1. Sam Monaghan Executive Director of Children’s Services Barnardo’s
It is a privilege to be here today. I am pleased to see how enthusiastically Andy and his colleagues have been to develop work in the South West working with Barnardo’s and other agencies

3. About Barnardo’s: No child left behind
Almost 150 years
900 services
200,000 children, young people and families
Our focus: the most vulnerable:
child sexual exploitation
children leaving care
early intervention
children affected by parental imprisonment

4. Children with a parent in prison
200,000 children+ children in England and Wales
Two and a half times the number of children in care
Half a million child visits in 2014
25% of men in Young Offenders Institutions are or are shortly to become fathers

5. Outcomes and outlook No systematic identification
No systematic support
Bullying and stigma
Mental health and behavioural difficulties
65% of boys with a parent in prison go on to offend themselves

6. Reducing re-offending
Maintaining family ties
reduces the likelihood of
reoffending by 39%
We have established that having a parent in prison has profound effects on children. But we also know that family separation has a profound impact on parent prisoners. And most importantly research shows that when offenders do maintain family ties, the likelihood of reoffending can be reduced by 39 per cent.
So supporting these families is about reducing reoffending as well as breaking the cycle of intergenerational offending.

7. Tackling the Problem Barnardo’s has 20 years’ experience in this field
Currently run 13 specialist services in England and Wales
Prison visits
“Through the gate”
Community Support for Offenders’ Families (CSOF)
‘Hidden sentence’ training
I-HOP
Barnardo’s works in prisons to support family visits, run parenting programmes, and provide “through the gate” work, to help families manage the transition back into the community.
Barnardo’s has developed innovative, local services to support families with a parent in prison, responding to the problems they face. We are proud of what we have achieved so far through our Community Support for Offenders’ Families (CSOF) services. Jointly funded by Barnardo’s and NOMS, these pilot services based in Bristol, Wales and the Isle of Wight have proved very successful. CSOF is an excellent illustration of how Barnardo’s has innovated to deliver local services responding to local needs. We also run programmes like ‘hidden sentence’ training, where professionals such as prison officers, teachers, doctors and judges receive training about the challenges they faced by children with a parent in prison.
Working with POPS, we have also developed the i-HOP service, funded by the Department for Education, which is an innovative online resource and training service for professionals.

8. Working in prisons Critical part of rehabilitation
Practice is variable
“Core” not “extra”
Integrated approach
New research
Contact with children and families is a critical part of rehabilitation. It helps offenders maintain their most important relationships, gives them a reason to work towards release, and helps prepare them for life after prison. Currently, practice is variable. Too often this is seen as an extra, rather than as a core part of what the prison service does. Equally, prison visiting needs to be integrated with offender management across the criminal justice system, and also with community based children’s services to deliver maximum results for offenders and their families. We are about to undertake new research into how prisons in the South West address issues relating to children and families. Hopefully this will help inform best practice – more about that later.

9. Effective family engagement in prisons
Over 25 years experience
‘cultural shift’
Work in South West prisons
Building relationships
Barnardo’s work in Northern Ireland goes back some 25 years when our staff started to undertake parenting and family work with ‘political prisoners’ who were refusing to engage with prison authorities. This started to break down those barriers.
An Assistant Governor from NI came to address a Barnardo’s conference and described this as Barnardo’s staff creating a ‘cultural shift’ in his staff team. This got us excited! Something powerful to help prison staff think differently and begin to see families and family contact as key to achieving positive change with offenders rather than contact getting in the way of real prison business
So about 7 years ago we started to talk to prisons in this area on how we could work with them in developing more informed and effective programmes of child and family engagement. This led to working in in almost all the area’s prisons and testing out and developing these ideas in various ways – for example through visitors centres; or parenting programmes or taking on ‘case work’ with prisoners worried about their children or families
Our two strongest sets of relationships have been through HMP Guy’s Marsh and HMP Erlestoke. It is no accident that Andy Rogers was the Governor of HMP Erlestoke during that time and we need to pay tribute to his vision for driving through a different approach to help us’ think family’.
We will hear more about our work in these tow prisons this afternoon.

10. What have we learnt Tenacity - keep going despite barriers!
Support of Governor is gold dust!
Gain the empathy of prison staff
Navigating the complex world of children and family services
You have to have the support of the governor to allow initiatives to take root. I don’t need to tell this audience that prisons have a very command and control structure and staff need to know the Governor is behind them
We have also learnt the importance of building personal relationships with prison officers and get them to ‘think family’ through conversations about their own children or grandchildren and what how frightening a visit could be for them. Enabling staff to connect with how they might think of their own children can be very strong and we have many stories of staff who have put in their own time to support extended visit days because they see the importance of supporting families and children
We have also learnt that the world of children’s services can be confusing and this is where our knowledge as a national organisation can be very valuable in linking services.

11. Family Ties
“An offender’s family are the most effective resettlement agency.”
HM Criminal Justice Joint Inspection on Resettlement by Prison, Probation & Ofsted Inspectorates,2014
Offender management is complex and multifaceted, but there is no agency or professional who can replace children and partners in terms of their potential to support successful rehabilitation and resettlement into the community. Maintaining ties whilst in prison is essential in preparing for transition back into the community.

12. Wider changes Tackling re-offending and intergenerational offending
Joint working from pre-arrest to reintegration into the community
Role of Government: we need national leadership on identification and support
Before I finish, I want to place some of this in a wider context. Reducing re-offending, and preventing inter-generational offending is not just about working with prisoners and their families. We need to work together right from the start, from arrest, right up until full reintegration into the community. We all have a role to play – including the courts and the police – in identifying where prisoners have children, addressing their needs, and supporting families to meet the challenges they face. Ultimately, this means the Government must take the lead – particularly in terms of identification, so that children no longer remain hidden and unsupported.

13. Conclusion
Supporting children and families of offenders goes hand in hand with reducing re-offending
It also helps tackle intergenerational offending and disadvantage
Key to this is effective partnership working
To sum up, it is clear that supporting the children and families of offenders goes hand in hand with reducing offending. Involving the family is not an additional extra – a nice to have. It must be central to work in prisons as well as community based offender management. Importantly, this is about partnership, so that prisons and community based services can collaborate to meet these families’ needs and bridge the gap between prison and the community. Barnardo’s is proud of what we’ve achieved so far. We look forward to working with everyone in this room, locally as well as nationally, to achieve our shared aims of reducing re-offending, reducing inter-generational offending, and improving the life chances of prisoners’ children.
Finally, looking forward to the project being launched and an approach that can be shared more widely and learning replicated .