“I was once involved with gangs where I was causing distress to the local community as well as my own family. I now want to put back into the community what I have taken out of it by showing young people that there is other stuff to do rather than gang fights and causing trouble.”
Shaun Harper, winner of a 2010 Peerlink Award
Growing leaders: Prisons and Young Offenders Institutions
The Leap Leadership programme, piloted in a remand unit at Feltham Young Offenders Institute (YOI) back in 1994, helps young offenders consider their choices and the impact of those choices on themselves and others. They see the benefits of taking responsibility, challenge their own prejudices and use their new skills and knowledge to help others take similar steps.
The impact on the prisoners is clear, as one prison officer explains: “One prisoner… stated that he had not thought it would be possible to talk about some of the topics covered, and mentioned that the way the course is run, and the atmosphere created by the staff, made it possible to talk about anything without fear of repercussion”.
In 2010 Leap worked with over 120 young people in prisons and Young Offenders Institutions (YOI), with 100 achieving an OCN level 1 qualification in Personal Leadership in Conflict. Ten volunteered to become mentors for other young people going through the programme.
More than 100 officers at HMP Chelmsford and HMP Littlehey have completed Leap’s course on Working with Challenging Behaviour, including seven at Chelmsford who have had extra training to deliver their own courses. Aylesbury YOI is now planning a pilot course and three more prisons have expressed interest. We are now working with Milton Keynes College to produce accreditation materials for use in the Prison Service.
A Trainer Perspective: Amanda Nelmes Leap Senior Trainer
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We’ve been working with HMP Chelmsford since late 2009. In the early stages, my recollection is the Leap team felt amazed at the capacity of the both the young men and the Prison Officers to take risks in creating communication and find out about each other.
Every course is different, for me it’s a roller coaster of emotion, we laugh, we cry and anywhere in between.
Prison isn’t an easy place to say how you feel, living a day to day life of uncertainty, with for many, emotions being perceived as a sign of weakness, to be concealed behind masks of anger and hostility. The work aims to support young people to see behind their own mask, to find out who is really there, how they operate, to make them aware of how they use the mask of anger as a defence, and when it doesn’t work for them anymore. Once group members have an understanding of who they are and how they operate, they can begin to make informed decisions about their behaviour and so take back responsibility for themselves and their actions.
The leadership programme isn’t a soft option, it requires courage to let go of, or even to be able to see, behaviours that have worked over the years (and now don’t) and find out who you really are.
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