Weekly football sessions at a south London prison are being used to deliver education and prepare prisoners for life after release - and there is no referee in sight.
Crxssbar, an education initiative co-founded by designer and Royal College of Art adjunct professor Judah Armani, runs three-hour sessions every Monday morning at HMP Thameside, commissioned by the prison itself. Attendance has grown to around 30 prisoners, with a waiting list, and a fortnightly session at HMP Lewes doubles as a workshop for new ideas, the Big Issue reports.
The games are deliberately referee-free. “Something really interesting happened. It forced them to self-referee,” Armani told the Big Issue. “Is there going to be a referee in your life when you come home and someone cuts you up in traffic?” He says players leave calmer and less agitated, having begun to regulate their own emotions through play.
Football situations are used as lessons for life outside. Drills built around playing with ten men, overloads and unfair penalties mirror the odds prison leavers face - “for them leaving prison, it’s never 11 vs 11,” as Armani puts it. Set pieces become a way to rehearse predictable life moments: disclosing a conviction in a job interview, or the first 90 seconds of meeting an employer. “We’re representing new ideas, but in a familiar language,” he says.
Participants can work towards functional skills qualifications in literacy and numeracy, equivalent to a grade 4 GCSE pass. The need is stark: according to the Big Issue, around half of adult prisoners are functionally illiterate, 57 per cent have literacy levels below those expected of an 11-year-old, and prison education hours have fallen by a quarter since October 2025. Reoffending is estimated to cost taxpayers £22.7 billion a year.
No participant in the Thameside programme has been released yet, but Armani points to early signs: one prisoner is writing a book of lessons to teach his children, another is gaining work experience as a coach, and a third has built a portfolio of scripts for difficult but predictable conversations.
Source: Big Issue https://www.bigissue.com/news/social-justice/crxssbar-football-prisons/