If titan prisons are back on the agenda, we must know more about the one we already have

Last week the government announced plans to conduct feasibility work on what would be Britain’s largest prison, citing a need for new capacity and a concern to close older and more expensive facilities. The government is pointing to HMP Oakwood, the 1600 place G4S prison which opened last year, as an illustration of the efficiencies achieved by prisons of this size. However Rob Allen questions whether the data for Oakwood is as clear as the government has tried to suggest

Without a pause in UK justice reforms there is a risk that enormous damage will be done to the day-to-day functioning of criminal justice in England and Wales

Last week Tim Newburn argued that Cameron’s crime speech was a delicate balancing act between different constituencies within the Tory party. In this post Rob Allen takes further issues with the government’s rhetoric, suggesting that writing what is seemingly an open cheque for prison expansion is something Cameron may come to regret

Wholesale changes to the probation system should be slowed down and piloted

The coalition government is pressing ahead with the privatisation of the probation service in England and Wales in the hope of reducing re-offending rates despite serious concerns about the scale, pace and complexity of the changes. Noting the hitherto tepid political response, Rob Allen examines how the reforms are progressing and what they mean in practice, arguing that the validity of the MoJ’s expectations should have been subjected to much more testing than it has been

Quasi-markets, school diversity and social selection:Analysing the case of free schools in England, five years on

The opening of new state schools by non-state actors has intensified debates about social selection and inequality in quasi-markets. This article examines the case of England, where the government allows anyone to apply to open a new 'free school', arguing this will improve social equity. Using data from the National Pupil Database for all 325 free schools established between 2011/12 and 2015/16, we analyse whether the students attending free schools are representative of their local neighbourhoods. We develop the first analysis of whether the specifics of who opens and provides a free school impacts on who attends the school. We also analyse whether opening a free school has an impact on neighbouring schools. We find that free schools are located in areas with above-average deprivation but admit intakes that are more affluent than the average for the neighbourhoods from which they recruit. This is particularly the case for primary free schools, which also recruit students with above-average prior attainment. There is no evidence that free schools become more representative as they admit additional year groups. Significantly, we find that all categories of free school providers have opened schools whose populations are more affluent than their neighbourhoods, with the exception of academy chains. We also find that the opening of a free school leads to a concentrated loss of pupils at the closest school, except in cities, but we do not identify an impact on the student composition of neighbouring schools. Discussing the reasons for this, we conclude that free schools are socially selective and reproduce socio-economic inequalities

Durrington Walls to West Amesbury by way of Stonehenge: a major transformation of the Holocene landscape

A new sequence of Holocene landscape change has been discovered through an investigation of sediment sequences, palaeosols, pollen and molluscan data discovered during the Stonehenge Riverside Project. The early post-glacial vegetational succession in the Avon valley at Durrington Walls was apparently slow and partial, with intermittent woodland modification and the opening-up of this landscape in the later Mesolithic and earlier Neolithic, though a strong element of pine lingered into the third millennium BC. There appears to have been a major hiatus around 2900 cal BC, coincident with the beginnings of demonstrable human activities at Durrington Walls, but slightly after activity started at Stonehenge. This was reflected in episodic increases in channel sedimentation and tree and shrub clearance, leading to a more open downland, with greater indications of anthropogenic activity, and an increasingly wet floodplain with sedges and alder along the river’s edge. Nonetheless, a localized woodland cover remained in the vicinity of DurringtonWalls throughout the third and second millennia BC, perhaps on the higher parts of the downs, while stable grassland, with rendzina soils, predominated on the downland slopes, and alder–hazel carr woodland and sedges continued to fringe the wet floodplain. This evidence is strongly indicative of a stable and managed landscape in Neolithic and Bronze Age times. It is not until c 800–500 cal BC that this landscape was completely cleared, except for the marshy-sedge fringe of the floodplain, and that colluvial sedimentation began in earnest associated with increased arable agriculture, a situation that continued through Roman and historic times