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This post originally appeared on the website of the National Agency – Education for Europe (NA) at the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB).

Although there are already many good initiatives aimed at reintegrating juvenile offenders into society, the recidivism rate remains high. The NEXT STEPS project aims to break this vicious circle and at the same time make a meaningful contribution to the labour market. The partnership, which will run until autumn 2023, builds on the STEPS project, whose goal was to use sports programmes to enhance the capabilities of young inmates in Heinsberg young offenders’ institution (JVA Heinsberg).

“We’re taking it a step further with NEXT STEPS,” says Peter Dohmen, Project Manager at the West German Chambers of Crafts and Skilled Trades’ Council (WHKT), the umbrella organisation for chambers of crafts and skilled trades in North Rhine-Westphalia. “Drawing on the experience we gained from the previous project, we and our partners from Austria, Portugal and Italy want to try to involve the economy more closely and provide young people with tangible employment opportunities. In the skilled trades we have a saying: ‘We’re not interested in where someone comes from. It’s where they want to go that counts.’ I think that should apply just as much to former inmates.”

This statement gets to the heart of the project’s underlying principles. Against the background of shortages of apprentices and skilled workers in the crafts and skilled trades, the team behind NEXT STEPS is primarily concerned to highlight young offenders’ skills and their relevance for their careers. As before, sport plays an important role. The BSV Wassenberg baseball and softball association has been going to the prison once a month for six years to run baseball practices for a selected group of inmates. Trainer Alexandra Nowack-Dittmer has noticed that the complex sport makes high intellectual demands of the prisoners, but that as a team sport, it also helps them develop and practise their social skills.

On an equal footing

Nowack-Dittmer remembers that, to begin with, she used to feel “quite uneasy” when she was going to run training sessions in the young offenders’ institution. But she soon realised that she was treated with a great deal of respect and that, during the hours that she spent behind the prison walls, she was simply “the trainer”. It is important to her to be on an equal footing with the inmates because this can also resolve any conflicts that may arise. Working with the young offenders has changed the images she had of them in her head, she says. She now really looks forward to the sessions “because the boys give you so much back in terms of the way they train”.

This is the kind of thing Leif Herfs likes to hear. He is the Heinsberg sports officer and says, “We have normality and monotony galore here. Programmes like baseball training help break through that, which is why there’s such a high demand for them from the inmates. We’ve even had to introduce a waiting list – it was the only way to handle it.”

As the sports officer, Herfs has been slipping into a variety of roles for the inmates on a daily basis for 17 years – sometimes he’s a psychologist, sometimes a social worker, sometimes simply a mentor or a “kind of friend” to them. This is also down to the fact that he does not wear a uniform and is therefore perceived very differently from other prison officers. From the very beginning, though, he is also responsible for monitoring the inmates’ behaviour and evaluating it through what are known as “sports grades”. These appear on the youngsters’ reports; the institution provides them with a vocational education. The reports cover aspects such as patience, perseverance, communication skills and respectful conduct, but also teamwork and cooperation.

Skills for the world of work

One component of NEXT STEPS – alongside building a database of volunteers and optimising process chains – is developing observation forms that ease Herfs’ workload. The forms were designed in collaboration with Talentbrücke GmbH from Cologne, whose Managing Director Thomas Beck emphasises, “The forms help to capture competences that are important not only for sport, but also for the world of work – all areas of it. They make the young offenders aware of the qualities they will need to make the step into work in the real world.”

For Peter Dohmen, this is a huge benefit of the project from the perspective of the crafts and skilled trades. He underlines, “We see the collaboration with Heinsberg young offenders’ institution as a big opportunity to recruit skilled workers for the crafts and skilled trades, whether that’s through the vocational training offered by the institute or during basic vocational training.” As an example, he cites a roofing company from the Ruhr which rang the WHKT and was open to taking on someone from the institution. “We are currently in the process of bringing the two parties together,” says Dohmen. “When the young man is released in the near future, he will have the prospect of completing his professional training as a roofer and then working in the company.”

All this makes NEXT STEPS a flagship project for other young offenders’ institutions, both in Germany and in Europe. Dohmen adds, “The standards we’re developing and testing here at Heinsberg young offenders’ institution are also of great interest to our EU partners. For the first time, we’ve managed to set up exchanges with various European prisons and create new networks. I believe that the collaboration between prisons, the crafts and skilled trades, and sport at a European level represents a special kind of collaboration that – perhaps precisely because of the somewhat extraordinary mix of participants – has huge potential for everybody involved. Now we need to put it into practice together.”

Hear more in our podcast about the NEXT STEPS project at:

https://www.na-bibb.de/themen/inklusion-und-vielfalt

Or listen directly on EPALE at:

Podcast [in German]: Access for all – Roads to freedom with vocational education | EPALE (europa.eu)