Recovery from COVID-19 within the Children and Young Peoples Secure Estate (CYPSE): A mixed-methods study of wellbeing

Background: Living with Coronavirus has been hard for everyone. Children in prison have faced a lot of limits on what they can do. They may have been locked in their bedrooms, not been able to see or talk to their families and not been able to go to school. Children in prison have lots of mental health problems, more than those in the community. They often hurt themselves, other children, or staff working in the prison. Coronavirus and how the prisons have had to deal with it, might have changed how often children hurt themselves or others. Aim: We would like to see what Coronavirus has done to how children in prison feel and how often they have hurt themselves or others. We want to do this to help make the prisons better and safer places for children. Design and methods: This project is split into three parts and they all link together. In part 1 we will get numbers that are already collected about how often young people hurt themselves and hurt others in the different prisons. We will look at these numbers before and during Coronavirus to see if there are changes. In part 2 we want to talk to staff who work at each prison to find out how the prison dealt with the virus and what changes they made to how the children were looked after. We want to do this to help see if any of the changes increased or decreased the harms in part 1. In part 2 we also want to talk to some children, their families, and staff in more detail about their experiences during Coronavirus. In part 3, we will put the information from part 1 and 2 together. We will then show this to children in prison, their families, staff who work in the prisons and the people in charge of the prisons to help us make a list of changes. These changes might be about making the prison safer, or a better place for children, or what the prisons might do differently during Coronavirus or if we have a new virus in the future. Patient and public involvement: Children at a prison called Wetherby have helped write this Plain English Summary. They have made us think about what questions we should ask. They will help us write information about the project, work with us to make the list of changes and with telling other people what we find. The children in Barton Moss, another prison, will help too. Dissemination: At the end we will share what we find with the help of the children and staff. This will be by writing reports and telling people at meetings.