As head of the prison service, Martin Narey was used to controversies, rows over the treatment of Jeffrey Archer and Maxine Carr among them. On a visit to his native North-East, he tells Nick Morrison why he swapped Britain's prisons for the challenge of running children's charity Barnardo's.

HE'S only a few days into his new job, but Martin Narey is enjoying his freedom. "I'm loving it," he says. "The word I keep using to people is I feel liberated. It's a very different sort of organisation, and now I feel able to say things which may not be in line with government policy."

After seven years of running Britain's prisons - firstly on its own and then three years as head of a combined prison and probation service - the requirement to defend a system which seemed to lurch from one crisis to another must have presented a daily challenge. But last year he announced he was jumping ship to become chief executive of children's charity Barnardo's.

"I loved the job I did. It was a privilege to lead the prison and probation service, but it was always my intention to move on. I led the prison service for seven years - nobody else has led it for that long. I'm the first person to leave that job happily since the seventies, the first to leave it on my terms," he says.

Middlesbrough-born, he spent a total of 23 years at the prison service, with spells as assistant governor at Deerbolt Young Offender Institution near Barnard Castle and governor at Frankland Prison in Durham, becoming director general of the Prison Service in 1999. His was generally seen as an enlightened tenure: he frequently spoke out against overcrowding and poor conditions and championed education in jails.

"I believe passionately in education as perhaps the primary vehicle for changing people's expectations and life chances," he says. "We have a lot of young people who, formally or otherwise, are excluded from education, and they are therefore socially excluded, the chances of employment are very low and many of them come from families where their fathers and mothers have never worked.

'THERE are a lot of young people who think the world of work has nothing to do with them, and I think education can change that." Education will also be a priority for him at Barnardo's. The charity already runs three residential schools - including one in North Yorkshire - and he is keen to see if its work in this area can be expanded.

But in the prison service controversy and strife were never far away. Indeed, he says he had been in the job only a week before one MP called for his resignation.

He says the "constant flood" of suicides - 594 prisoners took their lives on his watch - and the racist murder of Asian teenager Zahid Mubarek at the hands of his cellmate in Feltham in 2000, were the worst parts of the job.

He was also accused of treating Jeffrey Archer harshly when he ordered the former peer and writer back to a closed prison after he had been photographed having lunch with a prison officer, and of bowing to pressure not to release Maxine Carr, the former girlfriend of Soham killer Ian Huntley, early on an electronic tag. The latter decision was principally because Carr's release plan, to live with her father, was "half-baked" he says.

"The prison service and the probation service are under constant scrutiny, you get used to almost constant criticism from all quarters," he says. "There is a point at which people who work in difficult public services can just get worn down by the criticism, and with some of the criticism, of things like Maxine Carr, you have got to be pretty broad shouldered."

Moving to Barnardo's may represent an escape from the daily firing line, but there was still some surprise at his decision. He maintains that the links between the two organisations provide some continuation of the work he has been doing. If prisons are dealing with those who have fallen foul of the law, some Barnardo's projects are aimed at young people at risk of following them.

"I saw in Barnardo's some of the work to do with young people, assisting them leaving care, helping them get away from prostitution, the work we do with children excluded from school, as constructive, early interventions which might, and I think do, stop the inexorable shift towards prison," he says.

"It doesn't, wherever possible, say no, it does a lot of work which isn't terribly cuddly, and Barnardo's sticks with young people. I was talking to a young woman in Middlesbrough and every other agency had given up on her but she said she couldn't shake Barnardo's off. I see it as doing a lot of preventative work."

He took up the reins at the beginning of the year and is spending time touring the country, visiting some of the charity's 360 different projects. This has already seen him make two trips to his native North-East, where he grew up as one of a family of nine children in Middlesbrough, scraping his A-levels at what is now Newlands School and heading to what was then Sheffield Polytechnic before the Prison Service.

But stopping young people falling into his successor's hands isn't the only task he faces now, and he is keen to emphasise other aspects of the charity's work. "Barnardo's does a lot of work with children who are going nowhere near custody," he says. "We do a lot of work with disabled children and with carers."

ALTHOUGH he is still deciding what his priorities will be in his new post, one obvious one is to expand both the charity's work and its influence. "I want it to be seen unequivocally as the most effective and most influential children's charity in the UK," he says.

He wants to increase public understanding of what Barnardo's does, away from the children's homes of its past and towards the projects it runs now, and his previous job has given him the contacts to give it more say in Government policy.

"Getting greater assistance to children leaving care, the education of disadvantaged children, particularly children who have been excluded from school, work to protect children who have been sexually abused, more support for young people who are carers, in these areas I think we have something to offer," he says.

But there is one area where there is a direct cross-over with his previous job. As head of the Prison Service he repeatedly argued that we were locking up too many people. And the picture is the same for young people as for adults. The UK has about 3,000 children in custody, a greater proportion than any other European country, and he believes many of these would be better served in other ways.

He says community punishments should be more widely used as an alternative to custody, and should be seen as the demanding option they are, rather than allowing offenders to walk away "scot-free".

"We send huge amounts of people to prison, far many than any other country in Europe needs to do, despite the fact that crime is falling," he says. "By now there should have been a bounty in terms of fewer people going to prison, but we're a punitive society, we seem to have what I once described to the Prime Minister as a love affair with custody.

"I think custody can work and is appropriate in some circumstances, but it can't work when the prisons are terribly overcrowded. We lock up far more children than anybody else and I'm quite sure we don't need to do that. I believe in the way we deal with some of our most vulnerable young people we're doing a pretty bad job. If I can persuade the Government to do more to discourage the locking up of young people, that would be worthwhile."