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.