Lorna Brookes: Making evidence-based support for children of prisoners
Dr Lorna Brookes is an Associate Professor in Parental Imprisonment in the LJMU School of Education and the founder of the charitable organisation, Time Matters UK (TMUK). Her research focuses on how children who are affected by parental imprisonment, a cohort who experience complex disadvantages, can be better supported. The UK has a growing practitioner knowledge base due to an emergence of charities, but the research and evidence basis of ‘what helps’ is still emerging. Lorna’s research uses creative methodologies and co-production with children and young people to learn about their experiences and what they need, which produces peer-reviewed articles and diverse outputs that include theatre productions, podcasts, short films, art exhibitions, animations, and guidebooks for both children and professionals.
Researching support
I asked Lorna to tell me about the word ‘support’. What does it mean? Who gives it to whom? As things stand in the UK, Lorna tells me, there is no statutory-based, automatic support for children with a parent in prison. Instead, there’s a patchwork of voluntary sector organisations: ‘if your mum or your dad goes to prison and there isn't a local support group in your area, then the chances are you that don’t have any support at all’. Often, the children ‘fall between the gaps’. It’s hard to define who should have overall responsibility for these children, whether it’s the Department for Education, the Department of Health, or by the Ministry of Justice?
Children’s human rights are typically ignored or over-ridden when a parent goes to prison and are ‘collateral damage’. For instance, when a parent goes to court not only is their crime reported but so is their full name and address due to open justice principles and journalists needing to avoid defamation. As a result, children with parents sent to prison have their privacy and safety at home significantly compromised. Their address is exposed, and their surname is often visible if it’s the same as the parent who committed the crime. In situations when a parent has committed a particularly abhorrent offence, the outfall from social media can be especially traumatic. Lorna explained ‘children often feel so shamed and fearful of the community backlash that they avoid attending school; this not only leads to a decrease in their attainment and an increase in their isolation, but many then face Education Welfare Officers becoming involved’. Lorna has learned through her research that journalists can have a limited understanding of how reporting affects children. In addition, she has found that children often do not understand the motivations of journalists and typically believe that journalists want to make their lives worse. She explained that ‘education for both parties is key’.
When a parent goes to prison, children commonly experience a societal prejudice that they are destined to follow suit, as out of date, and unverified stats surrounding intergenerational offending remain widely circulated. Children become acutely aware of this gloomy prediction about their futures, often before they have had a chance to navigate their own feelings of loss, grief, and time to work out whether they want to, or even can, continue to have a relationship with their imprisoned parent. Lorna’s research has demonstrated the importance of providing access to timely support to help children realise that what has happened is not their fault, and that there’s no such thing as a ‘criminal gene’. Lorna does, however, stress that ‘support must be offered carefully and sensitively, so families do not feel like they are encountering another statutory organisation enforcing compliance’. As Lorna tells me, this can be an unwanted side effect of well-intentioned government initiatives to ‘identify’ children at-risk, and that the current government manifesto that set out to ‘identify’ children should have been better worded as ‘recognise’ children – advice she has given which has now been taken on board. As Lorna says, ‘What child wants to be “identified?” Children could likely interpret this another process set out to criminalise them’. Language matters here, and it is important to ensure that innocent children should not feel like support is forced on them, keeping them under close watch to prevent them becoming offenders. Supportive systems need to feel like an opt-in process that children can access in their own time, in their own way, if they want support at all.
Shared, creative research
With LJMU research support funds, Lorna worked closely with local writers and directors to bring her research to life, through the award-winning play 8 Hours There and Back. 8 Hours There and Back was first performed in 2022 and went on a UK-wide tours in 2024 and 2025. Like her short film, That Girl (2025), each line was born from an interview with a child or young person with lived experience of parental imprisonment. The play and film have enabled a wide audience, including politicians, support practitioners, police, prison staff and students, to gain a close understanding of the daily lives of young people with a mum or dad in prison, whilst challenging stereotypes and misconceptions. ‘On a very basic level’, Lorna tells me, ‘I think one of the most common pieces of feedback from watching is, “I had never even thought about the children before”’. Both pieces were constructed carefully to empower the lived experience consultants, but at the same time ensure protective support systems for them, recognising that seeing their own lives played back to them through these mediums is highly sensitive and potentially trauma provoking. By talking through the process in aftercare sessions, the children and young adults explained the projects have given them a sense of agency and purpose, because they hope through their co-collaboration, their input can help other children whom they might never meet, but who share their experience.
In other work, Lorna has worked with the children from Time-Matters to create podcasts for the National Probation service over the last 5 years. The podcasts, voiced by the children Lorna supports, have helped probation practitioners to consider not only the person they are supporting being released from prison, but to also how to better support wider members of the family, especially children. Many probation staff who are used to working with adults only, have explained being unsure about how to properly communicate with children, but the podcasts and other resulting materials such as the ‘Think Child’ Leaflets - made by the children about what probation is and what they need from probation workers - have helped revolutionise their practice.
Building relationships
Lorna has built strong relationships nationally and internationally, including with the National Probation Service, ensuring that children are heard from the very top. Indeed, in addition to the podcasts, young people have given live interviews to large numbers of online listeners for the national probation annual conferences since 2020, which has supported the training of thousands of probation practitioners. Each year a different topic is explored, from release, to prison visits, to their experience of professionals coming into their homes, and so on.
Lorna works with Merseyside Police and wider police forces across the country and Europe, the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Education, the Prison Inspectorate, as well as other local and national charities that are driven to improve the lives of children of prisoners and/or the prison system itself. As she tells me, ‘Everything’s about relationships’. In a great piece of advice for colleagues, Lorna describes working with an independent training consultant working with the Prison Reform Trust who can cascade her insights into the organisations and decision-making discussions that need them urgently. In one example, Lorna created a video training resource Lorna in partnership with the Prison Reform Trust, Merseyside Police, Thames Valley Police and Children of Prisoners Europe, which highlights the experiences of young people who have witnessed their parents being arrested, The film is a training resource for police officers to help them better support children when they must arrest a parent and is being widely used in forces nationally and internationally.
Lorna and the Time Matters team work with schools individually, applying their methods to help children and explain their experiences to teachers. This can stop teachers from accidentally stigmatising children by, for example, asking them to say what their parent’s crimes were, which Lorna says happens ‘all too often’. She tells me examples of siblings whose parent went to prison and who then had a downturn in their behaviour at school. By sending a professional practice mentor to work with the teachers and understand how the siblings were grieving, they could ‘explain why the children will behave in that way, and what they need done to help them to cope better in the school’s system’. This is a single example, ‘tiny, just one school, one case, but it really matters’, and Lorna was delighted to tell me the teachers wrote to say the siblings were thriving on the back of small changes they made.
Updating training
Lorna positions the children she works with as research consultants and changemakers. They not only receive support but can impact change. One major challenge children describe is inconsistency in the way prisons run their family visits, with some prisons being far more child-friendly than others. Lorna proudly told me that in 2023 a young man she supported was a finalist for the International Children’s Peace Prize, and not only gave his awareness raising speech in London to global leaders including the daughter of Desmond Tutu and the grandson of Nelson Mandela, but his impacting plea for better help for children of prisoners has been lived streamed to millions across the world. ‘It’s still a lottery, and where your parent is imprisoned can have a big effect on your visiting experience’. Lorna tells me the issue is the culture of the prison, not security category, but encouragingly her research is having a positive influence. ‘This is because we are now communicating with the Lead for Prison Visits in the UK, as well as the Prison Inspectorates. This is leading to a much more child-friendly, consistent approach’. There are examples of best practice to learn from, such as one establishment that ‘makes sure their visitors have lots of games to use, and staff remember that children are innocent, whereas other institutions are speaking to them like they're criminals themselves. It ultimately comes down to culture and training’.
Time Matters is a small organisation, run by volunteers and part-time staff. Replicating its work across the UK is ‘challenge number one for change’. By using Lorna’s research insights to work with children and make new insights together, Time Matters has made a successful model for preventing additional harms from parental imprisonment, which has been evaluated by the LJMU Public Health Institute. Its model leads to demonstrable improvements in the quality of practitioner training. However, Lorna stresses that whilst training is seen as a fundamental tool for enhancing services, we need to ‘ensure it is not reinforcing discriminative stigma by sharing outdated perspectives’. As Lorna underlines, if we are going to rely on training, it is vital to endure the training is good quality and will not add to the problem.
New actions
Lorna is in the middle of a busy calendar of representing young people with imprisoned parents and sharing their co-produced research. She is about to meet with the Minister for Education. ‘What I would like is for him to listen to the children and have open communication about the scale of the challenges’ and learn about what co-designed therapeutic support means to children. She is also working with colleagues at the University of Salford to research the experiences of children who do not have contact with their imprisoned parents, and a project with LJMU colleagues to help journalists consider a child’s world when their parent goes to prison. By building an evidence base with the children of imprisoned parents, she is bringing change and making statutory, professional, and volunteer support more effective for them and the people who deliver it.
Lorna spoke with Martin Brooks