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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 825-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
Wednesday 20 October 2004 MR CHRISTOPER MORGAN MBE, MR BOB DUNCAN, MS RUTH WYNER and MR BOBBY CUMMINES DR JOHN BRENNAN, MS MERRON MITCHELL, MRS JEANNE HARDING, MS CHRISTIANE OHSAN and MR DAN TAUBMAN Evidence heard in Public Questions 207 - 319
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Wednesday 20 October 2004 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr David Chaytor Valerie Davey Jeff Ennis Mr Nick Gibb Paul Holmes Helen Jones Mr Kerry Pollard Jonathan Shaw
In the absence of the Chairman, Mr Chaytor was called to the chair ________________ Memoranda submitted by The Shannon Trust and The Dialogue Trust Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Christopher Morgan MBE, Director of the Shannon Trust, and Mr Bob Duncan, Member of the Management Board, the Shannon Trust: Ms Ruth Wyner, Director of the Dialogue Trust; and Mr Bobby Cummines, Chief Executive of UNLOCK, examined. Q207 Mr Chaytor: Good morning to you all and I am sorry for the slight delay. I shall be acting as Chairman for the first part of the meeting as our Chairman is, we think, somewhere in the underground system; he is incommunicado; he left a message earlier saying that he was running a little late but he is later than he anticipated. I apologise for London Underground's problems and our Chairman's problems but I do welcome you to the meeting of the Education and Skills Committee this morning. What I would like to do to get the session going is to invite each of you - and I know that two of you are from the Shannon Trust - to say a little about the work of your organisation before we move into questions and if we can be reasonably informal and use first names. Christopher Morgan, if you could start us off, please. Mr Morgan: The Shannon Trust came about a little by accident in that I had some money from a book and decided to use it to see if it was possible to get prisoners who could read to teach prisoners who could not read to do so. It was quite difficult to get started but, once we got started, we discovered just the size of the problem because there are 30,000 prisoners in our prisons at any one time who cannot read. There is no way that they can get given the one-to-one attention of professional teachers and a number of them refuse to go to the professional teacher because they have bad memories of school and so on and so forth, but they will learn from another inmate. We did not get a very good reception from the Prison Service at first but, after a slow start, we joined up with the Prison Officers' Association and, together with them, we started to make a great deal of progress 18 months ago and we have now reached something over 100 prisoners in England and we are already on our way in Scotland as well, again in conjunction with the Prison Officer's Association. What we need to find in every prison we go to is an enthusiast. It is usually ideally a member of the wing staff or perhaps an educator or it could be a librarian or a woman from the Padre's office or it can just be a prisoner. So long as they are allowed to do it, it works very well. A mentor can deal with about three members. It takes about six months for an adult non-reader to learn to read and it costs the taxpayer nothing because we give them --- Q208 Mr Chaytor: Could I just intervene. I think we are getting into the area of the process that you can be involved in rather than strictly the organisation and I think we will question you on that later. So, that is fine and just sets the scene. Can I move on to Ruth and ask you a little about the Dialogue Trust as an organisation. Ms Wyner: The Dialogue Trust is a charity which has been registered for just one year and we are developing an intervention that has been going on at Whitemoor Prison for about 12 years. We are now into one other prison where we have some research on the process and we are moving into a London Prison soon but also work with the Probation Departments. We run dialogue groups where the method is grounded in group analysis in a professional method. We have two trained facilitators, volunteers coming from the community which is a very important part of the group and we have maybe 15 to 20 prisoners in a group. There is no agenda in the groups, everyone is on a level, and it is a way of really empowering the men - at the moment, we only work with men - and helping them develop their confidence, their skills and motivation really and their feelings of being made of the same stuff as everybody else. So it is a developmental intervention really.[1] Q209 Mr Chaytor: Finally, Bobby Cummines? Mr Cummines: UNLOCK is a national association for ex-offenders. It is the only charity run by ex-offenders for ex-offenders. So, rather than theory, we come from practical experience in that we have actually been there, so we know the obstacles and pitfalls. We go into various prisons once every six weeks and we advise Home Office Prison Departments and different Select Committees. We also work with children on anti-social behaviour orders, so we are getting them before they go into jail. We have found that education is a very powerful thing in prisons but we have also seen the flaws in it. So, if you like, we are looking at how money is spent. Is it being spent well? Are we getting quality service? We speak on behalf of the ex-offender community and we are very grateful to this Committee to allow ex-offenders an actual voice - we think it is very brave of you and also very sensible because we have always been the missing part of the jigsaw and we can show that it can work. We have done numerous television programmes where we have trained mentors. We did it on BBC2 with Make Me Honest. We had one lad who had never been out of trouble for two weeks and he is now with the Prince's Trust and he has not been back in trouble for 18 months. We are very pro-active. We have bank accounts for ex-offenders which they said would never happen; we have insurance for ex-offenders which they said would never happen; we have mortgages for ex-offenders which they said would never happen and what we are saying is that it can happen if you have the will to make it work. Q210 Mr Chaytor: When were you established? Mr Cummines: We were established in 1999 and we are getting bigger and bigger. Q211 Mr Chaytor: When was the Shannon Trust established? Mr Morgan: We were established in 1997 but it took us several years to get going because of the reasons I have explained. Mr Chaytor: Thank you for setting the scene very well and I will pass over to Jeff Ennis to begin the questions. Q212 Jeff Ennis: My first few questions are directed towards the representative from the Shannon Trust. Christopher, why do you think the Toe by Toe mentoring system has been so successful? Mr Morgan: I think it is partly the book. The book is structured so that you do not have to be an accredited or a trained teacher. Anybody who can read the left-hand page can teach the right-hand page. The second reason is because these guys, and girls too, are very suspicious of teachers in authority but they do not mind quietly going off. The third reason is that the lessons must only last 20 minutes a day, so that nobody's attention wanders - if you lose them, you lose them - and it seems to arouse a lot of enthusiasm. Q213 Jeff Ennis: Is it as successful with all types of prisoners or does it seem to align itself to any particular category? Mr Morgan: Yes. In every prison from high security down to Ford and women's prisons and YOIs, there is nowhere we are not ... Well, there are prisons where we are not because they have not heard of it or the head teacher is against it or something like that. Mr Barry Sheerman took the Chair Q214 Jeff Ennis: So, there is no effective drop-out rate from the system --- Mr Morgan: The drop-out rate in our pilot scheme at Wandsworth was that I think we reached something like 80 graduates and five had fallen out. Mr Duncan: Because of the numbers in the Prison Service, the movement of prisoners is a problem because the numbers are transferred regularly. It does not matter in some senses because they can continue elsewhere if the scheme is there, but the transfer of prisoners does interrupt the scheme to both mentors and mentees. Mr Morgan: Particularly mentors because, if you have a very enthusiastic mentor and he disappears, maybe nobody else will pick it up. If the mentees go anywhere else, that is one of the ways it is spread because they have arrived at a new prison with their Toe by Toes under their arm saying, "I want to go on", so the prison gets on to us and that is how we started. Q215 Jeff Ennis: We cannot spend too much time looking at the detail of the scheme as it operates but I just wondered if you incorporated within the scheme what I would have called some sort of prepared reading process whereby the mentor reads along with the trainees as it were, something which has been adopted quite successfully by parents in a number of schools these days. Mr Morgan: Not in the first instance; they stick to the rules of the exercises they have to do, but, in the second phase, some guys get to the end of Toe by Toe and they read like Daleks and they do not really understand what they are reading, but we have a follow-on called Stride Ahead and that is combined reading against the clock and there are comprehension tests. Q216 Jeff Ennis: Do all the prisoners go on to that phase? Mr Morgan: No. If they have a good grasp of reading by the end of Toe by Toe, we prefer them to go on to a normal course, but by this time they will because they are not ashamed of themselves anymore. Q217 Jeff Ennis: Other witnesses are going to deal with other questions but can I just move on to the role of the Dialogue Trust. What type of prisoners attend dialogue groups with the Dialogue Trust? Ms Wyner: At the moment, we are running in the high security prison of Whitemoor where there are long-term prisoners but we also operate in the local prison in Norwich and basically you have the ordinary prisoner who comes and goes. The prisoners choose to come. Really, that is a prerequisite of the groups, nobody is told to come, they make the choice for themselves and, unless somebody is extremely disruptive or a real problem, they come. Q218 Jeff Ennis: Do we have a dropout rate for the people who come to these sessions? Ms Wyner: Most people who have left in Norwich have left because they have finished their sentence or been transferred. We have only had one man over the year who actually the prison suggested should leave because he had become violent. I do not really know of the dropout rate in Whitemoor. Q219 Jeff Ennis: Do dialogue groups focus on attitudes to learning and identifying learning difficulties amongst their clientele? Ms Wyner: That is one of the things that we do focus on. It is very much that the prisoners bring things in but certainly the volunteers and I think the overall focus of the way in which people think and the way in which people see things does include the way they see education, training and rehabilitation and what the facilitators are looking for is to develop a more thoughtful outlook on life and an ability to see that other people can have different opinions and to sit with that and also to get a more rounded feeling about themselves so they feel they can actually go on and think about other things. We are always trying to encourage people in groups to think about solutions rather than just focus on problems. Q220 Jeff Ennis: Have you been successful in integrating dialogue groups into prisoners' sentence plans because that is a big problem with a number of education programmes in prison? Ms Wyner: We have not and we are unsure about whether that would be helpful because we do see ourselves as being almost like a first step before you go into anything, to get people in the right frame of mind to be able to move into education and that sort of thing. We are very young and it is something that we can talk to the prison about but, at the moment, our feeling is that we should be seen as very much a first step, there are no strings attached, you come and we can then hopefully move people on in a kind of very non-threatening way. Chairman: Can I apologise to our distinguished witnesses that I was not here to greet you. I do not normally arrive late except when the Committee is being held in Helsinki! I was incarcerated somewhere around about Lewisham on the train and I could move neither way. So, apologies for that but we are pleased to have such a distinguished group of people giving evidence to us today because we are really getting into this inquiry and, as members may have told you, we are fresh from both Oslo Prison and also Helsinki Prison which are very big and busy prisons, 375 prisoners in each, but it was very important for us to look and have experience of that. Q221 Mr Gibb: It is very impressive that it takes an adult non-reader about six months to learn to read but, when you say a "non-reader", what do you mean by that? Mr Morgan: It varies very much from people who have not read at all and people who are dyslexic to people who have a grasp of some of the letters but who cannot string the words together. I say that it takes on average six months but some people become very enthusiastic and continue in their own cells and so on and do it in two or three months, others take quite a long time. I know one prisoner in Wandsworth who has been at it for two years - he is a Pakistani and he cannot read in either language. He is sticking to it though; he has reached page 200-and-something but he has a bit of a way to go! Q222 Mr Gibb: From your experience as a trust engaged in this important work, do you have a feel for the proportion of prisoners who cannot read? Mr Morgan: The number of prisoners who cannot read is frighteningly large. The OLSU figures are 48 per cent of all our prisoners are effectively non-readers. That is the basis of my figure of 30,000. Q223 Chairman: How accurate is that? Mr Duncan: The Prison Department's own report says that 50 per cent of receptions cannot read and there are 100,000 receptions a year. Those are their own figures. Some prisons are testing all prisoners on reception but the volume is such that not all prisoners are tested fully. The Prison Department would admit that it is 50 per cent and 30 per cent are school failures or school excluders. There is a high proportion coming into prison because of their disorganised backgrounds. Q224 Chairman: There is no incentive at all for a prisoner to not indicate the true position of their literacy and numeracy? Mr Morgan: Yes. Q225 Chairman: Is there? Mr Duncan: Yes. Some prisoners are quite clever and they live by their wits - those who cannot read live by their wits more often and they can get around the system, but I do not see any point really. Q226 Chairman: It is just that a voice came to the Committee saying that prisoners suggested that they could not read because it gave them some advantage. Mr Morgan: I think the contrary is true. A great many prisoners on induction know the form, they know where the ticks should be and the crosses should be and they will pretend they could read. Q227 Chairman: Bobby Cummines knows the form more than most people; is that right? Mr Cummines: That is correct. Christopher is 100 per cent right there. We train students from colleges to actually act as mentors and what we teach them about is the prison culture. The first thing I say to our mentors is, "Make sure you are working them and they are not working you" because half of them have been through children's homes and they know the tick box syndrome and they go through it. Also, there is an embarrassment in going into education in prison, it is seen as you have sold out. So, a lot of people who want to access education will not because they see it as having gone over to the other side and life can be made pretty difficult by other inmates. What we also found was that, when people actually got into an educational course, we were concerned whether the education that they received to a degree level was actually going to get them into employment because there are still a number of degrees being taken for jobs in which they could never work. For instance, when they take criminology, sociology and psychology, they cannot work with vulnerable people. So, we saw that as a wasted three years where they could have gone into higher education on courses which would gain them employment. What UNLOCK basically does is that we go in and we deglamourise crime. Crime is very glamorised by the media and everything they read. We ask everyone we talk to, "Have you read the book about the Krays?" and, yes, they all have. This is happening with the schoolchildren we work with who are on anti-social behaviour orders. We talk from experience and we deglamourise crime. We actually show them the benefits of education. So, if you like, what UNLOCK does is prepare them and tell them that education is a well worth path to follow but we also train our mentors in the culture of prison because there is nothing more dangerous - and any security officer in prison will tell you this - than someone going into prison who does not understand that culture because they are in fact a liability to the prison. We would like to train the teachers who are dealing with our people exactly where our people are coming from and the culture of disorganised lives that they come from. Mr Duncan: May I just add one point on the Chairman's point. Amongst the juveniles, the very young, you are right. Some of those can actually read a little but are in denial. It is almost a status symbol not to be able to read. I have seen a very clever member of staff who runs a catering course with the people who cannot read to start with who are also disruptive, the more disruptive juveniles that nobody else wants, and he then says, "If you want to cook, you have to write the menus down." They say, "I cannot read and write" but he gets them to do it. So, there are a number of means - Toe by Toe is one means, I am not saying we are the only means - of tackling these things. There are some juveniles who are in denial about their ability to read to some degree. Mr Morgan: I believe the reason they are in denial is because they have given up. They do not think they are ever going to be able to. They cannot cope with classes and nobody is there to give them sufficient one-to-one time to overcome their problem. Once they realise that this way they are going to learn, to be quite honest, their behaviour completely changes and they stop being disruptive, they seem to gain self-esteem and they go about brandishing their books whereas formerly they slunk about hiding them. It does bring around a sort of change in personality, not of character but of personality which has been useful. Mr Cummines: I can actually verify that. I was at Rochester Prison where they have an A wing which deals with people with drugs problems who have committed violent crime. They go through a 12-week programme and UNLOCK is part of that 12-week programme in giving them support outside. When you see these people actually get a certificate, it may be the first certificate that they have ever had in their life and they are so proud. It moved me greatly. I know what it feels like to get a certificate and to be recognised. Once they had that certificate of achievement, they went on to bigger things because they were given permission to do it and they knew that they could do it for themselves and they were encouraged. I am a little embarrassed because our MP is here and Kent does it very well. Q228 Chairman: It could not be a better man! Mr Cummines: You are 100 per cent right. He is proactive; he is not a weekend MP, he is 24/7. Once they get their first certificate and they realise that they have been recognised for achievement, they go on to achieve even better and greater things. It is so important. Chairman: Any time you want to move to Huddersfield, you are welcome! Q229 Mr Gibb: It sounds like there is an array of abilities there but would you say that it is skewed to the almost illiterate, the 48 per cent? Mr Morgan: Yes. It goes all the way from the dyslexic ... We now issue coloured cellophane sheets because it seems, that with the really extreme dyslexic, prints on a white page jumps about the whole time but, if you put it on a yellow sheet or a blue sheet, usually yellow ... That is the extremity of that. The letters do not stay still long enough to be read. That is the worst case and of course there are others who have learnt a little but who do not use it because it is too much of a fag to use it. Q230 Mr Gibb: I do not know if you have done any studies about how this compares to other countries; is this something you might know about? Mr Morgan: No, I do not know very much about that but I was very interested in your speech on Monday, Chairman, in which you said that you had encountered prisons in Oslo where they said that 20 per cent of the population could not read properly. I was very surprised to hear that. I am told by the same OLSU that 23 per cent of our school leavers cannot read but it is double that in prisons and higher than that still in YOIs. I have been told by people in YOIs that it is 70 per cent. Mr Gibb: In Finland, we were told that there was almost no illiteracy amongst the prisoners coming in. Chairman: Apart from the foreign prisoners. Q231 Mr Gibb: Yes. Finally, I have just had a quick look at your Toe by Toe book and they will jeer when I say this but it does seem to be very phonics based. Have I understood that correctly? Mr Morgan: I would not call it phonic or look and say. It uses every technique. It was invented by a primary school teacher who found that 20 per cent of her classes could not hack it at all. So, she started inventing little games and exercises for them to do it. She was enormously successful at achieving a very high rate of literacy and, when she retired, her headmaster said to her, "Could you make sure that your technique survives your retirement." She had all these exercises on bulldog clips and her son put them on the computer and that is the book. I would not say it was phonetic or any other system. Q232 Mr Gibb: Phonic. Mr Morgan: It is pragmatic. It is what works. Q233 Mr Gibb: And is that Keda Cowling? Mr Morgan: Yes. Q234 Valerie Davey: Very specifically, of the 48 per cent who are non-readers, do you have any idea as to what percentage of those are dyslexic? Mr Morgan: I cannot answer that. I am not an authority on anything at all! Valerie Davey: You have a lot of good experience which counts for a great deal! Q235 Chairman: I am very surprised that you are not a Member of Parliament! Mr Morgan: I am not quick enough thinking! Mr Duncan: I have seen a figure - I do not know how true it is - that 33 per cent of people in prison are dyslexic but I do not know how they assess that. Q236 Valerie Davey: That is what we are trying to find out. Mr Duncan: With this method, you do not have to recognise the tag "dyslexic". We are dealing with people who cannot read, whatever form does not matter, whether it is foreign national or whether it is dyslexia, we do not need to recognise those titles because the method will deal with it. Mr Morgan: A by-product is teaching foreigners in prison to cope with English. Take a prison like The Vern where over 50 per cent are foreign nationals. It is enormously successful and popular in The Vern. Mr Cummines: I think it also boils down to the enthusiasm to learn. You cannot teach a prisoner unless they want to be taught and it is, if you like, that first bit of getting them interested and showing that it is not a sissy thing to do and, once that enthusiasm is caught, then you can teach them but they have to come to the table. We have tried to explain to the people that the culture of education is a thing they did when they were at school and they bunked off school because they did not like it. I have brought for the Committee - I would just like you to take the names off it - the actual comments from pupils who have been excluded as to what they say about learning, why they turned to crime and what they could do to get away from it. I will leave that for you. Q237 Chairman: That would be most useful. I think it was Dialogue that got the prison officers signed up to this. To all of you, at what stage and how important is it that you get the staff, the prison officers, engaged in supporting what you do? Ms Wyner: It is very, very important but we find that it is very difficult. For instance, in Norwich where we have done some research, we have been there for a year and we have not yet been able to get officers regularly in the group. We had one come in briefly. There are various different views on the wing where we worked. For instance, I heard a prison officer say, "I don't know why you want to go in there, that group is crap." Then, if you challenge him on it, he will say, "I'm only joking." I think there is a tendency for officers to be very defensive about new interventions that come in because they are working in a very difficult environment and they have to really have very strong defences in order to be able to cope with the prison itself but, on the other side of the coin, in Whitemoor, we have had officers come in and, when they have come in, they have made comments such as, "It was really helpful to see these men as real people. I view you differently now. Now when I see you on the wing, I will see you as a different person" and it works the other way round as well because the men say, "It is such a relief to see you as a real person" because there is a tremendous 'us and them' situation in prisons. Q238 Chairman: Are prison officers themselves sufficiently well educated and trained for the job? Ms Wyner: Do you really want my opinion? Q239 Chairman: That is what you are here for. Ms Wyner: I think they are not sufficiently well educated and trained but I think also, very, very importantly, they are not sufficiently supported and supervised. If you go out into the voluntary sector, people who are doing stressful jobs will have support and supervision regularly, sometimes external supervision from a trained group analyst in groups. This is something that is just not there. It is a very macho culture, you sink or swim. We have had comments at Whitemoor where people, if they are interested in the group or come into the group, are called "care bears". There is a huge cultural thing to overcome. I think there is some change in some of the newer officers coming in but it is a battle. Q240 Chairman: Do they see you as amateur do-gooders? Ms Wyner: Some of them do, yes. Others are very respectful. I have had a senior officer say to me, "It is very helpful. Even if the prisoners are just sounding off about how difficult it is in prison, it helps us because there are not so many difficulties on the wing." They are very much in favour of helping the prisoners get different attitudes and so on, but there is a bit of a split between the officers themselves really. Mr Duncan: The right culture is very important. A motivated officer is more important than an educated one in some senses. It is their enthusiasm that will help a scheme like ours develop. I have to say that very often we do not get much support from the management locally and we have spoken to the Director General about this. He is personally in support of the scheme. His argument is that governors have too much pressure on them already, too many tasks to undertake, and he does not want to add to that burden. I understand where he is coming from but we would like a little more support through the hierarchy in some of the things. Some officers are doing a magnificent job because they are motivated and I know that in some places - and I should explain that I am an ex-governor, I am a retired governor - some staff themselves are dyslexic and have welcomed a culture change in the approach to education because they have been able to admit their own deficiencies and take advantage of schemes that operate. Q241 Chairman: If you wanted to really radically change the culture of a prison and have an educational culture, surely you would need a motivated management and staff and that provides the environment in which prisoners would have a totally different way of learning. Mr Duncan: Governors do have a lot on their plate and they have a formal education department. Q242 Chairman: But they have reduced the training of prison officers to six weeks, have they not? In Scandinavia, it is a year's training. Mr Duncan: It was nine weeks but they had them on probation for a year. The training is changing all the time. Q243 Chairman: But it has been reduced in time. Mr Duncan: It has been reduced, that is right. Q244 Chairman: Do you think six weeks' training to be a prison officer is sufficient? Mr Duncan: I do not want to hang on to this. It is not reduced to six weeks. They do less time in the residential training centre but they get more support and training at the local establishment. Q245 Chairman: Her Majesty's Inspector at the very conference at which I spoke on Monday said that it has been reduced to six weeks and they get no further training except training in restraint. Ms Wyner: I was involved in weekend training for some officers at Whitemoor. The officers did not get paid for going to that training; they were told that they had to go in their own spare time. Q246 Chairman: I am trying to get it out of you as to whether it is related. We are the Education and Skills Select Committee. If we want an educational culture in our prisons, what I am asking you is can you just pluck out one part of prison education, literacy and so on, or do we have to do a much more thorough --- Mr Cummines: I think you need to go deeper than this. Some prison officers see education as a threat because what it means is that there are more educated prisoners who can write more complaints. That is how they see it. There are some prison officers who see it as an asset because, if you have an educated prisoner, they are more likely not to be disruptive. You have this macho culture that was talked about, them and us. What I have noticed in Maidstone Prison, for instance, is that there was a strong move towards learning - let us educate prisoners, let us build some dialogue, let us break down the barriers of 'them and us' - and it was the old 'bang them up and bash them up' brigade that were rebelling against the education, but the new blood that is coming into the prison are more for the education, and I think it was a very strong point that you made, are the prison officers educated enough to do that job? I have to do the other side of this now. I actually have to defend prison officers because I did an investigation for the Regimes Unit of the Home Officer at Elmley Prison and there were prison officers going out in their own time to get information about benefit systems, educational courses etcetera. The education authorities could have sent that into the prison but these people were doing it in their own time. There are very committed staff there working in very few numbers who are working in appalling conditions - and my members are living in that - and that is why you have the 'bang up 23 hours a day' thing. If you have a man banged up in his cell, the prison officers and the governor of that prison have to decide whether they want that prison to be a university for rehabilitation or a university for crime because, if they are not in education blocks, they are reading books on crime or talking to their fellow inmates about crime. Education is so important but it is feeding back to the staff so that they do not feel resentment when somebody gets a degree and they say, "Hold on a minute, I've got this job." A prison officer in my presence said to an inmate, "I'm going home tonight and you're here" and he was ribbing him a little but the inmate said, "I'm here at the lowest point in my career, you are here at the highest point. It doesn't say a lot for you, does it?" The prison officer was stumped! What I am saying is that there has to be equal learning. Also, when I was doing a course at Kent University with the prison officers about addictive criminal behaviour and we were talking about why people re-offend, the officers on that course were given no increment for going on that course and the skills that they achieved on that course were not accredited so they could take them outside, they were not transferable skills, and I think that prison officers who are willing to go for further training should either get some form of recognition through payment or at least be given certificates of achievement. I think they are demoralised a lot. Colin Moses would be very pleased to hear me say that because I was talking to the POA and saying that you have to give prison officers an incentive to do this. Also, the lack of prison officers means that, if they are running a course, they can be called off for movement which disrupts the whole of that course and the prison is banged up again. Chairman: Thank you for that very balanced evidence. I will be accused by the Committee of a lot of mission creep here, so I am going to go back to support for prisoners on release and Helen is going to lead us on that. Q247 Helen Jones: What we are concerned with as a committee is that any recommendations that we make for education in prison can be followed through when the prisoner leaves. I wondered if you had any thoughts that you could give us on how the work that some of your groups is doing could be followed through after release and also how we can maintain what we start in prison, so that if prisoners need both support to build self-esteem, if they need basic skills or if they want to go on to do more training afterwards, we can build that into the system. What are the obstacles for doing that and what would you recommend? I know it is a very wide question but we would like to hear your thoughts because we see no point in setting up a prison education system when then falls down when the prisoner leaves. Mr Cummines: We are doing something now with Goldsmiths Colleges and Goldsmiths College is probably one of the most advanced colleges for this: they have actually given rooms now for ex-offenders in order that they can integrate with normal students. There is also a group called Open Book and it might be interesting to the Committee to have a look at Open Book. It actually takes people, not just ex-offenders, from disadvantaged backgrounds and brings them into education and follows it through. The thing we found with most of the people who have undertaken education in prison - and I, as a national charity, am very much offended by this - is that there are charities taking huge amounts of money from the Government and not coming up with the goods. They are turning out the glossy literature but they are not coming up with the goods and the support systems outside fail miserably. Education does 100 per cent work in jail but there are not the support systems outside. It is not just around education, it is also about housing that can disrupt education and it is about training for employment and it is about the benefit system which is the most notorious out of the lot because, if they cannot get their benefits, they cannot get to college. They are the practical problems we are facing and that it is why it was imperative that UNLOCK negotiated with the Bank of Scotland that ex-offenders coming out now have bank accounts in line with Government policy and we did that because then they could get their fees paid into their bank accounts and manage their finances. Once their finances and their housing was organised, then they could concentrate. In prison, you are living in a false society where everything is done for you and then we throw them out of the door. We do not let them make decisions in prison and then we throw them out of the door and they have to make all these decisions that they are not capable of making and handling. Ms Wyner: One thing that we are wanting to set up are dialogue groups outside in order that the community can then receive people when they come out of prison and provide continuing support that involves volunteers from the community. One thing certainly when I was in prison that I was aware of is that there was a system of personal officers set up. I think that most prisoners do not know who their personal officer is and have very little contact with a personal officer. I thought it was a very good idea to have a personal officer because one of the problems that many prisoners have is that they have not had any supportive relationships or very few supporting relationships. If this system of personal officer was set up properly, that person could be focused on the needs of the offender in a wider sense in terms of all sorts of issues while they are in prison but also in terms of what happens when they go out and, if there is one person with whom they can make contact and deal, I think that is very, very helpful. Similarly, once someone is out of prison, the Probation Service, just as the Prison Service, is very overwhelmed but, if the probation officer can actually have the time to work on these individuals that Bobby has mentioned, then there will a lot of reward coming back. I think that the one-to-one relationship is actually very important, having one person you can trust and who you know is there for you. Mr Cummines: I think also if we could be, if you like, a little revolutionary and these things were put in place before the prisoner went out, such as the housing etcetera, because I believe that you would find a better integration. Also, there is a great mistrust from my members towards anyone who is not from their community and I think that it helps a great deal - when Unlock gets involved and we have worked alongside most educationalists and most prison officers and the police etcetera - is when they have a member of their own peer group who has been there, done it and has come out the other side, it gives them the faith. They can talk to us. We have things from kids that they would tell us because of our background that they would never tell a teacher. It is because we are non-judgmental and they know that we are no better than them, if you like. So, it is having someone there to shadow you and that is why we encourage ex-offenders who have achieved to come back as mentors and train mentors in that culture. It is so important that their own peer group take ownership. My members tell me, "We don't want people doing it for us, we just want the foundations to do it for ourselves" and education gives them the foundations, but it comes from a very middle-class background and a number of people do not understand where our people come from and their very chaotic lifestyles. So, I think that the educators need to be educated in that. Mr Duncan: Kent is very exceptional in that it has a mentoring scheme/support scheme for discharged prisoners which is unique and very pro-active. The rest of the country does not have that as yet and you have to remember that 40 per cent at least of all prisoners discharged have no supervision whatsoever. Mr Cummines: That is right. Mr Duncan: So, to try and even talk about support in terms of other problems of housing and finance just does not exist. NOMS may change that but NOMS is some way ahead. I know that Christopher anguishes over whether we ought to extend to post-release but we cannot run before we can walk. We are not struggling but we stretch our resources to meet the needs that we see in prison. We would love for it to continue afterwards but I think there has to be something like the Probation Service recognising that there is a need for this to continue and maybe that can be built into the NOMS concept but, at the moment, aftercare is very patchy. Q248 Helen Jones: I think we would all agree with you that what is important is the whole package when a prisoner leaves prison, but I want to ask specifically about education. In your view, are the courses that are generally being offered in prison of the right calibre and transferable for prisoners to then carry on in whatever outside, whether it is education or training, because, to do that, they have to get to some recognised, whether it is basic skills, whether it is further education or whatever? Is the problem that we are running a lot of ad hoc courses that are simply then not properly certificated and not transferable to outside? Mr Cummines: You are 100 per cent right. The biggest employer of ex-offenders is the construction industry: there are 400,000 jobs available out there. We used to have in prison the old VCT training courses where they learned bricklaying and plumbing. In the whole of Wales - and I have actually done a survey on this - there are six Corgi registered heating and ventilating people earning £750 a day. In fact, I was thinking of resigning my job and going off to do a course in it! It is very pro-active. We are looking at an industry that could train our people. Some of the training in prison is not appropriate for employment. Bob and I were on the Select Committee for Rehabilitation and we went to various prisons to look at it and I went to Aylesbury Prison where they are doing a course in car mechanics. These are jobs that our people can get because then they are not working with vulnerable people within the community, so they are not barred from these jobs. I think that education in prisons has to be geared more for the workforce outside than for academia. I think we have run away a little with academia and we have to look really at what works and what works is getting people into employment. We went to Grendon and they did courses on enhanced thinking skills and psychoanalysing people. Warehouse foremen do not want you going in and psychoanalysing staff! What you need to do is be able to operate a forklift truck. We have to get down to practical basics and that is what UNLOCK does. We deal with the basic practical stuff that excludes our people from employment. Mr Morgan: We take it as a self-evident truth that life is more possible if you can read, but we are also coming up against the problem of following on after a prisoner leaves prison because most sentences are less than six months' duration and, of the 75,000 prisoners in our prisons, 90,000 (sic) are released every year, which shows that they are not there for long. We are operating already with a number of post-custodial hostels and one or two of these YOIs which are scattered around the country, but I have to say that I find it very difficult. I have asked for meetings with the Probation Service and with Harry Fletcher because we find we get on better with the unions than we do with the authorities really. I have a number of hopes that we will be able to do it but I can see it as a very difficult thing. When a person is in prison, you have a wonderful opportunity to teach him to read and cure this problem that he has. Once they leave, whatever their good protestations of wanting to carry on, other things get in the way and so on. For those 40 per cent of prisoners that do have some supervisory element after they leave prison, we very much want to enable them to carry on and we are trying to find ways of doing it. Ms Wyner: I would like to make a couple of points. I endorse what Bobby said. Before coming here, I asked the dialogue group members for Norwich what they would like me to say to the Committee and they said, "What we would like are courses that actually enable us to get employment. Train us to be bricklayers, train us to be plumbers, that sort of thing." Also, I do not think that we should knock Grendon because what we are involved with in the dialogue group is actually getting people in a state of mind where they can learn and sit for more than two minutes and concentrate and so on and I think that Grendon is working with prisoners in such a way as enables their personalities to grow so that they are able then to take their lives forward. There is just one more point that I would really like to make and it may be that this will feel a little like a red herring but I think it is very pertinent. Nobody has mentioned the problems of addiction. Q249 Chairman: We were just going to come on to that. Ms Wyner: Then I will leave you to get there. Chairman: It is a very good point. Q250 Helen Jones: Carry on, please. Ms Wyner: If I can carry on, I think all this goes completely out of the window if we do not deal with people's addiction problems. The kind of courses that people have in prison are just not enough for the majority of addicts. Six weeks or three months is not enough. Research shows that you need nine months to a year minimum, preferably 18 months, to really help someone overcome their addiction. So, for people on short sentences, there are some projects in America whereby people are taken into drug rehab while they are in prison and, when they go out, their rehab continues and focuses on the drug problem and they go into a therapeutic community or something which seems to be the treatment for drug addiction but it is not a short-term fix. Unless people's addictions are dealt with, this is just a total waste of money as far as I can see. There are people in the dialogue groups who cannot get drugs out of their minds. They may have been on an ETS (Enhanced Thinking Skills) course or whatever but they are still right in there and they know that they are going back to communities they were in where drugs are available and the first thing they will want is to have a hit. Mr Cummines: That is 100 per cent right. If I can just clear up the point on Grendon, I was not knocking Grendon, what I was saying is that there needs to be a balance between therapeutic and practical. You are very right but what I found in prison with the drug problem is that they tend to concentrate mostly on heroin and crack cocaine. The biggest problem we are having, especially with the younger prisoners, is alcohol abuse mixed with drugs, cocktailing. Alcohol is not seen as a threat and yet the biggest sector of crimes committed are alcohol related. So, we need to educate, if you like, the addiction services not just to concentrate on the hard drugs as alcohol is a serious, serious problem. Q251 Helen Jones: I think anyone in the centre of my constituency would agree with you. When we are planning for discharge, what is your view about what educational planning should be undertaken? Should that not be part of a proper plan for discharge with the support built in? How good is it? Mr Cummines: Educational training is probably the most important thing you have in prisons today. It is one of the things that will stop people re-offending. It is all right, as I said, doing the courses, even the plumbing courses, but we also have to teach people practical skills like money management. We have them coming out of prison with their £54 and they go straight to a Kentucky Fried Chicken place and buy a big bucket, do the rest on booze and the next day they are skint and they are shoplifting. I worked in hostel environments with ex-offenders coming out and the big problem we were having is that they blow their money because they do not use money in prison so they are not used to budgeting and they are not used to shopping. I think that we have to teach people basic skills of life, life skills if you like, and they have to be part of a package that is followed through outside. Q252 Helen Jones: Part of the whole course. Mr Cummines: Yes. Chairman: I am very pleased about what you said regarding drug addiction. We picked that up very strongly on our trip last week to the Nordic countries where they said that 60 per cent, perhaps 80 per cent, of their inmates were on drugs and would go out on drugs and we saw a very interesting Finnish pilot called Pathfinder. Q253 Jonathan Shaw: Can I just tag a question on to this question of release. Pre-release courses: in our papers, we are advised that Lord Justice Woolfe said that he would welcome plans for the Prison Service to introduce pre-release courses and they were first established at the end of 1992/beginning of 1993 but, more than a decade later, these courses are still to materialise. Mr Cummines: In a number of the cases, it was down to the Governor of the prison. If the Governor were pro-active, pre-release courses were done but they were done in a patchwork quilt way. They would look at, say, Dialogue and then they would look at the Shannon Trust. What they were trying to do was do it on the cheap. Instead of getting the people in who were professionals in that skill, they were trying to mix it up in prison. When you have a prison officer who is on landing duty and doing all the rest of the things and you are understaffed, it cannot work. Pre-release courses were seen as not that important. Q254 Jonathan Shaw: So, there is no blueprint for a pre-release course? Mr Cummines: No. There was one we put up and UNLOCK is putting one together on money management and all that. We are doing a DVD for pre-release courses to assist prisoners to do a pre-release course - and the Home Office are doing a pilot with us - which we will give them when they go out. So that, if they move into Manchester, we will give them all the support agencies in Manchester on a DVD that they can plug in. It saves them carrying lots of paperwork because we found that they would dump that. It will be in Urdu and also Braille for people who are partially sighted because we are getting a number of elderly prisoners now who are coming out of prison and they have no home, they cannot access the benefit system properly and they need support. If we had proper pre-release courses, the prison population would drop dramatically because they would be prepared for when they went out and we could hand over to the Probation which is what NOMS is about or other agencies and they would be able to filter in to that and they would drop dramatically because they would have that support but, because we do not have pre-release courses, it means they are not prepared for release to deal with things like basic shopping skills etcetera. Mr Duncan: There is another charity called the Foundation of Training Organisations which does run pre-release courses in a number of establishments. I can leave their card if you are interested. Q255 Chairman: Why has it all gone on such a patchwork basis? That is what we want to know. Ms Wyner: Prisons are totally chaotic and it is all crisis work really and that is the problem. Q256 Jonathan Shaw: I think this leads on to the next point which is that the schemes you run are not nationwide, are they? Mr Cummines: Our one is. Ms Wyner: We would like ours to be. Q257 Jonathan Shaw: We hear all too often, not just in the Prison Service but right across the public service, models of good practice, where it is working. We have heard from the Shannon Trust that, where you have those enthusiastic people, whether they are prisoners or prison warders, and I am sure it is the same for you, Ruth, you need someone as that catalyst. If the consequences of you good people not doing the things that you do mean that we have that revolving door, surely that is not good enough, is it? We should have the blueprints. Mr Cummines: Charities could put it together. We actually looked at pilot schemes. That is why we did not take Home Office funding: because the pilot schemes kamikaze. If you go up in the plane and it runs out of petrol after 18 months - they have withdrawn funding - it is sunk. A lot of people would not employ people to do projects, because you would only have to sack them 18 months down the line. So it was no incentive for charities. If you are going to have something, you have to fund it for at least three years. Why? When you are looking at the chaos that is prison, it is purely a puncture outfit. What we need now are new tyres on the vehicle, because puncture outfits do not work and it is going from one thing to another. As you said, there is no blueprint to be able to say to you, the Committee, "Here we go - this is how you do it". Charities are also to blame, because we are so busy trying to fight for the same funding that we are not effective in what we do - because we are all chasing the same pot of money - where, if the money was dispersed properly and there was adequate funding ‑‑‑‑ Q258 Jonathan Shaw: A lot of us are new to this area, but it strikes me that there is a myriad of different charities involved in this education. I was recently trying to think, with a colleague, of what one of them was called, and it is Pythonesque. Mr Cummines: But there are frontline charities that are doing the work, and this is what you as politicians must sort out. What you need is an inspectorate of aftercare. You have got an inspectorate of probation, an inspectorate of prisons, but you have no inspectorate of aftercare - someone to look at whether you are getting value for money. The bottom line is no, you are not. There are charities out there and all they are doing is turning out glossy literature, making it seem as if they should be in the publishing business and not the resettlement business. I talk about what I know and I will tell it how it is. I will tell you straight. What you need to say is "Prove to us ---- Q259 Chairman: One small rule, Bobby, is to talk through the Chairman! Mr Cummines: I am sorry. What you need to say is, "Show us what you are doing". What we need is evidence, and that is what it boils down to. Not nice, glossy literature. "Show us the numbers where you are putting these people out of prison and into employment, and you are getting them back into a stable lifestyle." I will not name the charities, but there are charities taking to the tune of £74 million, and a lot of the work is glossy literature and research. We do not need the research. We know the problems of crime and the causes of crime. What we need now is action. Ms Wyner: But I think that we do need some research so that we can develop our practice as charities. Q260 Jonathan Shaw: You are being researched at the moment, are you not? So you would say that. Ms Wyner: We have actually commissioned that research. We have got some funding to commission the research. We are planning to extend it into a project in Wandsworth Prison. The overall difficulty is that there is no time for thinking about these problems, because everyone is rushing round, just trying to keep the lid on prisons. There is no overarching policy really. With NOMS there is the potential for that. As to the Inspector of Prisons, having read David Ramsbotham's book about the way he was inspecting prisons and making recommendations, people were completely ignoring it. I think that it has to come from a political level. There has to be a real intention to do something thoughtful that works, and also to bring in the POA and so on, so that there is real commitment. Q261 Jonathan Shaw: We are going to hear later from some of the trade unions and organisations which represent the staff. Looking at their submission to us, it is quite encouraging in terms of the direction of travel, from where we were a few years ago to where we are today - where governors would be able to vire money off from the education budget to do whatever they wanted to. If they did not have an inclination, if they did not have the enthusiasm that Christopher Morgan was talking about, then it went somewhere else. So are we going in the right direction? You are describing some big steps that have to be taken, and I think that most of the members of the Committee would agree with you, but are we going in the right direction? Mr Cummines: I think that the problem with the Government as it is, and the Prison Service as it is, is that they do not publish what they do well: they let newspapers publish what they do badly. This undermines those people in prison who are active and doing good stuff from doing it, because they get no recognition for it. But, yes, you are going down the right track, because at least now you are listening to the voice of an ex-offender. It has never been done before in committees. It was always done by the theorists and academics. What we are saying is that, yes, you are listening and the Home Secretary is looking at what is going on, but what we need now is, "This is what it will be". I think that it needs to be a bit firmer now, into action; but you need to be properly funded. Everyone I talk to, every charity I talk to, every course that is running - all they are saying is "Lack of funding". It is not that they cannot do the job: it is lack of funding. With Professor David Wilson from the Prison Education Forum, you have some great stuff going on in education in prison - but, again, lack of funding. Ms Wyner: The lack of funding extends to prisons as well. We go in and they say, "Yes, we'd very much like to have you, but I have got to cut half a million pounds of my budget this year". What we are hearing from the Government is, "Yes, we are doing resettlement", this, that and the other; but if the funding is being taken away, it can be seen as window-dressing. I think that we are going in the right direction with NOMS. There is a specific amount of money for voluntary sector interventions and so forth, but it has to be at the right level. There has to be real commitment. Also, if we continue expanding the prison population, it makes life a lot more difficult. Q262 Chairman: Christopher, did you want to come in on that? Mr Morgan: From my point of view, I personally do not think that funding has got too much to do with it. Our activities do not cost the taxpayer anything. We give them free, and we get such money as we need - which is not terrific - very freely from the private sector. What I think needs to be done is that a complete change of philosophy needs to be brought into the prisons which puts the matter of education, and trying to prepare the prisoners for the outside, on a vastly higher scale than it is at the moment. Let me tell you a little story. When we go to a prison, we always have a lot of guys there who want to teach. They are seized by the idea and they want to teach. They see this as something that will make their doing time meaningful; it gives their own self-esteem a great boost and, instead of being bullies and throwing their weight about, they put their energies into this activity. All we ask of the prison is that they should not lose financially. "Financially" is too big a word for what a prisoner gets in money for making the widgets they make. It is just chickenfeed; it is a few quid a week. But a lot of prisons will not do it. The prison makes money from widget-making. They use this very cheap labour; they produce teabags in boxes; they cut up the rubber bits of cat's-eyes in the road, and that sort of thing, incredibly cheaply, and that is all part of their budget as far as I can see. Therefore, they are not very willing to make it up. If a guy says, "I want to stop doing that and become a mentor", they will not make it up. So a lot of these guys are doing it, notwithstanding the fact that they lose money. And, in particular, women: I know a lot of women who have children at home; they want to be mentors but they cannot afford to be, because they lose a few quid, they cannot buy their telephone cards and cannot talk to their children. It is just a small example of the way the attitude is wrong. If we want prison to work, we have to get that attitude changed. It is not to do with ticking boxes and what they call "hard outcomes". It is more to do with soft outcomes: of changes of attitude and of behaviour , which are the side products of trying to give people back their self‑esteem. Mr Cummines: Christopher is 100 per cent right on the changing of attitude. You are penalised when you go to prison if you go into education, and you are encouraged to go into the workshops. I think that you need a complete reversal there, where you are enhanced for your attempts to rehabilitate yourself, rather than sitting at a conveyor belt. Q263 Chairman: Should there not be proper work in prisons that is properly paid? Mr Cummines: Yes. Q264 Chairman: So that people can send money home to their family. Mr Cummines: We brought up an idea, when Sir Stephen Tumim was alive, bless him: that we would like prisons to be colleges, where people could go out and be on tag for their last year; they could do their theory while they were in prison. It was heavy plant machinery fitting - because in five years' time we would be importing from Poland, because we do not have any. What we wanted to do was train them while they were in prison, long-term prisoners, and then they would go into society, in college, like an open prison. A third of their wages would be held in trust, if they behaved themselves; a third would be sent to their families, so that they could get back their dignity and get off the benefit system; and a third would be for their keep. But I think it was European legislation that prisoners were not allowed to pay for their own keep. That was the view of legislation, but there is also common sense. If a man has got his dignity back, that he can provide for his family and he is working towards a profession - and we could do it with Sir Robert McAlpine or someone, saying "We will train people for employment" - then we could gear them up so that they are not going out dependent on benefit and taking their family off benefit. Then it is a real thing and, you are 100 per cent right, we should be training people for work and allowing prisoners to earn proper wages. We employed three female prisoners from a prison in Kent. I fund-raised and got them a proper job. It was called "the Vision Team". They were doing really well. We trained them in conference centre building; we trained them in media studies; we trained them in reception work, and all the computer work. For that prison, we got £108,000 -- £8,000, I think it was - and the girls could have earned £15,000 a year each. It was knocked on the head, because the governor said, "I'm not having them earn as much as my staff". That was a fact, and it was appalling - and we had to give the money back to the European Social Fund. Mr Morgan: There is a lot of talk about making prison too soft, and perhaps giving too much education to prisoners would be put by some newspapers into that sort of category. But I think that you can only say that if you are somebody who has never been in prison, because anybody who has actually spent any time in prison - certainly as a prisoner - will know that it is not like that. Q265 Jonathan Shaw: We have been to Parkhurst. Mr Cummines: So have I! Ms Wyner: It is also quite different when you do not go out at the end of the day. Q266 Chairman: We have a press that is always very interested in prisons, until it comes to any serious interest at all. This is the first inquiry under my chairmanship where we have had sessions on prisons. No press come. Are there any members of the press here today? One today. We have had sessions with no press present. Mr Cummines: They are glamorising crime ---- Q267 Chairman: On any other subject the place is full and we have got television and radio. This is the level of interest in prison education. Ms Wyner: There is a problem in the messages that government gives out about crime and punishment. There is this vote-gathering type of message, and I do not know whether it comes from focus groups or what. I think that there is another message that could come out: that if we rehabilitate our prisoners properly, we cut crime. That is the way to cut crime. I do not hear that message from government, and I think that is a real problem. Mr Cummines: What we have to look at is, when we rehabilitate prisoners, what we are doing is reducing the victims of crime. That is what it is all about here. For every prisoner who goes out, that is 33 crimes he is not going to commit - because that is the average. They get nicked for one, but they have done 32 that they have not been nicked for. I think that, seriously, if we want to send a message out - if you are a Daily Mail writer, you can write this and quote me on it! - it is that prison is not a holiday camp like Butlins. I do not know too many people who will hang themselves in Butlins, but quite a few are committing suicide in prison. So let us get that - that prison is not a nice place; it is a place where people are punished. Q268 Chairman: I think that the gentleman is a serious journalist! Ms Wyner: It is also a place where people are damaged, traumatised, and come out desperate and unable to cope even with basic things. When I came out of prison I could not focus distance. Goodness knows what else had happened to my brain, but I could not focus distance. Mr Cummines: We also have to say that there are successes coming out of prison. Myself - I have been on select committees and have been made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and all those sort of things I have achieved. If I had said to the governor of Parkhurst that I would be sitting here giving evidence to you today, he would have taken me over to see Dr Cooper and I would have been on the "wally juice" - severely "nutted off"! There are prisoners that can achieve great things. We have to celebrate that and hold that up - about the achievements that can be achieved if people are given the foundations to build upon; and I think we need to do that. Q269 Chairman: Bobby, Ruth, Christopher - Bob has had to go - it has been an excellent session and we have gained from it. Will you stay in contact with the Committee? We are getting halfway through this inquiry and we want to be in touch with you. If you think of things that we should have asked you and did not, tell us. I have no doubt, having experienced the last hour and 15 minutes, you will! Mr Cummines: Perhaps I can leave you with this. This is what the kids are saying themselves. If you could keep the age group, and just take the names off - it is from the children's own voice. Chairman: We can do that. Thank you. Memoranda submitted by the Association of Colleges and by NATFHE Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Dr John Brennan, Chief Executive, Association of Colleges, Ms Merron Mitchell, Head, Offender Learning Directorate, City College Manchester, Ms Jeanne Harding, Principal, Dudley College of Technology, Mr Dan Taubman, National Official (Education), and Ms Christiane Ohsan, National Official (Further Education), NATFHE, examined. Chairman: May I welcome our witnesses. I can see from some of their faces that they were enjoying the last session as much as we were. May I also say that my Committee always groan when they find that there is yet another person that I have known for a long time and who has Huddersfield connections. Jeanne Harding and I go back a long way, because she was principal of Huddersfield College before her present job at Dudley. I just let the Committee know that, before they leap on the fact. Jonathan Shaw: Do we groan now? Q270 Chairman: You can groan now! May I also say that this is a very serious inquiry and we were straining at the leash, waiting to do this. It was interesting to hear some of the names mentioned a few minutes ago, like Stephen Tumim and others. I happened to be the shadow Minister for prisoners, Sir Roy Hattersley's deputy, at the time all that was happening - and the Woolf inquiry into Strangeways. If you get involved in prisons and prisoner education, it is something that never leaves you and you get this real commitment to it. Certainly I know that, as Chair and the team here, we are as keen to make this as good a report as we possibly can. That does not mean fiddling around on the edges of the problem. Christiane Ohsan, Dan Taubman, John Brennan, Jeanne Harding, Merron Mitchell - I am not going to ask you all to give an introduction, because it would take up the whole time. John, can I pick on you and ask whether you want to say something to open on behalf of the team? Dr Brennan: That would be very helpful. We very much welcome the inquiry you are undertaking, because we share the view that this is a very important but often neglected area of learning. To give it some profile and to address some of the issues is very important. I think that you know what our credentials are in relation to this. Colleges are the overwhelming providers of prison education. If I have counted it correctly, 24 colleges provide 126 of 137 prison contracts that exist. So we have a very substantial share. AoC represents those colleges; NATFHE represent the staff who work in those institutions. I would want to emphasise that, whatever differences we may have on other issues, in this area there is a considerable degree of commonality of view between ourselves and NATFHE about the issues which exist. I would like to make four points, if I may. The first one is to emphasise that, as was coming out from previous witnesses, our starting point is that offenders are some of the most deprived learners. Whatever other characteristics they have, they are a group who have very considerable learning needs. What we would want to see, the kind of vision that we would have of the system that we want to see created, would be prisons as a kind of secure learning environment - a secure college, if you like - in which offenders can acquire the skills they need, the knowledge, the qualifications which will help them not just to secure a job on release but also to equip them to cope with the complexities of the lives they often lead; to give them confidence, raise their own aspirations, shift them away from offending behaviour, to becoming much more productive members of society. We do see that learning has a key role to play in contributing to all of that. In realisation of that vision, I think that we see three important areas of issues that need to be tackled at the moment. One is about what, to coin a phrase, we might call the personalisation of the learning programmes. Our belief is that there has been a bit too much emphasis on key skills, basic skills, as being the sole vehicle in this area, and that we need to broaden out that offer. We need to recognise that there are a variety of learning needs, and that often the motivation of learners, even where they have important basic skills requirements, can be better achieved through integrating and embedding those basic skills activities in a whole range of other learning opportunities. To some extent the emphasis on basic skills, the key performance targets, and so on, has distorted the programme. We think that we need some rethinking about the way in which the prison education offer is structured, in order to take that forward. Around that, we think that there needs to be a much more comprehensive approach to assessment, to planning of individual learning, to monitoring, and taking that through into the post-release phase as well as in the institutions themselves. In that context, we saw the attempt which was being made through Project Rex, to bring together vocational training with education programmes, as having that capacity to offer a greater integration, and we would want to see that taken forward. That is one area. The second area I would want to highlight is management. It was already coming out in your previous session - the importance of a significant cultural shift in terms of the way in which learning is viewed within prisons. There have been some helpful developments in this respect. The appointment of heads of learning and skills, and so on, in prisons is beginning to change that. There are issues around that. There is often a lack of clarity about the roles of those individuals and their real authority, in terms of managing contracts and so on. There are still lots of operational problems about giving prisoners access to learning. Other operational requirements often override - the fact that you have to appear in court, or prison officers are not available to escort you to the learning centres, and so on. There are issues about priority and attitude in all of that, which we think do need to be changed. In doing so, we believe that will eliminate some of the waste which is inherent in the present system - which those kinds of disruptions create. There are some issues around contracts, where we are not, in principle, opposed to some changes in the way in which the system works, but the shifts of direction over the last couple of years have not been helpful in terms of managing and running those services. While we think there are some benefits to be gained from a more localised approach in linking prison education contracts to learning and skills provision more generally, what we would see as being important is that we do not go for something which is far too parochial and which loses the expertise and skills, and the considerable strength which has been built up as a result of the system that we have. So we see it as important to try to preserve all of that. There is a series of other management issues inherent in all of this. I would just draw attention to one in particular, which is about the management of learner records. It is very evident that the system does not work effectively in that respect, and we need to get a lot better. Electronic transfer is the means by which we could achieve all of that. We need to put some emphasis on trying to create a system in which, as prisoners move round the system, there is much more effective transfer of information about them, and they do not end up doing the same things over and over again - which may boost the key performance statistics, but do not do a lot in terms of taking those individuals forward. The final point I would make is about the need to have proper resources to back all of that up. We very much welcome the emphasis which government has given over the last few years to boost resources in prisons but, after you take account of inflation and the increased volume of people in the prison system, the real investment in learners and in prisoners is not that great. We think that much more needs to be done. There is a series of issues round that, not least to do with staff pay because of the pressures created by a contracting system which drives prices down, and about giving prisoners incentives to want to engage in learning. At the moment, the system is very much tilted against encouraging them to engage in learning. A series of issues of that kind, therefore, which we believe exist in the system at the moment. We are happy to discuss any of those or any other issues that the Committee would want to explore. Q271 Mr Chaytor: I would like to ask about the contracting arrangements, and particularly to flush out the strengths and weaknesses of the old contracting system. I would like to ask Dan and Merron to comment on what they thought were the strengths and weaknesses of the old system, before we go on to the new arrangements. Mr Taubman: You mean the contracting through prison procurement, rather than the pre‑1993 local authority ---- Q272 Mr Chaytor: Yes. The system that was disbanded and should have modified into Project Rex. Mr Taubman: I am not sure that there were a huge amount of positives. Over the years, we have built up positives. One of them is that we have built up a body of expertise, particularly in further education colleges, around the delivery of prison education. Some of the drawbacks were sometimes very stretched lines of management; contracts that were based on price rather than quality, and certainly that has had a very negative effect on recruitment and retention of prison education staff. My colleague Christiane Ohsan will want to talk more about the insecurity of prison education staff. We would like to see contracting and funding of prison education moulded to the type of prison and the type of prisoner, because there are different types of prison. Local prisons, for instance, have a very mobile, fluid prison population. Prisoners come through either on remand or going through to training prisons, and the kinds of assessments that those prisoners need might be very different than in long-term prisons. We are not wholly opposed to the proposals to contract through the Learning and Skills Council, but we have some very grave concerns. One is just how much the Learning and Skills Council knows about prison education. Second ---- Q273 Mr Chaytor: Before we go to the new contract arrangements, could we focus on the other ones, and maybe ask Merron about this issue of stretched lines of management - because you would have some experience of this? Ms Mitchell: Yes, I am representing the providers, the colleges that deliver education in prisons. City College is the largest, with 21 secure establishments across the country. We have built up our portfolio of prisons during the contracting rounds from 1993. I believe that there has been a lot of good in those contracts. The initial contracting out made so much difference - from the previous, individually delivered by local education authorities. In those days there was just a five per cent handling charge to the local college. Then I became part of a structured prison education service. I think that was probably the start of a quality education contract, and I do think it is important that we recognise the good that that contracting out of education did. The second round of contracting certainly ring-fenced education money and library money. That has made a considerable difference, because we have been able to plan. We have been able to plan education programmes. What we have not been able to do is plan for the future as a provider, because the original contracts were offered on a five-year basis with a promise of a five-year extension if the governor of the prison and the contractor were happy with that relationship. That did not happen. Rex reared its head, and re-contracting and re-tendering was going to go forward. I think that providers and deliverers of contracts, having had a ten-year period, were disappointed that we could not build on the success we had already made with current contracts. We have had that fragmentation. We are now in a position of not knowing whether this contract is going to last for six months, one year, or up to three years, and we are currently working within the current contract. I think that I can speak for most of the providers - we are continuing to deliver a quality education service. There may be barriers - and we are going to explore the barriers - to make education more accessible to more offenders; but I think that there was a lot in the old contract that we need to build on. However, it was input-based, not output. Q274 Chairman: For the record, could you tell us what Rex is all about? Ms Mitchell: My apologies. I tried not to talk in acronyms. At the end of the second five‑year period of contracting out, at the end of 2004, prison education was due to be re‑tendered. It was tendered on a competitive basis, on quality and on cost. That decision was taken by Susan Pember and OLSU. The Adult Basic Strategy Unit, the Government, DfES, decided - I think the words were "quite courageously" - to withdraw the competitive tendering process that was recommended by the PriceWaterhouseCooper report, until they had determined the future of prison education. During that period, contractors have had the extension to their current contract extended on three occasions - 1 month, 5 months and, now, for a period up to three years - during this time we are now facing prototypes and new Pathfinder projects through the LSC. So we are still in a slight limbo of not knowing where the future of prison education contracts really lies. Q275 Mr Chaytor: If we could move on to the future and ask about the LSC, how do you view the prospect of the LSC now being responsible for the contracting process? Do you have any observations about that? Ms Mitchell: Yes, I think that it has to be the way forward. The LSC is responsible for post‑16 education. The LSC work in communities, in the probation centres, and in adult education. I think they will have a steep learning curve, and I do hope - if I have one plea - that they consult and take the advice of the current expertise that is delivering well in prisons. I think we have a future of having the seamless progression. We were talking earlier about resettlement and the pre-release course. To me, resettlement and pre-release start on the day of somebody's reception into prison. I think that we should be working in education for the day that they are released. That has to be seamless, and the LSC has a model that could actually provide that. There may be some fine-tuning required en route. The management information system, for example. At the moment we are input-based. We are paid on hourly delivery of education rather than the outcomes that the LSC usually request. That will lead to a tremendous amount of personalisation of qualifications for individuals, rather than a set number of accreditations, irrespective of the need of that prisoner. Mr Taubman: I would agree with everything Merron has said. I have three points. First, the LSC is not noted for its lack of bureaucracy, so I hope that contractors are not drowned in yet more bureaucracy from that. Second, there are parts of the Prison Service, parts of prison education. You can understand going through LSCs in terms of follow-through, aftercare - indeed, the non-custodial sentences that are coming in - but there are various aspects of the prison regime that perhaps do not fit that. I am thinking of the women's estate, which is smaller, fewer prisons, more mixed ages, more mixed abilities, mixed sentences, et cetera. One wonders quite how a local LSC will deal with something like women's education or maximum security prisons, category A prisons. The other problem is London and London's offenders. Because there are a disproportionate number of them, a lot of them tend to get put to prisons well away from London. Then you would also have follow-up problems. We are going to have to approach it with care, because ex-offenders sometimes do not want to be tagged as ex-offenders. So follow-through work can be quite difficult. Q276 Mr Chaytor: When is the new contracting round due to start? Is there a date fixed for the start of the LSC contract? Ms Ohsan: Currently, we have the three prototypes, as Merron said. It could be at any time when they are ready. Any one of them could be ready. The arrangements will be, whoever is ready to run, they will implement it and others would join as and when. That is the nature of how things are being done. The date of January 2005 has been mentioned. The problem we have is that we are not into the loop with the LSC when they are doing those consultations. Ms Mitchell: The proposal is that all prisons will be ready to run the new prototype in September 2006. We do not yet know how that will be. You mentioned the local and the regional - and this is perhaps a personal opinion, having run a national programme of prison education across the country - but I do hope that the LSC do not automatically believe they have to procure their education on a very local basis. As we heard from Bob Duncan earlier, the Prison Service is not yet regionalised. We do release people from London who go back to Manchester. Currently many of our Manchester prisoners are being held in Haverigg, Durham and across the country, because of overcrowding and moving on a category basis. I do hope that the LSC looks at the cross-boundary and national approach, in line with their procedures for preferred suppliers. I believe that we are not just part of further education. We very much are a specialist offender education team, and I think that we could work on a preferred supplier basis. There are some LSCs who have had no experience of working with prisons and do not have a prison in their local area. I am professionally completing a 30‑year sentence in prisons, and I do remember pre-1991. There were a lot of providers that had no interest in prison education and no expertise. We have moved considerably from that standpoint, and I think that the LSCs have a good foundation on which to build the further education concept, by using current prison expertise. Q277 Mr Chaytor: In the new prison education contracts, will they be still purely for prison education, with vocational training remaining the responsibility of the prison, or will providers be invited to tender for both? Ms Ohsan: I think that at the moment they are still having discussions with members of the Public Commercial Services Union, whose members were very anti the previous arrangement proposed under Rex: that the vocational training and education departments should come together. There are big concerns for them, in terms of their salary, terms and conditions, and pensions, which would not be protected - an issue which, unfortunately, prison education department staff have gone through three times. We have cleared some of these problems but there was a big problem, and I believe they are having discussions with the OLSU and the Prison Service to see whether they can explore other options - where they could still work as Prison Service employees but more closely with the education department staff. The discussion is therefore not finished. Q278 Mr Chaytor: What is NATFHE's view from the educational point of view and the point of view of the prisoner? Leaving aside the concerns of prison officers about their pensions, which is the best model? Mr Taubman: I think a model which has very close integration between the vocational training and the education. To an extent, who runs that contract is secondary. Clearly colleges have experience in work-based training and could deliver it, but the Prison Service has been delivering it as well. Whatever happens, they have to be much more integrated, and both of them integrated in sentence planning and other education, for instance offender behaviour programmes. Q279 Chairman: Could I ask what sort of people provide the teaching? When we were in Scandinavia, we were impressed that some of the teachers we met were teaching in the prison in the day and would be in their regular college in the evening, teaching non-prisoners. I take it that most of the people you employ to do this work only teach with prisoners. Ms Mitchell: A lot of them have come from mainstream; a lot have come from the primary and secondary sectors, and then adult education. Some do work in local colleges. In Manchester we have people working in Manchester Prison, Styal Prison, Risley Prison, who also work in the college and who also work in the community. We do work in the approved premises and we work in resettlement units. So, yes, we do have an integration. As was pointed out earlier, once people work in prisons - I transferred from the primary sector - they do bite the bullet, enjoy it, and it does become part of them. We find that, despite a lot of the fragmentation and uncertainty of prison staff, there is a tremendous loyalty. People do have career progression. A lot of us have worked through the system and become part of the prison education management. So it is no longer the case that prison education is the backwater of education, education in prisons. People do see it as a career aiding social inclusion, and do enjoy working in that environment. Ms Harding: We have staff moving both ways, particularly our visiting lecturers who are looking to move to a full timetable and permanent work, who will perhaps work 50 per cent of their time in some of our local prisons and 50 per cent back in the main college. Similarly with the prisons that are further away. That is perhaps impossible in terms of where they live, but they will work in their local college as well. Q280 Chairman: So what you are saying is that there is this cadre of really highly qualified, professional teachers, teaching and tutoring in prisons. Will the change in arrangements lose them or not? Is there a guarantee that we will keep them, or will the contracts go to LSCs all over the country and we will lose the professional expertise that we have built up? Ms Harding: That is a concern that is already beginning to happen. Because staff are frightened and they do not know what the future is - and they have mortgages to pay, the same as anyone else - they are beginning to look for permanent positions outside, if that is an option. A lot are really dedicated to prison work and want to stay, but they have their own personal lives to consider as well. I think that the end of Project Rex caused a lot of concern. I spent a lot of time - and I was new at the college at the time - going round saying, "Yes, we are committed to prison education", "Yes, we are behind you", knowing that there was no guarantee that we would have the contract; no guarantee about who would get the contract; or what was going to happen at that point of time. That is destabilising, and we are talking about an area of work which is difficult to recruit to generally. Teaching in FE in general is difficult; basic skills work is incredibly difficult; work in the young offenders' institutions is even harder, because they should really be schoolteacher-trained and they earn an FE rate, which is considerably less than schools - and in schools they would get an additional allowance if they were dealing with the difficult young people they are dealing with. So it is quite difficult. The staff who have remained and have stuck with it are very committed, but there is a fear that we will lose them if the contracting period is run out over a long period. Q281 Helen Jones: May I ask a quick follow-up on that? In your view, which way is the best way for staff to keep up with developments in their own field? If we want prison education to be high quality and up to date, is there some advantage in them teaching part of their time in other institutions as well, or do you find there are ways of them keeping up with developments even when they are teaching full-time in prison? Ms Harding: We offer staff development to all our staff, wherever they are based. So if they wish to go on curriculum development specific to their vocational area, basic skills, or general education, they can do that with general education staff from the main site, who may be teaching adults and young people. However, if there is specific work around prisoner education, we would encourage staff to take part in that. There is a very good national network which all the colleges are involved in. Ms Mitchell: We are very fortunate in prisoner education: we have three strands. We tap into the Prison Service mandatory training of prisoncraft; we can use the college's main network, as you said - the mainstream - and then we have networks where we have seminar groups, curricula groups, for specific prison education curricula. In many ways, therefore, we have a broader staff development programme for educators in prison than we do in mainstream. We have started to take people out of our college and to give them some of the education for behavioural management for difficult students. I think that in prison education we have a lot to offer mainstream as well. Ms Ohsan: On the other hand, it is not all contractors/providers who are able to spend the money that the big providers are spending on staff development. We have a number of reports that, in some areas, staff do not have access to staff development; they are mainly part‑time. The majority of the staff in a lot of the education departments are part-time. They do not get the same amount of pay when they go on their training as they would do if they were full-time; so there is a disincentive. Some of them do not work when the training is available, even if it is being provided by the parent college with the contract. So it is a mixture. There are some very good practices, which certainly we support, and some which are not very good. We have a difficulty, given the nature of contracting, in trying to have that spread uniformly. Also, we should not forget the few private providers. It is a totally different picture, which of course does not apply to those. Q282 Mr Chaytor: Is it better or worse? Ms Ohsan: For some of them, we do not know - or we know very little. We do have a rapport with the colleges, because there is a history of industrial relations, of contact, of working together. With some of the private providers we just do not have that at all. Contact is nonexistent. One place where we do have contact, it is just disaster after disaster - things I cannot say here. However, it is a totally different picture - on everything we have said. I do not think there would be any agreement between that contractor and NATFHE, if we were to sit here together, about the staff, about the provision, and everything else. Q283 Chairman: So you think we should bring some private providers in, to hear their side of the story? Ms Ohsan: Yes, because there are about four private providers, I think. Dr Brennan: To be clear about that, I think there are two private providers and two LEA services that hold the other contracts which colleges do not hold. So there are actually two that operate, I think - and private prisons. Ms Mitchell: Can I clarify the private prison sector? There are some which deliver their own education in house. They do not contract out their education service. UKDS is one of those providers. The old Group 4, which is now GSL, has three prisons in the country: one at Altcourse in Liverpool; one at The Wolds in Hull; and Rye Hill in Rugby. Although they are a private prison, they do contract out their education to our college, so it is a college provider - which has recently meant that there is the standardisation of education services across the Home Office and the private sector. Mr Taubman: Could I bring up a point about professional development and just look to the future? We are in the process of getting a sector skills council for lifelong learning, which will be dealing with colleges, universities, youth work, et cetera. I think that there will be a criminal justice sector skills council. Somehow we will need to bring those together. To refer to some of the points made in the earlier session, about the role of other prison staff, prison officers, et cetera, somehow we need to get elements of training crossing over between prison staff, prison education staff, and staff out in the community. I am sure AoC and the colleges, and certainly NATFHE, will be saying to the lifelong learning sector skills council that, once they are up and running, offender education is something they need to take into account. Chairman: Can we turn now to the curriculum, basic skills and vocational training? Kerry is going to lead us on this. Q284 Mr Pollard: Are we concentrating too much on basic skill, perhaps to the detriment of vocational education - bearing in mind that Toe by Toe reading scheme we talking about earlier on, which seemed to be quite an exciting venture? Dr Brennan: I tried to say in my opening remarks that there is that need to shift the emphasis, and to see vocational learning as a vehicle for also tackling basic skills issues. Perhaps my colleagues would like to comment on it from an operational point of view. Ms Harding: Outside the prison sector we would normally provide integrated provision. So we would provide basic skills education on the factory floor, in industry, and in our vocational workshops. In some prisons that is working well. In one of our largest prisons - Birmingham - we have classes and teaching alongside the vocational training. However, the targets are different in the different sectors. Prisoners do not necessarily stay long enough in any one prison to be able to get a formal vocational qualification. Hopefully some of the national developments, like unitisation of the curriculum, will help that. Certainly if we can get the tracking between prisons, that would help; but of course not every prison offers the same vocational area. Personally, my staff would like to see a much closer tie-up in the new contracting round between the two, notwithstanding all the difficulties in terms of contracts of employment, et cetera, and all the other difficulties - because that is how we operate outside. Ms Mitchell: I have been a basic skills tutor and, as an education manager in a prison, was appalled at the idea of calling it "basic skills" or "foundation studies" for adults who had failed. I had an education programme, a curriculum, that did not have the words "basic skills" anywhere on it. I was at Liverpool Prison, and we continued to deliver the creative arts, parentcraft - any vocational area that we could get the prison to deliver, we did - but our accreditation was always the skills for life, the basic skills. I think that a lot of good managers and good colleges delivered the skills-for-life project through vocational areas. I am sure you will agree that the last thing a basic skills student - if we can call them that - wants is 30 hours in a classroom, doing basic skills. They have failed once: we do not want to give them more of the same. I really believe that we have to look to the employability, the vocational areas, to look at what the offender needs, wants, is going to use, and embed basic skills. That is one thing we are good at, as educationists. I think that governors were probably preoccupied with the outcome: it had to be level 2. It had to be a level 2 accreditation for key performance targets. We have gone through a period where some governors insisted that that was all that was taught; but there were ways of delivering it. I have to mention that my saddest day was walking into a prison and seeing on the door of a classroom "KPT class". I went in and asked the people what were they learning and they said, "KPT". They did not know what it was but they knew the governor had to get KPTs - key performance targets. In fact, they were doing English and maths, numeracy and literacy - because that was the focus of education. Whether you needed KPT or not, you were in it. Thank goodness, we are moving towards this broader curriculum, this wider approach, but with the national skills strategy at the very heart of it. that, We must establish the underpinning knowledge to enable them to be eligible for work.. Mr Taubman: I echo everything that has been said. Of course we recognise the need for basic skills, for literacy and numeracy. The figures of those without level 1 qualifications inside prison is absolutely appalling. However, I would make a very strong plea for a broad curriculum. We cannot live by bread alone. Art, culture, drama - some of you will have seen, as I did, that TV film about opera in a prison - these can give offenders a real hold on learning. It can be there first significant piece of self-confidence. We use these methods outside, in community education and adult education, of trying to get people re-involved, re-engaged in learning, through their interests - and I think that we can do so in prisons. It is particularly important in terms of cultural studies. Again, with the disproportionate number of black and ethnic minority prisoners, black studies and ethnic minority studies can give them a sense of pride in their race, in their ethnicity, which can be a really important first step back to learning, back to education. Q285 Mr Pollard: Bobby Cummines said earlier - and it was very powerful evidence that he gave - that employability was the key to stopping recidivism. It strikes me, therefore, that if we start by vocational training, it might unlock interest in the basic skills. If you have to read a plan to build something or other, suddenly you see the relevance of that. Is that not a better way of approaching it, rather than doing the KPT, or whatever it was you said earlier? That does not mean anything to me, never mind anybody else, and we are supposed to know about these things. Lastly, we were at one of the prisons on the Isle of Wight a short time ago. They had a welding workshop there which had been shut down for 18 months, perhaps even two years, because they could not recruit a welder. That is a key skill with which you could walk into dozens of jobs, wherever you have been before. How do we get round that? How do we encourage people to say that it is worthwhile to come into prison education? Ms Harding: It is quite difficult in some ways. A group of staff seem to take to it like a duck to water and that is what they want to do; others do not. We have to remember that we have national shortages in welding education. Q286 Chairman: I remember that you could not get many of them in Huddersfield. Ms Harding: No, and we have trouble with it in Dudley as well. Similarly, we have problems in construction and plumbing - equally areas that would encourage people into employment, because there are different levels of employment and they could move through those. However, those are not the areas which, as prison education contractors, we are in control of. I think that having that as part of the education contract would encourage people, because it would provide a career structure within which it is not just a prison officer: there is an education structure; there are jobs where we could move people in and out of mainstream prison education, community education, for those skill areas. That would be a way of encouraging people in, and the pay rates would also probably be better than the training rates. Mr Taubman: Prison education lecturers are the only staff in a prison who get no financial recognition of the fact they work in prisons. Secretaries in prisons, who have no contact with prison, get what is called an environment allowance. Prison education staff do not. I have to say some prison education staff are not even paid the same rates as outside, the college. Not all, but some. So I think that pay and security would go a long way. Ms Ohsan: May I add to that, if you are talking about the vocational instructors - which you touched on before? There is an issue about vocational instructors not coming into education, which is to do with their own qualifications, and their feeling that they are not up to doing what the others do. I think that is something which cannot be ignored. In the same way as the earlier witnesses talked about prison officers feeling that they do not want to be seen to be less qualified or less able than their students, I think there is that dimension to be looked at. It cannot be ignored in terms of recruiting. Q287 Mr Pollard: We have talked about the emphasis on prison education. Should we suggest that the prison governor should be called "prison governor and director of education" - so that we were setting the scene much better than we are now? If you look at the hierarchy in a prison, you see the governor, the assistant governor, and so on and, right at the very end, is the head of prison education. It seems to me that it is entirely the wrong way round. There is not enough emphasis, and that would send out a signal, would it not? Dr Brennan: It is a very nice idea. One can see all sorts of reasons why people might not be willing to take it up, but I think that it does emphasise the importance of a change of culture, of a recognition of learning as a key component of offender development within the prison environment. If we could get to that, then the question of who carries the title is perhaps less important. Mr Taubman: I would like to see prison education departments as learning centres for the whole prison. Q288 Valerie Davey: How do you feel that the work you are doing, and the difficulties you have already expressed about terms and conditions, fits in with the voluntary sector work which we have just heard about in the earlier session? How does this dovetail within a prison - or does it not? Mr Taubman: I think that it should complement what goes on in the prison. Teaching prisoners is a skill. Teaching basic skills is a skill. Over the last five years, the Government have put an enormous amount of resources and effort into training basic skills - the Adult Basic Skills Strategy Unit. I think that prisoners working with other prisoners, volunteering, helping, can be an incredibly useful adjunct. In particular, the voluntary sector has an enormous role in terms of resettlement, and the transition from inside prison to back out in the community. Q289 Valerie Davey: Who then oversees how that is organised within a prison? Ms Mitchell: The new role - and I take your point about the governor also being the director of education - has devolved that responsibility to his head of learning and skills. I think the future will see that head of learning and skills reporting directly to the governor and being his or her education adviser. The head of learning and skills has the responsibility of providing education, training and accreditation to the whole prison regime, and bringing it together as a secure learning college. I see the voluntary sector as a key part, alongside Connections, Job Centre Plus, the education department - we are already working in partnerships. You asked about construction. We are running a bakery project at Lindholme Prison, where City College deliver the education but Thomas Danby College in Leeds - the bakery specialists - send out their bakers, their tutors. It is a partnership approach where each person, with their core specialisms, can supply and serve that prison, under the auspices of the head of learning and skills, to give a quality product. We cannot be jealous of our own patch. We have to share and give the best quality across the board. Q290 Chairman: They are very emollient answers, Merron, but is it not a fact that, if you were doing your job properly, you would not need enthusiastic amateurs to come in and teach reading? Ms Mitchell: I hope that we can teach people to read in prisons. We do have Link Up schemes where we train mentors - prison staff, and volunteers, working alongside education staff. I think the Toe by Toe stands on its own merit. That is supplementary to, and has the enthusiasm of, the voluntary sector. We all will need the voluntary sector, but we cannot devolve our responsibility to the voluntary sector. We still have to be accountable and get outcomes for teaching people to read and have the social skills to resettle. Q291 Jeff Ennis: Supplementary to the question that Val has just asked, is there any evidence, other than anecdotal evidence, that where you have a very active and viable charity organisation, such as the Shannon Trust or the Dialogue Trust, working in a prison, that improves the educational outputs that you people deliver in that particular prison establishment? Ms Mitchell: I think only through the ALI-Ofsted reports, where you get a report on the whole of the prison. I think you will find more interventions of the voluntary, and education, and employer. Employers now play a big part. Certainly at City College we are an employer of prison education and, where we can, we take people on to the staff. I think probably more involvement from communities - but I do not have that evidence, except reading the Chief Inspector's reports. Q292 Chairman: Do any of you know of work that is to be done on a kind of education audit of a prison, top to bottom? Quality of the educational managers, prison officers - the whole shebang - has anyone done that? Ms Mitchell: The Chief Inspector does that. The ALI-Ofsted team go into a prison with the Chief Inspector, and the report is overarching of all services within the prison. Education, training and skills - whether it be by a contractor in education or by any other provider - are commented on and graded. Q293 Mr Gibb: I wondered if we had a figure for the proportion of prisoners who leave prison without basic skills. Ms Mitchell: The Offender Learning and Skills Unit would be the body who would collate that information. We send every piece of data on individual accreditations, on a monthly basis, to the Offender Learning and Skills Unit. They collate that data and they would have it. Q294 Mr Gibb: We know that between 60 and 70 per cent enter prison lacking the basic skills. Do any of you four, as the experts in this field, have any feel for what proportion leave prison? Would it be the same or less? If less, how much less? Ms Mitchell: I would have to give that back as supplementary evidence, when I have found the details. We would like to hope, in our optimism, that we do make some route to progression, if not accreditation: that there is progression, whether that is the soft targets ---- Q295 Mr Gibb: You have no idea? Ms Mitchell: No. Q296 Mr Gibb: I am slightly surprised, given all we have been saying about prison education, that you do not have a feel for how successful it is at the moment. Ms Harding: I think we have to remember that not all prisoners come to the education units. A large proportion do not, partly because of the finance issues that have been previously mentioned. I think that our own retention in prison education is probably higher than in mainstream colleges. Once students come, they get hooked to it and they do like to stay. They definitely see it as they have had their privileges withdrawn if they are not allowed to attend the education classes. However, it is such a small proportion of the prison population, unfortunately. Q297 Mr Gibb: So you are saying that you think probably quite a high proportion of prisoners leave prison without the basic skills? Ms Harding: Yes. Mr Taubman: To add to the technical difficulties, I do not think there is any tracking of individual prisoners in this respect. So that if you get transferred from one prison to another, you could do the same thing twice in two different prisons and appear twice in the statistics of successes, but actually only one individual is involved. I think that there are therefore some real problems about the adequacy of the data collection systems in all of this. I am certainly not aware of any systematic survey evidence which would answer the question that you have asked. Q298 Mr Gibb: Do you think we should have that? Mr Taubman: I think that it is part of this process of having a better grasp of the totality of the service which is being offered - better tracking systems, better information about exactly what the outputs are, and how that addresses the wide range of needs that you describe. Q299 Mr Gibb: Do you know, if we were to go round every prison this week, every class, how many lessons in maths calculus we would find being taught? Ms Harding: The odd one or two. Q300 Mr Gibb: The odd one or two. Is that good? Ms Harding: It is for those individuals who are interested in mathematics. Q301 Mr Gibb: Is that enough though - one or two in the whole prison population of 70,000? Ms Harding: With such a large amount of basic skills work needing to be done, they have a long way to go before they get to calculus. Q302 Mr Gibb: We went into a prison in Finland and in the first class we came to they were teaching calculus. Mr Taubman: But I think the literacy and numeracy are a lot higher in Finland than they are in this country. Q303 Chairman: I do not think they are. Twenty per cent illiteracy ---- Ms Ohsan: Also, we are trying to say here that the budget for education in the formal setting is tiny. It is very small. The turnover of prisoners - in some places they will be there for 12 days. What can you do in 12 days? Not very much. The ability to bring the prisoners to the classes, even when they have been assessed, is not there. Your prison officers are up to here with overcrowding. The systems - the certificates do not follow people. So there are those things. You cannot just see it as, "It's not good enough" or "It's very little" or "It's not a high enough level". It is the whole package, the whole culture, the whole system which needs to be looked at. The prison education - the area we represent - is a tiny part of it. We are hoping we can work with the others to make it more holistic but, at the moment, it is very small. Q304 Mr Gibb: Would you say that prison education is a shambles? That is what you are saying, is it not? Ms Ohsan: I would not say it is a shambles in terms of what the staff do and what even the providers can do, given what exists. What I think does need to be done is to bring it all together, so that it works better - which we hope OLSU and the service that is being set up will do. We hope that your Committee comes up with recommendations which will address that, so that those in charge can see that there is help and support for them as they want to change it. There was the all-party parliamentary group that came with a load of recommendations. We can sit together and say everything, get all the research, get all the studies. Unless there is the will somewhere and somebody is pushing and driving it, in a way that they will be listened to, our ability to influence is still very small. We are getting there, gradually, but we could do with some help. Mr Gibb: So it probably would not be a shambles then? Q305 Chairman: I do not think that the witness has said it is a shambles. Ms Mitchell: I really do not believe it is a shambles. I believe that, for those who can access it, they are getting a quality education that mirrors, and in some cases surpasses, their mainstream provision. Q306 Mr Gibb: How do you know that? What evidence have you got for that? Ms Mitchell: I have evidence in that the ones who come into the adult sector, who have failed in society through standard mainstream education, who do not have any qualifications, under that captive setting do achieve and can go out with a vocational skill. Q307 Mr Gibb: Do you have some numbers for that? Some figures? Ms Mitchell: No, we only have the positives because there is no national system for processing individual accreditation ---- Q308 Mr Gibb: That is fine, but it is all assertion so far. Are there any numbers? Facts? Ms Mitchell: No, we do not have the numbers. Q309 Mr Gibb: Can someone get the numbers for us? Ms Mitchell: There has not been any electronic transfer of records or data collection. Q310 Chairman: Let our witness come back with the answer. It is their job to teach, not to collect the stats. That is the problem. Ms Mitchell: We do acknowledge there are barriers, and greater access would bring greater achievement. Dr Brennan: I am sure that Merron, Jeanne, and other colleges could provide you with the data which they collect on the individual learners that they deliver to. There is some national aggregation of that data, which the OLSU is able to provide; but I think Nick is quite right in that you do not have a comprehensive picture. The failings are management failings; they are not failings at the level of delivery in the teaching situation. They are failings in the system to understand the need to create a proper progression; a proper understanding; a system which assesses, delivers, reassesses, follows through into a post-release situation; understands the progression, the attainments and so on, which individuals acquire during that process; and manages the processes much better. That is what I think is missing in the present system. Q311 Paul Holmes: This is about the collection of records and the passing on of records in terms of what is happening with prisoner education. In one of the prisons we visited they were saying, "We hardly ever get any records coming from a previous prison". NATFHE and the Association of Colleges did some research where 61 per cent of the people who responded said they always sent such records on, but 67 per cent said they hardly ever received any such records. Mr Taubman: Part of it is the terrific movement of prisoners. You might send the records on to the prison that you think the prisoner is being transferred to, and they never actually arrive there: they are at another prison altogether. Numbers are swamping everything, I think. The phenomenal rise in numbers is really ---- Chairman: It is numbers and change. Q312 Paul Holmes: But, in theory, if this was electronic and computerised it would be so easy. Mr Taubman: Yes, and one assessment at the start which could follow a prisoner through all the establishments they were in. Q313 Paul Holmes: You are saying that prisoners have to have the basic reassessment every time they go to a new institution. Mr Taubman: Yes. Ms Harding: The electronic transfer would solve some of the issues that were raised about doing calculus or something. Internet access is not allowed in British prisons - the Open University programmes, a lot of distance learning programmes. Some of our prisons will not even allow us to take materials in on CD-ROM. A lot of modern education is provided using that type of technology, and that is a whole area of work where, for the more able students - and there are numbers who are more able, and numbers doing OU courses - it has to be transcribed, and they have to do the courses that are more paper-based. In order to do some of the work that might be more useful possibly to industry in the future, they have to have access to the internet. Q314 Paul Holmes: We did hear in Scandinavia that there were examples of allowing access to limited pages on the internet. So it can be done, although it appears we cannot do it in England. But the original question, about transferring prisoners' educational records around - when are we going to get to grips with something as basic and simple as that? Dr Brennan: I think that is a question you have to address to the Prison Service. Ms Mitchell: Colleges can do it currently. We can move students' records around, however big the college. We have been asking the Prison Service to bring in electronic transfer of records for 15 years. When we manage that, we will stop the retesting and reassessment. We will move forward. I have to admit that our transfer of records is a shambles in the Prison Service. Chairman: We got your "shambles" in! Q315 Jonathan Shaw: That leads us on to the next point. We have a heading here, "How funding can be improved". There is always pressure and there are always demands for more money in every area of the public sector. "How can we better use funding?" might be a better heading. One of the things I want to ask you, in terms of the way the contracts might be shaped in the future, comes back to a point you made, John Brennan, in your opening statement, when you said that there was uncertainty about the lack of authority the head of learning skills would have with the new contracts. At the moment, my understanding is that they do not have any authority in terms of the contracts. How might that be? What are the possibilities, particularly if you are looking at flexibility, local prisons, and using the centres of excellence you described earlier, Merron, with the bakers? How could a head of learning and skills be able to use the local contracts flexibly, to maximise the money that is available? Ms Mitchell: Probably in the same way that a principal can run a college. They look for best value; they look to the LSC; they are accountable for outcomes; they are the education adviser. For the first time in prisons we have governors who understand learning and skills. They have links with the community and with the colleges in their area. They have links with the Prison Service, the Offender Learning Skills Unit and DfES. Given the right amount of authority within the prison, which some have - and some are doing excellent jobs in co‑ordinating the vocational training, the education, the voluntary sector within their prison - I think that the finance side is secondary to the quality side. I think that will be their ability - to look at the money available and spend it effectively across a broad range of services. Ms Harding: One of the difficulties we have had - for instance, a lot of our prisons are currently being refitted and they are refitting their education departments, but in only one of the nine prisons we work with have they spoken to the educationists about what was needed. So they have put a lot of resources into things that actually do not work in a teaching situation. Q316 Chairman: We went to a school like that in Norway. Ms Ohsan: There is an opportunity now - we were talking about the prototypes earlier - where the LSC is talking to heads of learning and skills. We do not know who else they are talking to, in terms of prototypes. I think that is an opportunity for those who are involved in education to be there at the time when they are developing the specifications, the contracts, to say, "This is the sort of thing you should have, so that it works better". I believe the AoC is not involved in the consultations. We are certainly not involved. Q317 Jonathan Shaw: This is an important junction, is it not, in terms of getting it right - and none of you are involved in this discussion. Ms Harding: In my own LSC, we have a person who has been appointed to look at this. We do not have any prisons within the Black Country area. They have no knowledge of the Prison Service, very little knowledge of education - because they have not come from the side that deals with college within the LSC, they are an administrator really - and we had to find out who they were by accident, rather than their automatically looking at the list of prison contractors and saying, "Oh, one of our local colleges is on that list. I can go there for information". That is a concern. Q318 Jonathan Shaw: We have not missed the boat just yet. Ms Harding: No. Q319 Jonathan Shaw: There is still plenty of time in which the LSC can get everyone together and sort this out, so that we have local flexibility that maximises the use of what is already there. Mr Taubman: The most effective use of resources would be to have an individual learning plan which was integrated and ran parallel to the sentence plan, and there was an entitlement for funding of that. Chairman: This has been an extremely good session - both the first session and this one. Because I know most of the panel of witnesses this morning so well, I know that you will keep in touch with us. If there are things that we did not cover, keep the dialogue going because we are, as I said before, determined to make this an excellent inquiry. [1] Note by witness. As the Rev. Gordon Ashworth wrote to us (June, 2002) concerning the Dialogue Group at HMP Whitemoor, when he was working in the chaplaincy at the prison: "We feel that the Dialogue Group at Whitemoor serves a very important function in allowing prisoners to express their feelings in a neutral environment and at the same time helps them to develop as human beings. Many people come into prison because of a lack of social skills and the Dialogue Group has helped prisoners to develop those skills." Rev. Ashworth is now based at HMP Wandsworth. |