Alumni Profile Charlie Taylor

Taking on a new position in lockdown is a bizarre experience, no matter how high profile the role. Six months on from becoming HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor “still hasn’t met half the staff”, though he has been able to conduct prison visits.

After completing a BEd with English and Drama at Homerton in 1988, Charlie taught at various primary schools in south London, becoming increasingly interested in children with behavioural difficulties. After publishing two acclaimed books on toddler and teenage behaviour, Divas and Dictators, and Divas and Doorslammers, he was appointed head of The Willows, a school for children excluded from mainstream education. Under his leadership the school achieved two Ofsted ‘Outstanding’ ratings.

Under Michael Gove as Education Secretary, he spent several years at the Department for Education as an expert adviser in behaviour, before moving to the Ministry of Justice where he became Chair of the Youth Justice Board.

What do you remember of Homerton?

At the time, everyone was studying education, so it was semi-vocational, though only around 50% actually went into teaching. It was fairly evenly split between the people who had always wanted to teach, and the people who were there because it was a way of being at Cambridge.

It was about 90% women, which was a bit of a change after an all-boys school, but I don’t remember that being too strange. If anything, because there were so few boys it meant you got on with people you probably wouldn’t have got on with if it had been 90% boys – we were all thrown together.

I still think about some of the children I taught while training. There was a boy who really stuck with me – in fact thinking about it, he may have been the initial reason for my interest in children with behaviour problems.

Had you always planned to go into teaching yourself?

No, I thought I was part of the other 50%! I enjoyed my teaching practice but I somehow thought it wouldn’t be for me as a career. I started supply teaching in about 1988, and got sucked in.

I became interested in children with behavioural difficulties and what made them tick. In 2005, having been working on the pilot for a new educational initiative in Hillingdon, I had visited The Willows and was interested in what they were doing. I wanted to get back into teaching, and thought the head might be due to retire, so I opened the TES and it fell open on the advert for his job.

Your work at The Willows attracted a lot of attention, not least your introduction of ‘tea and toast’ for students and staff. What was the thinking behind that?

On a practical level, lots of the children hadn’t had breakfast when they arrived in school, so we needed to get some food into them to enable them to learn. But it was also an opportunity to teach social skills. These were kids who hadn’t sat round a table, who didn’t sit down for dinner with their families. Just sitting and eating with adults and learning to say “could you pass the sugar, please” was hugely valuable.

We’d also get teachers to role play conflict, so that the children could see, in a way a lot of them didn’t at home, that it’s possible to resolve disagreements peacefully. You could see, as soon as there was a suggestion of even imaginary conflict, some of them would tense, assuming it would lead to violence.

These were kids with very troubled lives, and we’re never going to be able to fix all that. But you never know the good you’re doing and what might stick.

Under the Coalition government, you were appointed as an expert adviser in behaviour to the Department for Education. How was that?

I came from the chaos of a failing school, which I had just taken over, that was in real difficulties to Whitehall – it was fascinating to see a government department in action. I produced a “behaviour checklist” that still

gets used, which is really rewarding. In fact, I met someone the other day who had done their Masters’ dissertation on it, and I had to pretend to be blasé but I was so excited!

Since then you’ve moved from education to the justice system, which sounds like a leap, but with the common thread of your interest in behaviour it makes a lot of sense.

The principles are broadly similar in families, schools and prisons – light touch sanctions and rewarding the behaviour you want to see. People seem to think that if you can refine the punishment you’ll stop the behaviour. But children with severe behaviour problems or adults in prison often have nothing to lose. Punishment makes no difference. I’ve spent my career looking for what works, and what it comes down to is positive relationships.

When I go around a prison I’m familiar with most of the stories. Substance abuse, familial breakdown…these are the same issues faced by the children I taught. In some ways it’s inevitable that people who’ve had difficult and troubled childhoods are the same people who go on to have difficult and troubled lives.

What perspectives did a background in teaching give you on the world of prisons?

When I moved, in 2015, from the Department for Education to the Ministry of Justice, to review the Youth Justice System, what really struck me was that what was happening in the best special schools and Pupil Referral Units just wasn’t happening in prisons. I found two job ads, one for a teaching assistant in a school for pupils with behaviour problems, and one for a prison officer. They were about the same pay grade but what hit me was that one was all about hope and change, the other was all about containment and control. I showed them to the Minister and said “just look at the language here.”

We’ve since proposed a system of secure schools, to support sentenced or remanded children, and the first is due to open in Medway next year.

You were appointed as HM Chief Inspector of Prisons in November 2020. Is it a fixed-term role, and what do you hope to achieve?

It’s a three-year appointment, and it’s completely independent. My predecessors have always been fierce defenders of that independence, so I’m very lucky that it’s well established.

I want to focus on the quality of leadership in prisons. It’s strange coming from education, where leadership is the first thing that gets reported on. Ultimately, that’s the biggest factor in terms of improving any institution, whether it be a school, or a Cambridge college, or a prison.