unsafe.
She responded as unhappy children do. She lashed out.
Stuck in a loop of violence, mainly towards herself. Where she knew that only if her behaviour escalated would she get even a crumb of support.
No one taking responsibility for her as we do our own children. Never mind love, there isn’t even care.
Now, other children get to have these reactions in private, in their homes, within the fold of a family that can forgive or forget, because children make mistakes.
Other children, in short, get to have childhoods.
Sarah’s reactions were not a child making mistakes.
No, they were ‘incidents’. And incidents have paper trails. Something to log. Something to refer back to in serious case reviews.
Paper trails that made it very clear – it was Sarah who was responsible for these incidents, not the adults or institutions that hadn’t helped her.
And so, eventually, one of the places that Sarah was placed was a custodial setting.
A prison.
How many of you listening, were first denied your innocence as children like Sarah? First looked up at that ceiling, the Formica off white, through the bars, locked up and in, when you should have been cared for.
Even if we believe that is the right thing to do, it doesn’t work.
She was denied her right to be ‘innocent until proven guilty’. The system assumed she must be guilty by dint of her story.
And once you’re remanded into custody. Your innocence is gone. You see things. You’re told you are guilty. You feel you are guilty. Because why would they treat me this way otherwise?
And Sarah is not alone. Last year nearly 200 children who went on to be acquitted were remanded into custody, and almost 450 went on to receive a non-custodial sentence.
And we must remember that those on remand are spending significant periods of time there. Last year over 100 children spent over 9 months in custody on remand.
The report I have published today shows that there is huge variation around the country when it comes to children’s chances of ending up in custody.
Over the course of ten years, one local authority used custodial remand for 100% of all remand episodes, while another local authority used it for 38%.
Custodial remand isn’t inevitable, we can do things differently. And we need to do things differently.
We need alternatives. Fostering. Care. At home, with people who can love you and keep you safe.
And this brings me to where the failure is perhaps most acute: in the prison system.
It was Dostoevsky who pointed out that: ‘The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons’.
My research on children in our prison system shows just how poor the relationships have become.
Many of the young people I have spoken to tell me that their time in the secure estate exacerbates the disadvantages they face rather than addressing them.
They say, “I wanted to come back here, because my friends are here.”
Or that, “the county lines start and end in HMP”.
For a child to end up in custody usually means countless chances missed further up the line.
All of the children who have ended up in custody have the educational journeys you might expect – unrecognised need, attendance falling away to nothing, eventual expulsion.
Half of children in custody haven’t been to school or college for at least a year before they are sent to prison, and 20% of them came from six schools. Six.
It is fixable. If we choose to. If we prioritise it.
That’s not we are doing.
Today, we are in a position where our secure institutions are regularly closing because they are unsafe for children.
Where there have been reports just recently about sexual abuse in Oakhill, where one in six children reported being sexually assaulted by staff in the past year.
Saying sorry is not enough – it is meaningless if it doesn’t come with the change we need. And we must not kid ourselves that these things are consigned to history. These are things happening right now.
So how can change begin? Where would we start?
I know of only one antidote to this failure.
The antidote is listening. Connection. To give us the courage to do different.
This is why we must listen to children, to engage children on the decisions about their lives. Consult them, meaningfully, when we’re changing the law. Even when it may only affect them tangentially, like assisted dying.
That’s what I’m doing. I’m listening to children from across England, whoever they are and wherever they live.
I want to speak to all those children are coping and enjoying their lives but I also make sure that I speak to the children who are harder to reach.
Those who are in hospital, those who are in care homes or young offenders’ institutions.
As I look back on my time in this role, this role which has allowed me to confront the joys and tragedies of childhood – of human experience – I am brought back time and again to those visits to children’s prisons.
They have, I think, been some of the most profound experiences of my life.
My heart turns to a young man who I met in prison, who told me how he loved music above all else – and who I cajoled into joining me in singing.
The beauty of his voice in contrast to the misery of his surroundings – that must galvanize us every day to keep trying to make things better.
Because today, for the children in our prisons, the children who most need to be heard, things are far from good enough.
And what does this change need to look like? This is a question I have asked myself repeatedly on visits to children’s institutions here, and around the world.
I was recently in Los Angeles where I went to visit a youth prison. I spend a lot of time trying to see the best of public service so that I can translate hope that it can be done. I was being prepared for the worst, advised that I would never have seen the like.
Surely I would be outraged at the conditions? And yet the moment I walked in, the air, the smell, the atmosphere, the relationships, the system. Everything was different. And I dare say better.
Of course it was awful. How could it not be? And yet they had people there who genuinely cared about them, hugged them, who would worry if they didn’t get involved in education. There were books everywhere.
It is perhaps not a surprise given my background that I believe in education, but I can tell you that the children in our YOIs believe in it too.
They are crying out for more education, keen for everything from Physics A-levels to carpentry qualifications, knowing the value they held.
I appreciate the challenge. Of course I do!
And I have seen admirable work – I spoke to one child who was taught to read and write for the first time after entering a secure setting.
But I am worried that we have become complacent about children in custody. We have treated it as a battle won. That we have got down to several hundred, rather than several thousand children in custody.
We have tweaked the forms of custody with the secure school, but not the fundamental approach to locking children up.
We cannot stop at the last 400.
We have to close all YOIs now, and find genuine decent alternatives.
We must not remand children to custodial settings. We have to build alternatives.
We must not allow complacency about the pipeline from “care” to prison. I have never met a parent whose ambition for the child is “not being homeless” or “not stuck in a cycle of crime”.
If we are to have the courage of our convictions, to truly challenge ourselves to believe in the potential of children, of all children, we must think about those children charged with the most serious offences, who end up in custody.
These children too must be allowed to be children.
But as things stand they are not.
When the learned Baroness Hale gave this address, she said of the treatment of women and girls in the criminal justice system that ‘a male-ordered world has applied to them its perceptions of the appropriate treatment for male offenders’.
I would add adult to that. An adult male-ordered world has applied its perceptions of appropriate treatment to children.
I don’t think this is easy.
Bluntly, I do not think this will be politically convenient.
But the measure of rights is not if we give them to the people we like.
The measure of value is not if we do things when they are easy.
These things will take money, they will take hard work and they will take a constant drive for reform.
But I believe they can be done.
The lesson I take from those who have given these lectures before me, the lesson I take from Lord Longford himself, was put perhaps most simply and elegantly by Archbishop Desmond Tutu – that “no one is a totally hopeless and irredeemable case”.
We must never give up on a child and think they are past the point of being given a second chance.
As I was leaving Feltham on a recent visit, a boy shouted over the fence to me, “You lock us up here with criminals, and nothing to do – what do you expect when we get out?”.
He summed it up better than most. These children should have the very best teachers, the very best carers.
One of the glittering prizes of our care and education system should be the opportunity to help these children turn around their lives.
So often this faith in the possibility of redemption is treated as naïve, as child-like.
Perhaps it is child-like.
Perhaps that is no bad thing.
I began with a story about a man in a cell, holding his hands out in the wind and rain to protect God’s creatures as they started out in life.
Let me end on a similar note.
I recently spoke to a boy in a secure children’s home.
At every step he had been treated as guilty, as harmful, as dangerous.
And so, on arrival, he held out his hands for the cuffs.
But no cuffs were forthcoming.
Instead, he was shown care, and love – he is now taking his GCSEs and thinking about his future again.
It is hard, but not impossible, to do the right thing. We must all commit to that possibility.
To that end, let us labour, and not seek reward.
Let us allow those glimmers of hope be our guide as we seek to rebuild the chance of redemption for these children.
Just as our Children’s Laureate said at the rebuilding of the Spellow library burnt down in the riots:
“No lies or fire can dim the light
This beacon on a hill.’”
