Boosting the Reading Levels and Attitudes of Young People who have Offended: A Review of the Evidence and the Lessons Learnt from an Evaluation of TextNow
| Author | Roger Tarling,Greg Brooks |
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225412459836 |
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
459836YJJ12310.1177/1473225412459836Youth JusticeBrooks and Tarling
2012
Article
Youth Justice
12(3) 184 –198
Boosting the Reading Levels and
© The Author(s) 2012
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Attitudes of Young People who have
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DOI: 10.1177/1473225412459836
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Offended: A Review of the Evidence
and the Lessons Learnt from an
Evaluation of TextNow
Greg Brooks and Roger Tarling
Abstract
This article draws together the existing evidence which indicates that young offenders coming to the
attention of the criminal justice system are very much below national reading levels. It then reviews the
effectiveness of initiatives designed to improve the literacy skills of this group. The article then presents
the results of an evaluation of TextNow, by analysing data on 230 young people who were known to have
offended and participated in the programme. Both reading levels and reading attitudes improved. The article
concludes by drawing the lessons learnt from the programme; regarding the length of the programme, its
content and mode of delivery, and the importance of rewarding participation and progress.
Keywords
education programmes, literacy, TextNow, young offenders
Context
It is a well-established fact that offenders known to the criminal justice system have low
basic skills, experience difficulties in formal education, and as a result are less likely to
have obtained academic or vocational qualifications compared to their non-offending
peers. While the causal connection between performance at school and criminal behav-
iour is not straightforward (see for example Berridge et al., 2001) it is certainly the case
that a lack of basic skills is related to other established correlates of crime, in particular
unemployment. For a review of the issues and evidence regarding adult offenders see
McMahon et al. (2004). Here we focus on young people who offend.
Corresponding author:
Professor Roger Tarling, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, UK.
Email: r.tarling@surrey.ac.uk
Brooks and Tarling
185
The Prevalence of Reading Difficulties among Young People
who Offend
What are the reading levels of young people in England and Wales who are known to have
offended, both absolutely and compared to their non-offending peers? Here we present,
first, estimates of the reading levels of young people who had offended (i.e. in the age-
range 10–18) from six relevant studies (see Table 1), followed by brief details of the
projects from which the estimates are drawn.
Hurry and Moriarty (2004; see also Hurry et al., 2005) conducted for the Youth Justice
Board an evaluation of 42 projects, of which 17 were run by the INCLUDE charity. A
reading test was administered to 283 of the young people entering the INCLUDE projects;
63 per cent had reading levels below Level 1 of the old Basic Skills Agency Communication
Standards which were replaced by the Adult Literacy Standards in 2001 (see the footnotes
to Table 1 for both sets of Standards).
A survey conducted for the Youth Justice Board (Ecotec, 2001) is the largest relevant
study to date. An analysis was carried out of the reading levels recorded in the Detention
and Training Orders of 1454 young people aged 14 to 18 in Young Offender Institutions
(YOIs) in March 2001; they represented 61 per cent of the total YOI population of 2376
in that month, and 52 per cent of them had reading levels below Level 1 of the BSA
Standards.
Bryan (2008) directed a project intended to improve the speech, language and com-
munication skills of a sample of 58 juvenile known offenders, and assessed the reading
levels of 51 of them. Of this group, 37 (72%) had reading levels below Level 1 of the 2001
Adult Literacy Standards.
In a project carried out in 2002–2005 called Improving the Literacy and Numeracy of
Young Offenders and Disaffected Young People and funded through the National Research
and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy (NRDC), Hurry et al. (2006;
also reported, less fully, in Hurry et al., 2009, 2010) worked with 346 young people aged
16–19 who had offended, or were disaffected in the sense that they were reluctant to use
their poor literacy skills and were not in education, employment or training or (if still of
compulsory school age) had poor attendance records. Just over 200 were serving sen-
tences in two YOIs; the rest were either young people who had offended and were being
supervised while serving orders in the community, or socially excluded young people in
the community who had offended or were at risk of doing so and were attending projects
delivered by the national voluntary organization, Nacro. Hurry et al. (2006) tested the
reading of 267 members of their sample, of whom 83 per cent had reading levels below
the 2001 Level 1; the data presented in Table 1 represent the whole of this group because
separate data for the young people who had offended and those who had not were not
given in any of the three papers.
In the Spring term of 2007 an organization called Ecotec, on behalf of the Youth Justice
Board (YJB), ran an initiative called Reading Matters (the precursor to TextNow) in 18
Youth Offending Team (YOT) areas in England with 157 young people aged 10–18 who
had offended, and tested the reading levels of 89 of them, of whom 74 (83%) had reading
levels below the 2001 Level 1 (Brooks et al., 2008).
186
Youth Justice 12(3)
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Tarling and
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Young people who had off
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Notes:
national scale used in IALS and PISA is out of kilter with the UK scale b
will be f
Br
within its Le
Brooks and Tarling
187
In 2007–2010, Ecotec/Unitas ran Summer Arts Colleges with 1142 young people aged
14–19 who had offended, and tested the reading levels of 830 of them; of this group, 78
per cent had reading levels below the 2001 Level 1 (Tarling and Adams, 2010).
In addition, Table 1 presents nationally representative data which can be presented on
the same scale as those from most of the studies just listed on the reading levels of young
people in England from five surveys which were conducted in the period 1996–2010,
namely:
•• the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), 1996; separate data are available
for 16-to 25-year-olds
•• the Skills for Life surveys of adult basic skills, 2003 and 2011; separate data are
available for 16 to 18 year-olds
•• the 2000 and 2009 rounds (in which reading was the main focus) of the Programme
for International Student Assessment (PISA), which focuses on 15 year-olds. (Data
are not given for the 2003 and 2006 PISA rounds, in which the main foci were
maths and science, respectively.)
(For copious further data on the reading levels of 13- to 19-year-olds nationally see
Rashid and Brooks, 2010.)
The contrast between the national figures for reading on the one hand and those from the
NRDC, Reading Matters and Summer Arts Colleges studies on the other is stark:...
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