UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 825-iv
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
Education and Skills Committee
Prison
Education
Wednesday 27 October 2004
MS JULIET
LYON, PROFESSOR AUGUSTIN JOHN, MR TOM ROBSON,
MR PAUL
O'DONNELL and MR JOHN BRENCHLEY
Evidence heard in Public Questions 320 - 417
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Education and Skills
Committee
on Wednesday 27 October 2004
Members present
Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Mr David Chaytor
Valerie Davey
Jeff Ennis
Mr Nick Gibb
Paul Holmes
Jonathan Shaw
________________
Memoranda submitted by Prison Reform Trust and OCR
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: MS
Juliet Lyon, Director, Prison Reform Trust; Professor Augustin John, Visiting Professor of Education,
University of Strathclyde; Mr Tom Robson,
National Executive Committee Member, Prison Officers' Association; and Mr Paul O'Donnell, Public Affairs
Manager, and Mr John Brenchley,
Regional Manager, South Region, OCR; examined.
Q320 Chairman: Can I welcome
our witnesses this morning and say, to Paul O'Donnell and John Brenchley, Tom
Robson, Juliet Lyon and Professor Augustin John, we are very grateful that you
could spend time with us this morning and the Select Committee depends a great
deal on the quality of the evidence that is given to the Committee. Tom, I have to express a view that we are
very disappointed that, even after some considerable time of notice, we did not
have confirmation of who was coming from Prison Officers' Association until
very late and I wonder why that was?
Mr Robson: I will apologise on behalf of the Association for that. It was brought to my attention through a
contact of mine that this was taking place and I volunteered my services, if
you like. It was at a late stage and I
can only simply apologise for that. I
think there is a possibility that documentation had gone astray somewhere down
the line.
Q321 Chairman: From our side,
we do not think that is true. Who is
your President, is it President or Chairman?
Mr Robson: The General Secretary is Mr Brian Caton.
Q322 Chairman: And Colin Moses?
Mr Robson: Colin is the national Chairman.
Q323 Chairman: Normally, our
Select Committee expect the most senior officers of any organisation we invite
to be here. Will you tell them that we
expect them to come at an early date, set by this Committee, and if they do not
come I will send someone to bring them?
I do not appreciate people treating a select committee inquiry
lightly. This is the first and most important
look at prison education that has ever been done because it has only ever been in
our remit for the 18 months. We take it
very seriously and we expect POA particularly to take it seriously.
Mr Robson: I think what I can say certainly, on behalf of the Prison Officers'
Association, is that prison officers and the Prison Officers' Association in
particular certainly do take the education of our charges very seriously
indeed.
Q324 Chairman: Tom, I am sure
that is right, but I hope the message will get home that we expect to see them
very soon?
Mr Robson: Yes, certainly it will.
Q325 Chairman: Thank you. Because we have got five witnesses, we
cannot ask all of you to give an introductory word, but I am going to be
terribly cavalier about this and ask Juliet to say something to get us going? I will give everyone individually a chance
as we proceed.
Ms Lyon: As you know, we submitted it, the Prison Reform Trust conducted an
inquiry into prisoners' education from the prisoners' perspective, which was
published last October, and that was our first thorough-going look at prisoner
education. I was very pleased to be
able to be part of that because some years previously I conducted a study for
the Home Office which was about young offenders, called 'Tell Them So They Listen'. It was Research Study 201 for the Home
Office. In that case we were asking
young offenders about their career paths into crime, through prison and their
hopes and fears about resettlement. It
was interesting then and it emerged very clearly from this more recent study
that prisoners saw education as a kind of oasis, an important place in which
things would happen, in which they would be treated differently, quite often,
from how they felt they were treated in the rest of the prison, and where they
would gain things, skills and qualifications, which would help them in terms of
going straight, maybe finding work that would be more appropriate, etc., etc. It was a valued thing in pretty much of a
desert, in terms of what else was on offer.
I think what is disappointing, in terms of key things which emerge from
our study, is that, despite this valued place, recognised as such, and despite
a huge injection of cash from DfES and a takeover of responsibility for
education, which really is to be welcomed, we are still seeing a situation
where education is pretty patchy, where prisoners do not always get to classes,
where courses are curtailed or cut short by their moving around the system
under the pressure of overcrowding.
Also what officials refer to as the churn, the movement of prisoners
from one gaol to another, so you get a situation where people cannot always
complete things, where people are virtually queuing up for scarce places in
things they particularly want to do. It
seems, to me anyway, as if it is pretty early days for prison education, in
terms of it reaching to as many people as it could do and should do and
providing the kinds of benefits which clearly it can. It is curtailed by the pressures on the system, to some extent,
and by historic accident of things like the variation in amounts of money that
are given to different education departments in different prisons. I cannot see a rationale for why Wandsworth
would have £450 per head for prisoner education and Leicester would have, I would
need to check but I think it is, about £1,800 per prisoner, per head. It is these discrepancies in terms of
allocated budget which need to be looked at.
Q326 Chairman: That is a very
good opener. Professor John, what is
your view? You are a distinguished
academic. What we are picking up, and
we were in Helsinki and Oslo recently, only the week before last, looking at
some of the prisons there, as we see more prisons, what comes home to the
Committee, I think, I think we agree on this, is how do you insert a culture of
education into a prison, how do you change the culture? We did not come back starry-eyed, that they
have all the answers; they were struggling to impose a culture of education and
training on a prison system. Do you
think that is the serious challenge?
Professor John: I think the picture in the UK over the years reflects the
patchiness that you were describing and it was not a very basic issue of what
prisons are for. In the Foreword to the
report, 'Time to Learn', which I wrote, I made the point that if there is a
prioritisation of the knowledge-based economy then education reforms should
touch every part of the system, including prisons, for the simple reason that,
as the statistics show, more than 50 per cent of people in the secure state
have had very poor education, certainly poor educational qualifications. The number of young people in YOIs (youth
offender institutions) who have either had interrupted schooling or have been
excluded from school and had their education further curtailed by being in a
secure state does not bode well for what the Government intends, in terms of
having a more educated and knowledgeable workforce. It seems to me therefore that there must be issues around
education in prisons as an entitlement, and an entitlement which can be
delivered through structural organisation so that it does not become a lottery,
it does not become a question of chance, it does not have to compete with other
things, but, as part of a sentencing plan and indeed in relation to people who
are on remand similarly, opportunities are created such that education cannot
be interrupted, and where people have been out of education they could have
their needs assessed and met.
Q327 Chairman: Thank you for
that. Tom, one thing which leaps off
the page in the evidence we have been given so far is again getting back to how
you change the atmosphere in a prison, in terms of being very positive about
education and training. What do you
think about what has been coming up time and time again, that there is a much
greater financial incentive to do rather boring work in prison rather than get
an education? Do you think that
differential is defensible? Why do you
think that still exists?
Mr Robson: I think that we are in the situation where budgets are very
important but I think that people are more important, contact between people,
and I think that prison officers ought to be put in the educational link. They spend 24 hours a day with their
charges, especially in youth custody, and prison officers themselves should be
utilised to give skills to the inmates in their charge. I think that should be the way of the
future. If you look back in time at the
Borstal system, prison officers were very much utilised in the education system
at that time, and I think, sadly, we are being taken out of the link, and most
prison officers want to do positive work with inmates. Also, I think we are missing a big
opportunity to use what I term mentoring, and that is to use inmates themselves
to mentor other inmates and teach skills to them. I think that sometimes we aim too high and maybe we ought to aim
a little lower and try to deal with basic educational needs in prison. I see prison officers teaching prisoners how
to fill in, for instance, housing applications, various licensing applications
and things of that nature, which is very basic but I believe very, very
necessary information to give to people in prisons. I think the opportunity has been lost.
Q328 Chairman: That is very
interesting. What is your view then of
prison officers generally, the POA position on the fact that, when we were in
Scandinavia, not that they have all the answers but their training period for
prison officers is a year, a year's training. The evidence which this Committee
has had is that it is a very, very short period of training in the UK and it
has been cut, there is less training than there used to be. Somebody said that it has been cut from 11
weeks down to six or eight weeks, is that right?
Mr Robson: If a prison officer receives any training in today's Prison Service
they are very lucky indeed, once they have got through the initial training,
that is.
Q329 Chairman: For how long is
the initial training?
Mr Robson: The initial training is seven weeks. We are talking here about people who have got a very big impact
on people's lives. The mandatory
training which took place for prison officers throughout their career has now
been abolished and it is down to each individual governor in prison
establishments as to how they utilise their budget and, out of their budget,
what they put towards the training of prison officers. There has never been an element of prison
officers' training that would give the skill to impart skill to others, if that
makes sense to you. I think that is a
man-management skill, an interpersonal skill, which one would pick up during
the course of doing prison officers' work day in and day out.
Chairman: That is most interesting.
We will come back to that a little bit later. Let us look at the suitability of educational opportunities for
prisoners.
Q330 Paul Holmes: Looking
generally at education, there is a general issue across the board, not least in
prisons, that the Government are saying they want certain things on education,
they will put money into certain areas and they will set targets to make sure
they get it. FE colleges, for example,
are saying that they are being pushed into basic skills and level two but
anything above that has to be paid for by the student or the employer. It seems to me there is a slightly parallel situation
in prisons, in that there is a huge emphasis now on basic skills. Half the prisoners lack basic skills in
writing, and so forth, but therefore half of them do not. Is there a danger that, by emphasising basic
skills, by having key performance targets which are based around that, they are
neglecting at least half the prison population?
Mr Brenchley: The figures show that there is a very high percentage of people in
prison who do not have that level of basic skill. However, even a majority probably of the ones who have exceeded
that level have not proceeded far beyond it, so it is not exactly an either/or
situation. For me, unless you can get
to the first level through basic skills at, say, level one up to level two,
which we can talk about later if that is pertinent, the opportunity for you to
proceed into employment or to further your life chances in any other way is
seriously reduced and in some cases totally reduced. Therefore, my argument would be, if you have not got the basic
platform you have not got anything to spring off from.
Professor John: I think, as in schooling, there needs to be a concern about
responding to people's needs and identifying those needs adequately. One can understand the concentration on the
acquisition of basic skills. However,
there are many people across the spectrum who would have had advanced training
or education programmes interrupted by being put in custody, and really it is a
matter of building upon where people are at the point of entry into the secure
state. The issue then of how one
assesses their educational needs and builds that into the delivery of a
sentencing plan is critical here.
Q331 Paul Holmes: We have
visited four English prisons so far as part of the inquiry and we have got the
same sorts of mixed messages from prisoners and prison officers and
educationalists that we talked to there.
Some of them are saying there is not enough chance for people to go
beyond basic skills, to do a university degree, etc., partly because they
cannot access the Internet, and that type of thing, but the vast majority of
people were saying that it was the basic skills they needed. If you want to provide the whole range, and
perhaps there are 20 per cent of prisoners who want much higher than basic
skills, can we do that and is there enough money in the system? Is it just a question of funding or is it a
matter of the attitude within the system?
Ms Lyon: I think there is a tendency to go with the lowest common multiple,
that is a good one, and you have drawn attention to the use of target-driven
education and I do think that is problematic.
In the interviews that we did for 'Time to Learn' there were 153
prisoners involved and of those around half felt that they were not being
stretched, they were not able to access educational opportunities that were at
the level they were, which was beyond the basic level. Certainly in an ideal world one would want
to tailor education to individuals, and I think that is a hard thing to ask of
a public service which is struggling to cope with the day-to-day processing of
people around an overcrowded system. It
does mean, as a result, I think, that the combination of targets set and the
pressure on the system needs good delivery on the basic skills. Interestingly, there is not much pick‑up,
as far as I can see, of learning difficulties or learning disabilities. If you look at the work which is being done
on mental health, that is in very stark contrast to the lack of work on
learning difficulties and learning disabilities within the prison
population. Although you have got the
basic skills, you are not picking up people, for example, who have spent time
in special aid, or who have been statemented, and so forth. At the other end of the spectrum there are
people way beyond that, often very frustrated, feeling that all they do is go
through a series of hoops of continuous assessment. Assessment seems to have been very well developed. Delivery of a response to those assessments
seems to be lagging behind.
Mr Brenchley: The other point which relates to that is length of sentence. The education people at Holloway tell me the
average stay there is 22 days and that includes an initial assessment. There is precious little time then to do
anything by way of getting anybody through an education programme, particularly
by the time you have sorted out all those issues which have to be addressed on
induction, including assessment but also including orientating the individual
to a regime they are going to spend their life in for a period of time. A lot of this relates to length of sentence
and my understanding of the sector is that there are different solutions in
different establishments depending on the length of stay, and therefore whether
it is possible to build an effective individual learning plan with an
individual or just rake them in, do a test or two and let them out again.
Q332 Paul Holmes: There is a
tension there between basic skills provision and higher levels of education
provision. Is there also a tension
though, because I think, traditionally, some prison education was seen as being
therapeutic, particularly for prisoners who were in there for longer
sentences? What we saw in one of the
prisons we visited was an art class, where clearly the whole emphasis was
personal satisfaction and therapy rather than education as such. Is that side of prison education being
squeezed out now, because everybody has to help the prison governor meet KP
targets?
Ms Lyon: It would be very disappointing if it were. Fifty-six per cent of the prison population
now are serving four years or more. You
have got, on the one hand, these people spinning through the system, very short
periods of stay, Lancaster Farms Young Offenders Institution, average length of
stay for sentenced young men 11 days.
That has got one of the best education units that I have seen, in terms
of actual physical plant, in the country, but clearly it cannot make much use
of its facilities given that move through.
You have got that group and then you have got this other group of
people, because sentence lengths have increased markedly over the last ten
years, who are getting this four years or more, a very substantial part of the
prison population. For those people,
clearly one has to pay tremendous attention to a period of years when they
could really make amazing use of education.
I can give you an anecdote. We
have just had a Masters student placed with us at the Prison Reform Trust and
the reason that we agreed to take him on for a year's placement was because he had
this just amazing story to tell. He had
spent years in prison, as a young offender and then as a young adult, and he
said, "When I was in my cell reading Zola" and we were all completely
flabbergasted at this notion, it did not sound very usual, "I thought, why
shouldn't I read this in French?" and he learned French. He did that because the chaplain in that
gaol and the head of education in that gaol formed a rapport with him and
supported him to learn French. He went
on to do a French degree, slept rough in Paris in order to do that part of the
placement because he had no money. A
person who had really been lifted out of a situation by education and by his
attachment to it and those individuals who had helped him and it was just an
extraordinary story. I doubt it is the
only story of that kind. Education
seems to be one of the few areas in prison life which really can reach somebody
and give them something which will change them markedly.
Mr Robson: I am interested in what was said about the inmate reading
Zola. There are a lot of inmates who do
a lot of good work, what you might term homework, in their cells, and that is a
constant, because education from time to time is interrupted for reasons of
security or lack of staff, etc., etc., and the governor has to make a decision
as to what facility he has to trim, and quite often, in fact, it is
education. There are charities which
work alongside prison governors and indeed the Prison Officers' Association to
provide in‑cell work. Those of
you who read The Independent might have noted that there was a quite good
article in yesterday's Independent about fine cell work, which hardened
prisoners are taking in their cells, making fine quilts and fine artwork as a
therapeutic perhaps rather than educational facility. Again, I think that therapy is part of education, and very
important. At least if someone is
spending a lot of time in a cell then that time can be utilised usefully rather
than the present trend of watching cartoon shows on the television.
Q333 Paul Holmes: My last
question carries on this theme and it is about the tension between basic skills
and higher skills and therapeutic education.
The Chief Inspector of Prisons has said that the key performance targets
lead to a focus on numbers of prisoners achieving qualifications rather than on
meeting the needs of individuals. A
constituent of mine who currently is serving a sentence of about seven years, I
think, has got an argument going on. He
wants to use the education in prison, he is very good at ceramics and he wants
to use his computer skills to write poetry, but the prison are saying, "You've
got to get CLAITs level so-and-so, you've got to get skills," so that is
leading to certain problems. Who guides
a prisoner into what is the most suitable form of education, and are the KPTs stopping
a lot of that and saying, "No, you've got to do this short course because it
helps us tick our KPT box"?
Mr Brenchley: Certainly KPTs direct what happens in prisons, there are no two
ways about that, and my source for that is the various education officers and
heads of learning and skills that I have spoken to, something like 20 of them
in the last fortnight. Often,
achievement of a KPT, even if it is fairly mechanical, through the initial
education process, then triggers life-changing experience and achievement. One example for us would be that there has
just been announced a winner for OCR's Recognising Achievement awards, of which
we have about 20 spread right across the whole spectrum, who is a prisoner in a
prison in Wiltshire, who started off on basic skills and has now worked his way
through a Firm Start qualification, which is the basic understanding which
enables you to set up your own business, which you can do even if presenting
yourself to an employer turns out to be unsatisfactory when you leave. That would just be an example of where the
initial level of achievement then enables achievement at higher levels and
enables an element of self-realisation in the individual which can have the
rehabilitative and resettlement effect, and it is considered much more strongly
by heads of learning and skills and various support agencies they work with
outside the prison. I quote that as one
example. The other example I wanted to
quote really was, that kind of life-changing experience can be created within
the education department but it can be created in all other environments within
the prison. One I wanted to quote was
HMP Manchester, which I visited
recently, where one of the major driving forces is actually the chap who runs
the industry workshops, which include a range of, for example, commercial
selling contracts for other prisons, where they do an entry level three in
manufacturing, which involves an element of research. Interestingly, in the light of what you were saying just now, the
one area where they have difficulty achieving that qualification within a prison
environment is the area which requires them to research what is going on in the
broader world, which they could do by Internet and they are doing by having visitors
from local industry, and so on, liaising with them and discussing employability
opportunities. It is not just
education-driven, clearly it is driven by the other areas within the prison, in
this case particularly an individual instructor in the workshop, and also by
the physical education instructors, who are able to do similar things in a
different environment, and so on and so on.
For me, the good news is the way in which other sectors within prisons
are developing an understanding of how prisoners can be enabled to achieve and
feel more confident about contributing to that process.
Q334 Paul Holmes: You have got
shining examples there, where you have got the prisoner learning French so he
can read Zola in the original, but are they not the tip of the iceberg? Are not the majority of prisoners either not
taking part because they do not want to, or because there is not the space, or
the prison officers can move the education classes, or they have been excluded
as a punishment because they are seen as being difficult?
Mr Brenchley: Yes, they are the tip of the iceberg. I was talking to a group of four education managers and heads of
learning and skills in the North recently and the education manager from Leeds
Prison. I was saying, "Give me examples
of life-changing experiences that individuals have had in prisons," and they
quoted me Ali who had come into the country and could not speak English and now
is running his own hairdressing business, and all the other examples. I could see the education manager from Leeds
just sort of bridling a bit at this and he said, "John, it isn't the individual
cases, it's all of them." That was the
crucial message he wanted to get across to me.
What he was saying was that every single one who is enabled to achieve
and is able, what is more, to progress through the levels, in relation to the
dichotomy you raised earlier, is saving the country money, it is saving
individuals across the country grief, and so on. There really are high stakes being played for when they take
somebody on the first rung of the ladder and enable them to climb it.
Q335 Chairman: The evidence is
that it is still reaching only a very small proportion of the prison
population, even those who are on long sentences?
Mr Brenchley: Yes; agreed. We would love
there to be more and we would love them to be able to achieve better than they
do now in all the environments of the prison, not just within education, which
is doing its bit towards that.
Professor John: It seems to me that in order for that progress not to be
interrupted there must be a system whereby the learning which is taking place,
or which begins in one institution, can be recorded. In one of the recommendations we make in 'Time to Learn', we
argue for the sort of learning passport which can follow the prisoner to
wherever, indicating what they have done, whether that was based on an
assessment or not and what could be built upon. Since the degree of movement across the secure state is a given,
I would have thought that positive story could only be sustained if indeed such
an arrangement were in place so that there could be continuity, wherever people
may end up, from where they were before.
Q336 Chairman: What can be done
to reduce the churn then? Is this
inevitable? The picture which comes
over from the evidence you have given so far and the evidence we have taken and
the visits we have been on is this highly mobile state of the prison estate and
mobility in every case. We can come to this a bit later but the number of
prison officers who are recruited and then drop out within two years, the
average stay of a prison governor in the job in one place is very, very
short. Whether you have got prisoners
whizzing round the system, you have got staff whizzing round the system, it is
a wonder anything can be accomplished in a management system where everything
moves. Is it inevitable, or can we do
something to change that?
Ms Lyon: From the Prison Reform Trust perspective, one solution clearly would
be "Let's build more prisons," put forward variously. In fact, in the last ten years, another 13 prisons have been built
and nine of them are overcrowded already.
It is hard to see that as a solution.
I think the solution has got to be in looking at groups within the
prison population to work out whether they actually need to be there, and there
is some cross-over there with groups which are not getting access to
education. If you look at the remand
population, so a large group of prisoners, at any one time they represent
around 12,000 prisoners, but over the years 58,000 people enter prison on
remand. Of those, a fifth are acquitted
when they get to court, more than half do not go on to serve anything other
than a community penalty, so arguably they need not have been incarcerated in
the first place. There are parts of the
system which are particularly messy; remand probably is one of the messiest
because it involves so many different sectors - courts, CPS, police, probation,
prison, etc. - and there are breaks at every point in the system. We have just produced a report called
'Lacking Conviction' which is about women on remand, which has shown clearly
the way in which the system is failing at different points. The messiness, I think, makes it hard to
address, but if one were to address the overuse of remand, if one were to
remove people who have severe mental health problems and put them into health
treatment settings, rather than prison settings, it would be possible gradually
I think to pull down numbers, along with a Government commitment to rebalance
the system, and have more effective community penalties for people who have
committed comparatively minor offences.
If one can get to the position where prison is genuinely a place of
absolute last resort, for serious and violent offenders only, then work can go
into making it a place of excellent last resort. I do have some fears. I
think it is an unintended consequence of reform that, because we have failed in
this country to reserve prison as that place of last resort when improvements
are made, whether it is in health, drug treatment or education, there is a
slight danger, more than slight in some parts of the country, of the courts
making decisions about disposal. It is
tempting to think, "Ah, those things have improved, better education, some health
treatment and detox.," and then there is a lack of that in the outside
community and other disposals, then to use prison for that purpose, which of
course is not what it was intended to be used for. I am sorry to give you a kind of global answer, but I do think
that one cannot look at this without seeing it in that wider context.
Chairman: That is most useful. We
will come back to some of the more global questions about drug addiction in
relation to the difficulties later.
Q337 Mr Gibb: I am interested
in Mr Robson's views on a lot of things.
Would you share the view of the Prison Reform Trust that the answer to
this continual movement is to release more prisoners, or is it the POA's view
that we should build more prisons? Have
you been lobbying for more prison-building?
Mr Robson: I think certainly the big problem facing all of us is the issue of
overcrowding. It seems that various
solutions have been tried, one being the tagging and early release of a certain
amount of the population. How you look
at the figures depends, I suppose, on how successful it has been. I do not think it has been terribly
successful. It would seem to me that if
you can tag someone who has already been committed to prison we should be able
to tag someone rather than remand them into custody. I think that is something which may well be looked at, to try to
keep down the population on remand, which, as Julia said, is very heavy
indeed. If that cannot be found as a
solution then the only solution that the Prison Officers' Association can put
forward is a properly-sized prison estate to hold the size of the population
that we seem to have and is ever-increasing.
There was one other point made and that was about governors who seem to
spend not a long time in charge of establishments, and that is something which
has concerned the Prison Officers' Association for many, many years. Quite simply, governors are recruited
nationally and the promotion structure is such that they need to move up and
down the country in order to attain the highest level of employment, and that
is understandable. However, there are
levels of management below governor which could be more stable within the
Prison Service and I think that the whole promotion structure would need to be
looked at in order to achieve that.
Q338 Mr Gibb: What is your
understanding of the percentage of prisoners who cannot read when they
enter? We have heard about a very good
assessment system.
Mr Robson: I did have some figures regarding that. We are talking about people with interrupted education, and the
like, being something like 47 per cent.
I would question that figure as maybe being too low, but the Prison
Officers' Association have not got the means to be able to survey that
ourselves. From the experience of
prison officers, the incidence of people who have got a very, very basic or
below basic education is extremely high.
Q339 Mr Gibb: What about
reading, in particular?
Mr Robson: In particular, with reading, the basic skills, numeracy and
reading.
Q340 Mr Gibb: Forty-seven per
cent do not have those skills, is that right?
Mr Robson: Yes.
Q341 Mr Gibb: What percentage
do not have those skills when they leave prison?
Mr Robson: Again, I have not got any figure for that, but various incentives
have been taken, not only within our education departments. For instance, it is no use having
exceptional facilities for education when, because of inappropriate staffing,
or whatever, they are not always fully operational. Again, I would turn to charitable organisations which are making
use of prisoners' time in cells where they are teaching those basic skills. There is the Shannon Trust, Toe by Toe and
others. I think that they are very
useful, but unfortunately I cannot give you figures. I do not know whether any of my colleagues might be able to.
Q342 Mr Gibb: The
representative body of the prison officers in this country does not know how
successful your reading teaching is in prison, is that what you are telling me?
Mr Robson: We have no established way of being able to produce those figures.
Q343 Mr Gibb: Why not?
Mr Robson: We have not got the resources.
We rely on the Home Office and the Prison Service to produce those kinds
of figures.
Q344 Mr Gibb: Is not that
rather uncaring, that you do not give a damn really about how successful your
teaching of reading is, in prison?
Mr Robson: That might be an opinion that you have, but I can assure you that
the Prison Officers' Association do give a damn and prison officers also give a
damn. They work day in and day out
trying to improve the lives of people who are sent to us.
Q345 Mr Gibb: How do I know
that though?
Mr Robson: I know that because I have worked in this operation for 20-plus
years. You would know that, I assume, by
speaking to people such as myself and my colleagues in this forum, who will
tell you that is a fact.
Mr Gibb: If you do not have facts about the proportion of prisoners that
leave unable to read, what is your - - -
Chairman: Nick, I understand your line of questioning but even I, as Chair,
would suggest that if anyone should know those figures it should be the
Government or the Prison Service.
Q346 Mr Gibb: Surely we can ask
them too. I think people who work in
prisons ought to know as well. Do you
have a feel for the proportion of prisoners who leave unable to read? Sometimes does it go down?
Mr Robson: I think that we have tried every which way. I think that our educationalists have tried,
I think prison officers have tried and prison governors have tried. I could not sit here and say that we have
had a magnificent impact but what I think I can say is that we have had a
significant impact. There are many
stories such as the anecdotal ones told by colleagues that I could relate to
you, but I could not give you statistics.
Q347 Mr Gibb: What about
Juliet, do you have a feel for what proportion of prisoners leave prison unable
to read?
Ms Lyon: I know how many achieve basic skills, which I am sure you know too,
because the Prison Service published in its Annual Report that the numbers
achieved were 89,200 key work skills awards, which was nearly double the Prison
Service target, and 41,300 basic skills awards. What is not quite so clear, and it is difficult, and this is
partly the tangle of having KPIs which have to be met, is that there are
figures given for the number who go into work, which we have challenged because
they appear to relate more to people who have got job interviews set up for
them rather than people who are known to go into employment. The calculation of how many are leaving
prison with a qualification and going into work is not necessarily quite what
it seems. We know essentially how many have
interviews established for them rather than how many go into work.
Q348 Mr Gibb: In your
experience of the Prison Service, is it your fear that, that 47 who enter, that
goes down to, what, 25 per cent when they leave who cannot read, or would
you say it stays at round about 47 per cent?
Ms Lyon: To be honest, really I do not know. Given the length, as we said earlier on, the very short stays of
half the population who are flying through so fast, logically very few of them
are going to be able to change their literacy level in that period of time, or
indeed in the series of short hits, because obviously very many of them are
back in again for another short sentence.
We know the reconviction rate averages out at 59 per cent. If you look at the young offenders, the 18s
to 20s, that goes up to almost three-quarters, 71 per cent, at the moment,
half of whom are going to be back in prison, so you are getting a series of
short, interrupted periods in gaol where they might get an injection of
education each time. In the current
system, they might go right back to stage one.
Q349 Mr Gibb: As custodians of
the taxpayers' money, how do we assess the effectiveness of basic teaching in
prison if we do not have any figures for the leavers?
Ms Lyon: It has always amazed me that there are very few outcomes that you
can actually check in a measurable way.
One of the things about the movement of governors, to which the Chairman
referred earlier on, is that it cannot increase your morale if you do not have
any ability to determine whether your institution is succeeding. There is not any 'per prison' set of figures
for outcomes, so you do not know whether your prisoners leave and are less
likely to reoffend than somebody else in a comparable gaol somewhere else in
the country. That is partly because
prisoners are moving around the system and partly because the nature of the
record-keeping at the moment does not actually allow you to have that
information. You will get a ballpark
figure for age bands in the prison population but you will not get it tied to
an establishment, so you will not know, as a governor, whether you are running
a successful establishment, you will not know as head of learning and skills
necessarily the kinds of outcomes which would help you feel that you were doing
a decent job.
Q350 Chairman: I am thinking of
the parallel of added value. Those
colleges and schools that were very angry, in terms of GCSE and O level
results, where they were finding it difficult to show the wonderful added value
that they brought to students who came in, say, at 11 and did wonderfully well
although they did not reach the high scores in five GCSEs A to C, and so on, is
there the possibility of having an added value score for a prison so that you
can get a healthy evaluation?
Professor John: I suppose it would be difficult to construct one. The lessons from schooling, I think, are
pertinent here, in the sense that a measure of someone's progress might take
account of the development of other social competences apart from academic
learning as such, or the acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills, so that
the individual might perform better as a social individual as a result of the
quality of the mentoring they received from education staff, from other
prisoners, from prison officers, so that their social competence is
enhanced. There are ways of measuring
that, in terms of a 'before and after' scenario. Indeed, one of the recommendations we make in the 'Time to Learn'
report is that key performance indicators for education and training should be
based on the progression of individual prisoner learners and not on absolute
performance as measured by exam results.
I think the key issue here is how are these performance indicators going
to be constructed? I take the point
behind your question, surely it must be sensible for prisoners to know that the
progress they make on all other indicators or indices is acknowledged because
it goes to the issue of their overall social competence.
Q351 Chairman: Would it be
sensible then to pay a prisoner as much to get an education as to do routine
work in the workshops?
Professor John: That again is one of the things we have noted. There should be an incentive for prisoners
to access education and to see progress with an education plan being as
important for them, in terms of their own incapacity, as for other things that
they might want to do. Some prisoners,
as you know, are having to juggle, or indeed give up, the opportunity to earn
if they want to pursue education programmes, because of the way in which the
whole thing is organised, and I think that element of it needs to be removed.
Ms Lyon: What we found in the study was, one issue was about the financial
incentive, and people have said to us, "Well, you know, outside in society
people make a choice; if they want to go into further education it's going to
cost them and they're going to have to lose other opportunities in order to pay
for that one, or to gain access to that one."
I do not think it is a relevant comparison, in that choice is not an
issue in a prison really and money is not either, except that what little money
you can earn, and it is just a few pounds, of course has an incredibly high
value because that is all you have for your 'phone cards or whatever small
things you are going to get from the prison canteen. We are not talking large sums of money. I think differential rewards for different sorts of work,
particularly some of the more mundane workshop work, is a positive disincentive
and it should be removed. I cannot see
a justification for it. The other
commodity that matters, and 'Time to Learn' picked that up very clearly, was
time, time out of cell, and levels of purposeful activity in a prison
estate. For the last eight years the
Prison Service has not been able to make its own KPI of a minimum of 24 hours a
week purposeful activity per prisoner.
In fact, in the last ten years, the increase in purposeful activity
amounts to round about ten minutes per prisoner per day, that is the level of
increase, which I think is a very stark way of thinking about what this influx
of numbers has done. There has been a
fantastic injection of hours of education, other opportunities, training, put
into the Prison Service but it has been mopped up by the numbers, so the actual
overall movement is fractional. I
think, if you are making choices, as prisoners interviewed in 'Time to Learn'
found, between queuing up to make a 'phone call, getting a shower, going to the
gym, going to worship, any of these sorts of things, if you are having to
balance these sorts of things with trying to find a bit of time for education,
that again is another disincentive.
Q352 Mr Chaytor: I want to ask
about key performance targets and ask first of all what the difference is
between KPT and KPI, or are the terms interchangeable?
Mr Robson: As far as I am aware, there is no difference at all between a KPT
and a KPI, it is simply different terminology.
Q353 Mr Chaytor: How are the key
performance targets established?
Presumably there is a global total established by the Home Office which
is fed down into the regional offices of the Home Office which are then distributed
to individual prisons. Do individual
governors have some discretion over this or is a target simply imposed on them?
Mr Brenchley: If I can answer that, on the basis of the recent
conversations. I understand there are
something like 43 key performance targets across the prison as a whole, of
which a small number relate to the provision of education in its broadest
sense. Those are split into skills for
life, which are basic skills, in common parlance, and work skills, which have a
definition of what kinds of qualifications are eligible to be counted towards
these work skills. The good news, I
suppose, going through the figures, is that prisons are doing extremely well
and hitting those targets, but whether or not they were the right size in the
first place, of course, is anyone's guess at the moment. I understand the process by which it works
is a breaking down from national level, this is simply in terms of the two
education targets, at regional level and then further down to institutional
level, based on factors of which heads of learning and skills are not aware,
necessarily, but they are something to do with the size of the prison and the
number of prisoners going through.
Certainly there is an element of opaqueness around the decision-making
at the individual institutional level, as far as the feedback we have from the
sector is concerned.
Q354 Mr Chaytor: There is an
issue around the sense of ownership of the individual prisons of these targets
and the relevance of the targets to the size of each prison?
Mr Brenchley: My understanding is that they are not negotiated, they are simply
provided, and the prison does its best to meet them. As I say, that is the intelligence I have, through the sector.
Q355 Mr Chaytor: Therefore, the
consequence of that is, what does that say about the appropriateness of the
targets and the way in which each prison can select qualifications to hit the
targets?
Mr Brenchley: If I can quote you an example from HMP Styal, in Cheshire, one of
their arguments is that they have a number of repeat visitors, therefore
somebody will get a key performance target at a particular level, a level one or
a level two, or whatever, and will achieve it and everybody is very
pleased. They go away, they come back
again, there are no key performance targets for them to attempt subsequently,
so somehow they are less of a priority for a programme than they would have
been had they been more able to contribute to a key performance target. There is definitely a skewing effect there.
Q356 Mr Chaytor: Do you think
it is the case that, given this phenomenon of churn and all this transfer of
prisoners, presumably a prisoner can go to Styal, do their level one
qualification and contribute to the key performance target and then be shifted
down to Holloway and do exactly the same again and count as a KPT for
Holloway? Does that happen and, if so,
how frequently?
Mr Brenchley: I guess it could, because they might not even show up on any of the
awarding bodies' records as the same person, for example, there would not be
necessarily any reason. I know that one
of the issues which affects a number of heads of learning and skills in
particular is that somebody can do the bulk of their learning programme in one
prison, they can be bumped off to another prison, they can pass the initial
test at a particular level because they have done all the work somewhere else
and it is the receiving prison which gets the credit for the KPT. I do not want to suggest that there is
furore around the sector about all that, but certainly there is a kind of quiet
resentment that one prison has done all the work and another has got the KPT.
Q357 Mr Chaytor: It is fairly
clear that this Stalinist, top-down approach to KPTs is wide open to
manipulation and abuse, is it not?
Would that be a fair comment? If
I were running a prison, on the evidence of our visits and the evidence we have
had here, I could think of at least 15 ways of manipulating the system to the
advantage of my prison which was not necessarily in the interests of prisoners.
Mr Brenchley: I think there is no doubt that pragmatism comes into play then and
realism comes into play, and that is certainly the feedback we get from
individual heads of learning and skills in particular, and then they say how
they hope, within that pragmatic environment, to be able to respond to the
needs of individual learners. At the
moment it is a relatively new regime, it is a relatively new phenomenon, and I
think they are still working it out in some way.
Ms Lyon: Just a clarification. There
are 19 KPIs set by the Prison Service and then the KPTs are refinements of
those KPIs so that they are more detailed.
Q358 Mr Chaytor: The KPIs are
the broader-brush headings?
Ms Lyon: Yes. The Service sets those
in the business plan.
Q359 Mr Chaytor: There are 43
KPTs?
Ms Lyon: I think so. I have not got
the figures, but there are 19 KPIs set and they are agreed and they are top‑down,
they are set centrally, but there are calibrations, as I understand it. There has been some shifting of targets
done, based on acknowledging that particular groups would find it particularly
hard. A clear example of that would be
levels of assaults, for example, that you would expect because of a more
volatile population in the young offender group, that you would have a higher
assault rate in a young offender institution.
Consequently, the expectations have been tailored to match that, to some
extent, rather than requiring it to match adult prison.
Q360 Mr Chaytor: In terms of
the KPIs and KPTs relevant to education and training, is there a standard model
across the country? Does each prison,
and each region even, submit the same qualifications to meet their KPTs?
Ms Lyon: There is the overall target for basic skills qualifications, which
has been set nationally, then there are regional plans drawn up. I know they are drawn up by the regional
managers, but whether they are drawn up with education bods as well, I would
hope that they are but I do not know that.
Your point about skewing, I think, is an important one. If you take an example of the governor who
set up Lancaster Farms, he said, "I want to train my young men to know how to
use complaints systems properly, and my complaints are going to go up and
that's not going to be so very good and I'm going to have to discuss this with
the area manager who won't like it. In
effect, these young men need to know how to negotiate their way through a
system and represent themselves properly."
That means you need a governor who is prepared to stand out against
things and not mind if his complaints shoot up because of that good work done.
Q361 Mr Chaytor: From the
Prison Reform Trust's point of view, are you satisfied that the KPIs and KPTs
relevant to education and training are the right ones? You have had some criticism of the way in
which the figures are calculated but in terms of the broad headings, or the
specific sub-headings, are you happy that those are perfect?
Ms Lyon: I think probably it is quite early days, actually. I would expect them to be more sophisticated
and better targeted once the DfES takeover of education has bedded down and
people have had a chance to look at it more thoroughly. It is not a very sophisticated system at the
moment.
Q362 Mr Chaytor: In terms of
the OCR's contribution, what proportion of the total work of prison education
does the OCR accredit? Do you have a
monopoly, or a virtual monopoly, or is there competition with other awarding bodies?
Mr O'Donnell: That is a bit difficult because we would not know necessarily what
all the other bodies are doing. What we
do know is that we are dominant in terms of education provision, that is to
say, what is run in the education department, but that other awarding bodies
are equally dominant in respect of workshop provision, for example, in
manufacturing or in PE awards or in industrial cleaning or catering, or
qualifications like those, where there are a number of reputable specialist
bodies.
Q363 Mr Chaytor: In terms of
basic skills you are dominant, but you do not have a monopoly necessarily?
Mr O'Donnell: Yes. Of the 41,000 basic
skills, I think I have got the figure right, which Juliet mentioned earlier on,
something like 23,000 are OCR's.
Q364 Mr Chaytor: Whose are the
others?
Mr O'Donnell: I could surmise it might be City and Guilds, it might be an
organisation called ASSET, and so on.
They tend to trickle off after that.
Q365 Mr Chaytor: Is it up to
each individual prison governor or head of learning and skills to determine
which awarding body is used?
Mr O'Donnell: Yes, absolutely. One point
I wanted to mention about the parity of KPTs was that the same value is
attached to a full level one CLAIT certificate, which takes a fair amount of
time to achieve, as is attached to, for example, food handling or manual
handling, health and safety type qualifications, which can be done in between
four and eight hours. There is
definitely room for a more precise calibration of the KPT structure.
Q366 Mr Chaytor: If someone
wanted to pursue this issue of double counting of individual prisoners, in
terms of their contribution to KPTs, it would be possible to interrogate the
database of OCR or Asset or City and Guilds, would it not? If someone really had to pursue this, it
would be possible, would it, to check the relationship between the global
totals which the individual prisons are putting forward and the records of the
awarding bodies to see if there was any double counting? Secondly, on this issue, how would one find
out whether people are submitted for level one qualifications who are already
well in advance of level one, because presumably this is a temptation for
individual prisons to do as well, is it not?
Mr Brenchley: It depends on whether they already have that level one
achievement. I think the simple answer
to your question about tracking an individual prisoner is that if that prisoner
shows up with a different candidate number from a different centre there would
be no reason for OCR to be alerted to the fact that potentially it was the same
individual. That should not happen,
because the records that I am told go from one prison to another when a
prisoner moves are supposed to be precise enough about achievement, I think it
is called the 'green file', or something, that is transferred, but it struck me
that there is a very significant improvement which could be made to ensure that
this did not happen in the future. That
would be an effective electronic database, preferably by achieved units, of the
achievements of individual prisoners, and that could be transferred
electronically so you were not worried about this phenomenon of throwing a
large brown envelope in the back of a van just as it goes out of the door. That way, you could be much more confident
that the experience of a prisoner who is being churned around the system is
consistent and coherent and that what they have managed to achieve in one
prison, even possibly down to the level of a single unit, is being carried
forward to accumulate to a full qualification somewhere else. At the moment, although a lot of
establishments are assiduous about how they manage this process, just moving a
lot of paper around the system is bound to be a faulty process and it would be
far better if it were tracked electronically.
Q367 Mr Chaytor: The charges
which OCR make for accreditation are exactly the same presumably as they are to
any other part of the education world, there is no differential charging for
prisons?
Mr Brenchley: Yes.
Q368 Mr Chaytor: It must be a
significant factor for individual governors in the managing of their budgets,
as it is for a teacher, as to how much they spend on awarding bodies. Is that an issue? Do you sense that there is some resistance in individual prisons
to doing more education and training simply because of the cost of
accreditation?
Mr Brenchley: No. The cost of the
qualification is a tiny proportion of the expenditure, and I am thinking of not
only the demands of having a tutor on the premises but the demands of Tom's
members and moving them around, and so on.
The cost of the qualification is a very small part of that and we are
not aware that it is causing any impediment, that actually any prisons are
reluctant to put prisoners through qualifications because of the cost.
Q369 Mr Chaytor: Other than the
establishment of the electronic transfer of student records, funder records, is
there any other single improvement to the system of accreditation or of
measurement of success of the system that you could suggest?
Mr Brenchley: It is essential that the qualifications which a prisoner gains in
prison are reputable outside, that they are not sector-specific. The reason for that is, clearly, they must
have credibility elsewhere and they must be on a par with the sorts of
achievements gained by people outside, and the National Qualifications
Framework is the best proxy we have for that at the moment. If a qualification is on the National
Qualifications Framework then it gives some kind of parity. That is the first thing. The second thing I will mention briefly is
about units. If qualifications operate
in units then it is possible to accumulate them even in different prisons on a
known structure. All those concerned know
that it is one unit of a five-unit qualification, or whatever it is. The third area I would wish to push is the
availability of qualifications across the whole prison, not just within the
education department. Certainly there
are one or two examples I have been able to see so far where prisons have been
able to develop qualification structures which have involved members of the
Prison Officers' Association or members of other uniformed staff, or
whoever. They have been able to change
the culture, which goes right back to the Chairman's very first question, and
almost convert a prison into an organisation which is there as much for
learning and rehabilitation as it is for a punitive purpose. That enables, I think, the individual
prisoner then to see himself, or herself, in a different light.
Q370 Chairman: Where has that
happened?
Mr Brenchley: The best example I quoted you was Manchester, with that entry level
in Manchester.
Q371 Chairman: How do you set
up qualifications which are appealing to the staff?
Mr Brenchley: It is the evangelists within the prisons, actually. There is no standard pattern. Again, I hear somebody say, like the head of
that learning workshop, "It's just the way we work here."
Q372 Chairman: It is luck; it
is the individual, is it not?
Mr Brenchley: It is luck. I think it is a
mindset, a mindset at different levels.
The Head of Learning and Skills at Reading, which I know the Committee
visited not long ago, said to me, "Perhaps I'm just lucky here," so he used
your word, in that he can talk to a governor in a particular way, he has got
facilities there. My guess is that
probably, and I was there on Monday of this week, they have come on even since
you visited them, in terms of the quality of information technology, and so on.
Q373 Chairman: You have been in
this business for a long time, as OCR, you are the preferred provider of
qualifications. Even the little charity
that we had giving evidence last week, the Shannon Trust, has built up a
relationship with the Prison Officers' Association and in prisons, and the Toe
by Toe thing is really making a difference, I know it is only small. What has the OCR been doing and why do you
not have an arrangement with the Prison Officers' Association going back years,
where you have to take prison officer education and qualifications seriously,
in a meaningful way? What have you been
doing all these years?
Mr Brenchley: We have had a history, which I am not sure I am fully aware of, in
terms of previously running custodial care qualifications and suchlike, but
really it is only in the last 18 months to two years that we have identified specific
requirements which operate in the prison sector. Prison education departments, or whoever, were simply centres, in
our language, they were simply organisations which ran various qualifications,
whose staff might attend training, which we would visit for quality assurance
purposes. It is probably in the last
two years or so that the intelligence which has come back, initially to me, in
the first instance, on standard, routine quality assurance visits to prisons,
has shown that there are particular sector constraints and requirements which
OCR, as an organisation, must address.
Q374 Chairman: You have been in
this business for years. You are the
examination board of Oxford and Cambridge and the Royal Society of Arts, it is
that combination, is it not?
Mr Brenchley: That is right.
Q375 Chairman: Basically, you
have seen this as a nice little earner for all these years. Is it not strange that two of the
best-endowed universities in the country see providing this to prisons and
prisoners as a nice little earner, whereas surely long ago you should have
said, "Come on, what can we do as a partnership to do something more positive"?
Mr Brenchley: I think we are just about getting to that stage. You will gather that the issue has only
recently come through because of the quality of the reports we have had back
from prisons and the opportunity to look at them and think "There is a sector
here which needs specific support."
That is why, for example, we run network meetings which enable the
practitioners from the prisons, the heads of learning and skills and the
education managers, to share practice with one another in a way which seems not
to have been available before. In a
sense, we are there with the education practitioners and really it is the
experience we have gained in those meetings and those discussions and visits
which is opening up for us a view that prison officers, who previously would
not have been, as it were, part of the sector that we would have had to
address, actually have a part to play.
I think we are very early on that road, at the moment.
Q376 Chairman: Has Oxford or
Cambridge ever thought of twinning with a prison?
Mr Brenchley: It is an interesting thought.
The short answer would be no, but I am not going to walk out of here and
not take note of that point.
Q377 Chairman: Tom, you would
be a bit worried perhaps if you had got a couple of academics from Oxford
coming in and running the prison, would you?
Mr Robson: I think I said earlier that, from a prison officer's perspective,
we need to pitch our level at a realistic level, and I do not think Oxford and
Cambridge is realistic to us.
Q378 Chairman: I am sorry to
correct you there, Tom. There is a fine
tradition of external education and life and learning coming out of both those
universities with appropriate courses for part-time learners, so there is a
potential for real partnership there?
Mr Robson: I understand that and we do not want to be rivals with education,
we need to integrate together. I was
going to go on to say that the quality of man who is in prison who has got a
decent educational standard, I think, has enough self-esteem to be able to find
out for themselves where the opportunities lie within prison and make use of
that, where it is available. I think
that we need to pitch our time, as prison officers, to try to help those who
are less able to push themselves forward, people who have lacked confidence,
who are ashamed of the fact that they cannot read and write, and they are the
people that my members generally are needed to be involved with. That was what my statement was about
regarding academics.
Q379 Chairman: Professor John,
it has always interested me that there are about the same number of higher
education institutions as prisons, you could do almost a one-for-one
twinning. If might be pretty good if we
are trying to get a culture of education imbued into a prison, it would not be
a bad idea to have a twinning arrangement, would it?
Professor John: I think you are quite right and it could piggy-back on the
Government's Widening Participation agenda, for example, there is no reason why
it should not, in my view, so that the whole thing could come full circle. The last question I think which
Mr Chaytor asked resonates with something you said earlier, Chairman, the
question you asked about added value.
It seems to me that the efficacy or appropriateness of these targets and
key performance indicators needs to be tested, there needs to be the most
rigorous evaluation of how all of that is working, in order that one could look
at the range of competences people are acquiring which relate to what employers
ought to be looking for right now, and I believe that universities could assist
greatly in that. The idea of twinning,
I think, is a persuasive one, and it may well be that, at the very least, a
relationship between outreach and extramural departments, where those still
exist, and the Prison Officers' Association, if no other part of the system,
would be particularly advantageous.
Ms Lyon: There is a precedent, a bit of a one, in relation to Goldsmiths
College, and I think it is Dover Young Offender Institution, which was brokered
originally by UNLOCK, the National Association of Ex-Offenders.
Q380 Chairman: UNLOCK were a
bit unkind about the more established pressure groups in the prison reform area. I do not know if they were talking about you
but they said "There are too many of these groups who have been here a long
time, publishing lots of research and glossy pamphlets but who don't actually
do anything." Did you smart when you
heard those remarks?
Ms Lyon: I was wondering if I was going to escape some criticism or not.
Q381 Chairman: Do you think you
are a bit complacent? Lots of you have
been around for a long time and if you did performance indicators on you lot,
there is NACRO and yourselves, and you have been going for many, many years,
the Howard League, you have not done very well, have you?
Ms Lyon: I think there were some startling failures. I am not sure you can lay this entirely at
our door, but our twin aims are, one, to reduce the prison population to what
Lord Woolf called an unavoidable minimum.
Q382 Chairman: I think you have
missed that performance indicator.
Ms Lyon: We have done pretty badly on that one. The other is improving the treatment of and conditions for
prisoners and their families, on which I think we have done somewhat
better. We count particular things we
are able to achieve. In terms of public
information, I think we achieve a significant amount of good quality, accurate
information, disseminated to Parliament and the public, through the All-Party
Group as well to which we provide the secretariat. In terms of individual particular gains, we have achieved a
health policy agreed for older prisoners, having published a report about older
prisoners. This particular report, on
education, we were pleased that it was taken up and used as a backbone to the
curriculum review, and I am interested now to talk to Lord Filkin about whether
he feels it has been fully responded to.
In terms of where it went and how many bodies considered it and looked
at it, we were pleased that it appeared to inform a lot of debate and
discussion. Maybe that is a very small
aim, because clearly most of us would not come into the business of working in
a pressure group if we did not want to make major changes, but sometimes we
have to knock up some minor ones.
Q383 Chairman: Do you engage
enough with the press? We notice here
that as soon as we start an inquiry into prison education hardly any press turn
up at all.
Ms Lyon: We have independent press monitors, so we know, in terms of the
printed press, how many people we reach.
In January and February it is 22 million each month; for September,
it is 15.
Q384 Chairman: You would almost
think one of your jobs might be to get more people to come and hear your evidence?
Ms Lyon: We did not actually press release on this, in part because we try
not to overdo it. We are just producing
a report about 18 to 20 year olds.
Chairman: I think press releases would have been the minimum. I think some very large men, muscular men,
might have been more useful. We are
going to move on and talk about prison staff.
Q385 Jonathan Shaw: Short-term
sentences seem to be the problem, in terms of staff, in terms of prisoners and
governors. We have heard that governors
stay, on average, 21 months. Juliet
Lyon, what impact does that have on the commitment to see educational
programmes through?
Ms Lyon: I would not have chosen a school for my children, if I had the
choice, leaving out what that headteacher was like. It seems to me that is an important parallel. In terms of the culture of an establishment,
the governor in a hierarchical set-up has an enormous influence on the kind of
institution it is. If you have got that
break in leadership and that constant movement, it is a nonsense I think,
frankly. It is one of the key things
that one would like to see change. Over
the last five years, up to March of this year, 44 prisons had four or more
governors or acting governors. If those
were schools, people would be going berserk.
On the previous point about the press, it would make every headline, you
know, "What's happening to our heads?"
We do not have headlines about "What is happening to our governors?" or "What
is happening to our prisons?"
Q386 Jonathan Shaw: Parents
would be waving placards, would they not, quite rightly?
Ms Lyon: They would, indeed. I think
the point is well made. The other thing
is, we did do another survey, called 'Barred Citizens', which I would like to
submit, if I may, after this meeting.
It was a scoping study of opportunities for prisoners to take part as
volunteers and to be involved as citizens of the prison community, if you
like. We looked at examples of good
practice and in particular looked at the Samaritan 'Listener' scheme, where the
Samaritans train prisoners to respond to suicidal prisoners, and we looked at
the Inside Out Trust. They are the two
biggest examples of very positive work which engaged prisoners as givers of
services rather than recipients. The
reason I am telling you that now, in relation to governors, is that it was a
landscape where there were some startlingly good examples and some completely
barren areas where nothing much was happening.
It was not to do with security classification, it was always to do with
whether the governor, he or she, subscribed to that activity, supported that
activity and supported the staff who initiated and ran it.
Q387 Jonathan Shaw: On that,
did you see any correlation between the churn of governors and the impact upon
those sorts of programmes for the institutions?
Ms Lyon: Certainly things fall away when a new governor comes in, very
often, and equally it is true of the individual reformers who are running a
particular thing. For example, they may
well get a Butler Trust award and it is something the Butler Trust, I know,
feel very strongly about, we did a joint conference with them last year about
Prison Service performance recognition.
They reward exceptionally able staff for doing programmes of this kind,
but so often after they have been rewarded for it they are moved on or promoted
to a different area and that is lost along with the individual who has put it
in. There is a lack of integration, is
what I am saying really, I think, and things hang on individuals.
Q388 Jonathan Shaw: Is it a
profession that finds it reasonably easy to recruit, is it a popular profession
to go into? I am talking about
governors.
Ms Lyon: It is a simple fact that there are not enough good governors to go
round and this explains the reason for movement. It is not just to do with the promotional structure, which I
think needs investigation. At the
moment the planning is, as Tom was saying, to reward people for moving rather
than for staying and it is only the exceptional governor, like Paul Mainwaring
when he was at Huntercombe who negotiated to be able to stay at a young
offender institution for five years and to be rewarded for staying. It was a special arrangement attached to
that one governor, who put forward a case for needing to maintain consistency
with young people, which was admirable but it should not have been him having
to make a special case.
Q389 Jonathan Shaw: The reason is
that there are not enough good governors so they have to move them around all
the time?
Ms Lyon: If you have a large London prison that is in trouble, a Brixton or
a Holloway, that is very near to ministers, very near to the press. It is a high profile institution, it will
not be a good thing if it gets into serious trouble, so the tendency will be to
move a good governor in from another, regional prison as fast as possible,
often with absolutely no notice. In
that case you have to back-fill the appointment, so if you moved from the
Midlands you have to back-fill into the Midlands, and each large governor move
may require another five or so moves, like dominos. There simply are not enough good governors. There was a scheme to attract in new people.
Q390 Jonathan Shaw: Thank you
very much. Can we go on to targets?
Mr Robson: In support of Juliet's answer, there was a very high profile case
regarding Wandsworth some years ago, we are going back possibly five years,
when the Chief Inspector's Report found that actually there had not been a
governor in Wandsworth for some two years.
The situation was that the government of Wandsworth was so high profile
and so well thought of within the Prison Service that it was forever being
taken out of the establishment to shore up a poorly-performing establishment or
to cover for people in head office and, as a result, Wandsworth was sadly
neglected. That is a situation, in a
smaller way, which occurs up and down the Prison Service day in and day out.
Q391 Jonathan Shaw: This is
about education; nevertheless, I think the parallel with a headteacher is one
that I wrote down as well, Juliet.
Mr Robson: It is to do with continuity, of course.
Q392 Jonathan Shaw:
Absolutely. Can I ask you about the
appointments of learning and skills, Tom Robson. How was that received by your Association?
Mr Robson: First of all, our Association welcomes any initiative that will
give quality time to inmates. The worst
thing that can happen to my members is for prisoners to be idle. I am talking about initiatives, whether they
be, as was talked through earlier, a myriad of things that happen, we are
talking about cell work, vocational training and education, so the Prison
Officers' Association welcome quality time out of cells for inmates. The worst thing that can happen to my
members is to have to lock people up for 23 hours a day, which I think is the
standard press response to what happens in prisons, and to watch inmates, day
in and day out, playing table-tennis or hanging around. Anything that is quality for inmates is
quality for prison officers.
Q393 Jonathan Shaw: Have things
changed in the last few years?
Mr Robson: Yes, they have. I think
that we have a different style of prison governor. I think that there is much more hands‑on by the Prison
Service, prisons are not being left to do their own thing any more. Certainly there is more monitoring, which
again we welcome. However, what goes
hand in hand with that is, in some areas of the country, a difficulty of
recruiting prison officers, so not only is there a lack of continuity with
governors there is also a fairly high turnover of prison officers in some areas
as well. I think the Prison Service has
changed in that way. I think we do need
to have a more stable staff, although that has been addressed and it is
starting to improve now, certainly in London, which has always been a more
difficult area.
Q394 Jonathan Shaw: How is it
being addressed, what are they doing that is making an impact?
Mr Robson: I think that we have gone into a situation of local recruitment,
recruiting people who actually live in London rather than bringing in people
from outside, and I think that is having an impact. It is in its very early stages now. I would reserve judgment as to whether it is going to be a
permanent situation or not but, so far, the local recruitment I am talking
about appears to be working.
Q395 Jonathan Shaw: Juliet
Lyon, has that been your feeling, that the staff, the prison officers, have
embraced the recruitment of the heads of learning and skills in institutions?
Ms Lyon: Certainly our sector has, the voluntary sector.
Q396 Jonathan Shaw: What is
your perception of it?
Ms Lyon: I think there is a fear, which Tom voiced earlier, that prison
staff will be reduced to turnkeys, that they will be locking and unlocking
doors, while other people come in and do the more interesting things, the more
interesting things being education and other sorts of activities.
Q397 Jonathan Shaw: I do not
know whether you are familiar with the contract. We have heard that REX has collapsed and there has been some
discussion about the inability of the head of learning and skills within
prisons to have much influence on the contract, particularly importing, using
local education providers. Is that
something on which your organisation has got a view?
Ms Lyon: We have contributed to the consultation on the contracting
procedure.
Q398 Jonathan Shaw: What were
you saying in the consultation?
Ms Lyon: We were saying, it is an area on which we do not feel strongly, so
we did not say as much as we might have done.
What we have said in relation to heads of learning and skills is, we
welcome their appointment and we welcome the level at which they are placed in
the senior management team, clearly that was important and that was a
significant change. In terms of
contracting, I remain unconvinced that the process is right yet. I was in Durham Prison last week, looking at
new education units but being told by the Governor that there were no people to
staff them because of problems with the contract. Really I could not understand what this was about, where you can
have facilities and nobody using them and no staff to run them.
Q399 Jonathan Shaw: Tom Robson,
is that something on which your organisation has a view?
Mr Robson: Turnkeys were mentioned, and that is absolutely right, but we have
got no fear, we believe that we should be integrated and that we are major
players within the Prison Service anyway.
I think I mentioned earlier that there are education centres of great
quality up and down the country where, because of lack of staff, governors are
not able to keep them open for the hours that they should be, and sometimes
that is because of a shortage of prison officers, sometimes because of
overcrowding. When a prison is
overcrowded it is more likely that people will self-harm and have to be sent
out to local hospitals, which takes staff away, etc. There are 101 reasons why an education department might suffer
brickbats in that way.
Q400 Chairman: Tom, can I push
you on this. Can we have some
detail? I was getting off the train
last night and I saw a poster which said "Why don't you teach? Minimum 22k." What do you get to start as a prison officer?
Mr Robson: It is difficult to tell you actually. I might have to write to you with those figures.
Q401 Chairman: Give me a
ballpark for a prison officer's starting salary?
Mr Robson: The starting rate in London for a prison officer is round about the
figure you have just quoted, £22,000.
Q402 Chairman: What is the
minimum qualification for that?
Mr Robson: The minimum qualification is simply the university of life. There is no minimum qualification to be a
prison officer. They sit tests, a
written test, a practical test, and go into the Prison Service. There is no standard qualification.
Q403 Chairman: Once they start,
we know there is a 60 per cent drop-out rate within the first two years. You do not have to have any qualifications
to be able to start and you get a reasonable salary but you do not have
training after that period. You do not
have a very long period of training, you said seven weeks, did you not?
Mr Robson: Yes, but of course you are in a 12‑month probationary period,
as you would understand, and that is a pretty intensive situation. I came into the Prison Service from an
engineering background and people come from all sorts of backgrounds these
days, some people with very, very good and high qualifications become prison
officers, but it is a difficult environment to work in. I think it is a difficult profession to take
up and you work with difficult people.
I think the drop‑out rate is sometimes to do with the fact that
there are quite a lot of rival industries that pay similar wages, but also I
think the drop‑out rate is often because it is, I was going to say, an
acquired taste, but I think it is a difficult job to work your way into.
Q404 Chairman: It sounds like
being a politician, Tom. Do you see
what I am driving at? I am very
interested in management. If I were
looking at the Prison Service and any other organisation I know, if you want to
keep men and women and motivate them and retain them you have to have good,
stable management and management that cares about the development of the staff,
and that nearly always means upgrading, training, performance review, training
out of the business and in the business.
It just seems to me that what has been explained to us by other people
is that not enough investment is put into training and getting the best out of
this talented workforce you have got. If
you do not try to get the best out of them you do not get that link with doing
other than turnkey, you do not get that as much as you would like. Is that not true?
Mr Robson: I have a feeling that we have been there during the course of
today's discussions. The biggest
problem within the Prison Service, other than drugs, and I know this is not a
forum to discuss drugs, is the overcrowding.
Not only have the prison department had to dispense with mandatory training,
as I explained to you before, and it is very much down to the quality of a
local governor as to how much of his budget he can spare, also it is down to
the fact that there is not the time in the day to pay to the training of prison
officers. It is a very, very busy
profession to be in at this moment in time, it is very difficult indeed.
Q405 Valerie Davey: Professor
John, having heard this conversation about the needs of the Prison Service,
what do you think ought to be the main contribution that we should be
commenting on, as a Committee, in terms of prison staff? We are talking at the moment about prison
staff. What should we do and what
should we recommend?
Professor John: I think that is multifaceted, really. To continue from where Tom left off, it seems to me that the
conditions have got to be created wherein prison staff could have an investment
made in them so that they could acquire the capacity to assist offenders and
aid the rehabilitation process. The kind
of custodial management which is taking place just now, for all the reasons
that Tom has given, in my view militates against that. That relates partly to the whole business of
contracting that we were just discussing.
Up to 1989, when I became Director of Education in Hackney, I was in charge
of the education provision in the five London prisons as an Assistant Education
Officer in the ILEA. We were able to
have a coherent approach to prison education and indeed to working with prison
officers in those establishments and, to a very large extent, the programme
that we introduced supported the development of those prison officers. It was idiosyncratic in the sense that it
did depend very much on the disposition of the individual prison governor;
nevertheless, the way in which the whole thing was organised made that
possible. The current contracting
arrangements, in my view, do not assist that necessarily and the expertise of
further education colleges and education facilitators in the post‑16
sector cannot always be drawn upon, again for reasons of contract and cost and
the differential levels of pay that people who work in the Prison Service have,
as distinct from those who work in colleges, and so on. Therefore, the extent to which prison
officers can be facilitated in their own development such that they are not
just turning keys but are able to contribute to the development of prisoners is
really very limited. One has got to do
something about overcrowding. There has
got to be a link between the contracts of prison officers, as part of the
contract that they receive there should be some element of their staff
development, so that, while they may not have expertise in particular areas of
education provision or delivery, they should have some general competences in
terms of facilitating people's development.
Q406 Valerie Davey: Within
that, would you also say identifying the needs of prisoners, particularly in
terms of education, and that is the context?
I know that what Tom said earlier means that many prison officers want
to help the individual but if they have not got the training to identify those
needs then they are unable to be as helpful as they might be. It is that aspect. It is not just the delivery, which perhaps further education
colleges or the specifically designated education team can offer, but it is
that identification of what the needs are?
Professor John: That is again a pretty complex and, I would say, specialist area
too. It is right that prison officers,
given the degree of interface they have with prisoners, should be able to take
part in that, but then they would need to be trained to do that, yes.
Q407 Valerie Davey: Thank
you. Could I ask Juliet very
specifically because of an answer to a question earlier; you said that we were
not doing well when there were specific education needs identified. Could you tell us first of all who is
actually assessing and identifying these needs, and I am particularly
interested, I will tell you now, in dyslexia, and, secondly, what are we or are
we not doing about meeting those specific education needs, which do not even
tally in terms of the basic need, essentially, or initially?
Ms Lyon: There has been very little work done on this. I would say that to start with. We have begun to try to find out what is
known already. There has been a study
in Scotland, of which I will submit details so that the Committee can be
informed by that study, but there is not a comprehensive picture of how many
people in the prison population have specific learning difficulties. We know roughly how many had disrupted
education because the Social Exclusion Unit did that piece of work in its
report on preventing reoffending. There
is no comparable work, say, in the mental health area, which I said earlier
on. I have never seen a figure, for
example, which tells you that in the prison population there are X percentage
of people who have been statemented, which I know is not a fantastic measure
but it is a measure of their need, whereas I do know the percentage who have
been in care as children. I just do not
think it is an area that people have bothered to look at in the way that it
should be looked at.
Q408 Valerie Davey: Should it
not be a target to identify, in fact, the specific education needs of prisoners
and then you would have some basis on which to judge outcome, you would have
some basis on which to judge the delivery of the needs of those prisoners in
terms of their education?
Ms Lyon: It would have to be a different target. There is already a requirement to assess, but I think we are
talking about something more specialist, as Gus said, than just simply a quick
assessment, and I think antecedents would be important, so finding out from
business whether they had paid any attention to educational deficits or
learning disabilities would all be part of that. A person who is rather good on this is Dr Sue Bailey, who works
in the Manchester area and has picked up various learning disabilities by
looking intensely at a small group of young offenders, and also physical
impairments, such as deafness, which had not been picked up previously, which
clearly are impeding people's ability to learn while they are in gaol.
Q409 Paul Holmes: Can I return
to explore a little further some of the comments which were made earlier. I think Juliet said that prison officers
were getting worried that they would become just turnkeys, they would put
people in the cell and lock the door, unlock the door and all the other
bits. The interesting bits and the bits
where you got more involved with the prisoners would go to somebody else, like the
Education Service. Tom commented, right
at the start I think, that it was a shame that back in the old days, in the
Borstals, for example, which I think Tom started working in, the prison
officers were quite closely involved with the prisoners and now that is
becoming less and less so. How
important is it that the prison officers should be people who are closely
involved in delivering education, given that they get only six weeks' training
to be a prison officer, whereas somebody involved in teaching, for example, has
one to four years' training just to be a teacher?
Mr Robson: I think it is very important, for a couple of reasons. Prison officers, by the way, are people with
vast experience of life. In general,
they are people in their late twenties who are employed as prison officers. They build up a rapport with prisoners every
day of their working lives, they get to know the prisoners very well and the
prisoners get to know them. I think
that is perhaps the number one issue, that there is trust built up. The downside is that if there are any
nasties to be done to a prisoner, if there is any punishment to be handed out
or restraints to be applied, then obviously it is the prison officers who have
to do that as well. In general, they do
build up trust and a working relationship with prisoners, which I think is
probably more vital than any other relationship anywhere else in the Prison
Service, other than perhaps the camaraderie between the staff themselves. I think that is very important, it is something
which bears fruit in a lot of ways. We
do various offender programmes that prison officers are involved with,
particularly the sex offenders treatment programme, which is a very stressful
situation for prison officers to be in, and that is coped with. I think that trust and working relationship,
the man management and the support situation is something that is being leached
away, if you like, and not being utilised by anyone at all. A lot more thought needs to go into
that. Prison officers as individuals,
and there will be obviously some prison officers who would not give a brass
farthing for educating prisoners, the vast majority want interesting work and
they want to try to make prisoners better people. Frequently, simply by spending five minutes of their time with a
young man, or a young lady, can give huge dividends, and that, to me, is part
of the education of a young man or a young lady.
Professor John: I do not think that what Mr Holmes is asking for, or indeed what
Tom is suggesting, could be achieved within the timeframe that is set typically
for training prison officers. One of
the concerns that I and many of my colleagues have is to do with the awareness
that prison officers develop of issues to do with equality and diversity. As someone who has been involved in training
on the implementation of the Race Relations Amendment Act, for example, there
are major issues in terms of how prison officers are equipped to understand and
grow their awareness of issues to do with gender subordination, to do with race
discrimination and other aspects of equality legislation which are simply
skimmed over, in my experience, in the training that prison officers have. If we are saying that this is a service which
deals with the whole core community and the whole population of multi-ethnic
Britain then it seems to me that the kind of interface we wish prison officers
to have with prisoners sensitively, given the overrepresentative number, for
example, of black people in the secure state, must mean a greater
concentration, a greater amount of time spent equipping prison officers with
those kinds of skills.
Ms Lyon: I want to address, in principle, what the CRE are telling us. They are saying to us that there are more
black young men going to prison now than there are entering university, which I
think is an awful thing to know. That
is just an extraordinary fact. If that
is the case, there is not any room for complacency because we are in danger of
losing a generation of very important young people.
Q410 Chairman: What is the
percentage of ethnic minority officers in the POA?
Mr Robson: The percentage is very small.
I cannot give you the actual percentage. I could write to you and give you that. I would have to say that it is very small,
with the exception of Pentonville, I think, which has got the biggest
percentage of black or ethnic minority prison officers in the Prison
Service. There have been various
attempts to try to recruit into that particular area and there are difficulties
in doing so. In some cultures, it does
not appear to be made an attractive job, although a lot of time and effort have
been put into that.
Q411 Chairman: Can you tell me,
Tom, for those who do not know this, if you are a prison officer is there a
career path into management, into becoming a governor?
Mr Robson: Yes, there is.
Q412 Chairman: That is a career
path which is fairly normal?
Mr Robson: Yes. I have to say again,
it is more the exception than the rule now that someone makes it to Governor of
Wormwood Scrubs from a basic grade prison officer, but it can be done, yes, and
it is welcome.
Ms Lyon: The current Director-General of the Prison Service took that route
through to the post she has now, which I think is an important model for the
Service. I did want to say just a
little bit more about the management issues and the training of prison staff
and again to echo what Gus said. We
have become increasingly concerned about the low priority ascribed to training
prison officers, whether it is basic entry level or whether it is people coming
in at direct entry, or people managing for the first time. At one point the college had, I think it was
called, Managing for the First Time or Governing for the First Time; that
course has been discontinued. Efforts
to train governors and support governors was something done at the Tavistock
Clinic some while ago. As far as I
know, that has fallen apart now. There
is not even as much attention paid as there had been to supporting and training
people at every grade entry level or promotion change in the Service. That just does not seem sensible, because obviously
you need to enable people to manage, which is going to be different from
working as an officer. That effort to
look after others and attend to their development has got to feed into thinking
about prisoners and their development.
I do not think you can dissociate the two.
Q413 Chairman: It sounds a
rather old-fashioned management structure in the prison because, if we are
hearing evidence today that there is this instability as governors move on,
where is the concept that there is a management team which a governor leads,
and that stays with it even though the governor moves on? That is a model we are familiar with in the
private and public sectors, but does that not happen in prisons?
Ms Lyon: There is more of an emphasis on SMT, the senior management team,
than there used to be, I think, but there is a similar level of turnover there,
because a large number of that SMT will consist of the fast-track junior
governor grades who are doing just that, fast‑tracking.
Mr Robson: My point would be that quite often the governor has no control over
who his management are and who they consist of, because everyone is striving to
better themselves within the Prison Service and quite often they have to leave
that establishment and go to another to do that, so the governor has no
control.
Q414 Jeff Ennis: We have focused
already on the issue of overcrowding in prisons as being a stumbling block, to
some extent, in making progress on improving academic achievement, educational
achievement, in prisons. Overcrowding
is cited, obviously, as one of the main reasons that we have prisoner
churn. I think the statistics you gave
us, from the PRT, were that currently there are about 17,000 prisoners sharing in
cells designed for one, and the issue of prisoner churn affects primarily Category
B prisoners. If we cannot overcome this
problem of overcrowding in the short term, I wonder whether we ought to be
considering looking towards some form of standardised curriculum within the
prisons, primarily because of this major stumbling-block. Have any of you got any views on that?
Mr Brenchley: In a sense, there is a standardised curriculum because it is
determined by KPTs plus whatever the prison can provide and that will vary from
place to place. There is a core, that
we are aware of, of basic skills, key skills, CLAIT, basic IT qualifications,
there are others available as well, and then there is a sort of tail of other
qualifications. The concern which was
expressed earlier on about the broadening of the range of experiences which can
be made available to prisoners certainly applies in those contexts, because
they are very much determined by whatever a prison has been able to set
up. For example, in Reading now, they
have got a new catering kitchen. I have
never seen or heard of anything like that in a prison, maybe that is my limited
experience, and it looks to me to be to a pretty good industrial standard. Somebody who has done their work there can
go out somewhere else. I do not know
whether there should be catering kitchens everywhere else, but certainly there
should be something which has that level of industry-standard facility and
training potential in it. I suppose
really it goes back to what was said before about the management team. I was quite keen to come in on that because
there is now a crucial combination of people in post, with a governor and a
head of learning and skills, which I think is just about the greatest innovation
in around 20 years in the prison sector, in terms of opening it up as a
learning and skills environment, and people like the prison workshop managers I
have met, and so on. If that group of
people have got their act together and are able to affect the culture, going
right back to the beginning of the discussion, then I think there is a prospect
for a prison starting to affect Tom's members or starting to affect other staff
there in a way which does start to ramp up the sense of the organisation as
being a learning environment. For me, it
is partly about equipment but it is driven very much by that group of crucial
people in managerial positions who form a management team, and they can make it
happen or they can kill it dead, depending on the chemistry between them.
Mr Robson: I would support a curriculum if it did not debar people from
entering that curriculum at particular points and at particular levels, if it
did not debar charitable organisations, for instance, to be able to come in and
do decent work. As long as it was all‑embracing
I would support that. The second thing
is what John says about the industrial kitchen. Again, that is nothing new.
Someone mentioned earlier prison officer PEIs, doing vocational work
with prisoners, giving qualifications in various levels of PE, which they are
qualified to do. It is not many years
ago when, in our prison kitchens, in our prison workshops and, in fact, to
maintain our prisons, prison officers were the people who did that, as
specialist grade prison officers. They
would take groups of prisoners with them while they were doing that work and
they would have qualifications themselves to be able to teach prisoners to NVQ
standard, for instance, in the kitchens and in the workshops. That policy has been reversed for prison
maintenance to be done by private individuals, or by, if you like, not prison
officer grades, who do not actually take prisoners, supervise and teach, and I
believe that skill and that facility has been lost. It is something that we would urge this Committee to have a look
at, please.
Q415 Jeff Ennis: Every set of
witnesses we have had so far that has given evidence, including you people
today, has focused on the need to establish some form of electronic tracking
system of record of achievement, which I think is definitely going to be one of
the recommendations we come out with. I
was intrigued with what you said earlier, Professor John, about the concept of
a passport that prisoners would take with them when they moved from one establishment
to another. Do you see that learning
passport as supplementary to the electronic transfer of information, or would
that form the basis of this system?
Professor John: I would see it very much as being integrated within it. It seems to me that there must be ownership
of that instrument by the learners themselves.
In addition to it being a management tool passed around the system
electronically, the individual learner must have access to it in some form, I
would suspect it would be mainly hard copy, in order that they could celebrate
their achievements as well as have an indication as to how it tallies with
whatever individual learning plan or sentencing plan they may have had.
Ms Lyon: There is a precedent for that at Wandsworth. We were working alongside the St Giles
Trust in Wandsworth Prison and they are training prisoners to be housing
advisers and they are getting NVQ qualifications in housing advice. We introduced a system of prisoner passports
there, which has been picked up in one or two of the women's prisons, I
understand, but it is not a system yet in the whole Prison Service.
Q416 Chairman: It has been an
extremely good session and the Committee have valued your evidence a great
deal. Is there anything that any of you
would like to say that you think we have missed? You have the usual offer, of course, that we would like to remain
in communication with you, and if you are on the tube or the bus or driving, or
wherever you are going, and you think "I wish I'd said that to the Committee,"
do e‑mail us, write to us, 'phone us, but is there anything of a burning
nature that you need to tell us now?
Mr Brenchley: Two points, if I might, Chairman, because they have not naturally
slotted into the conversation earlier on.
The first one is that I know in your journey around Scandinavia you discovered
Internet access being used quite widely.
Q417 Chairman: Yes, in Norway.
Mr Brenchley: My understanding is that there are means of making this happen
electronically, there are one or two people who have explained to me how it
might work and I did not understand a word, but they know these things. I would not want to leave the room without
having used the word 'Internet', for research, and so on. The second one was about the interface with
the Resettlement and Probation Services.
I think the infrastructure of the Service at the moment does mean that
it is possible to envisage continuity in the learning experience of a prisoner
who is leaving prison through some of these other organisations, in a way which
probably they would not have been able to before. For me, education in prison, in a sense, is just part of the
story, because it is education back into whatever they do afterwards, which is
going to consolidate it and put the lid on it.
From that point of view, I hope that the Committee is entertaining the
sorts of continuity back into resettlement that will enable prisoners to change
their lives in that way.
Chairman: It is interesting where different sessions lead. I would like to have spent a little bit more
time on the relationship with drugs, the full package of after pursuit and care,
and a lot of other things. We did not
get everything today. As I say, it has
been high quality evidence. Tom, I was
cross with the POA when we started, but that is not to undervalue your
evidence, which has been first-class and we have very much enjoyed your
performance. But do tell your Chairman
and Chief Executive that we want them here and we will ask them soon. Thank you very much for your attendance.