UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 825-vi

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE

 

 

PRISON EDUCATION

 

 

Wednesday 10 November 2004

 

MS ANNE OWERS CBE, MR DAVID SINGLETON, MR BILL MASSAM MR DAVID SHERLOCK and MS JEN WALTERS

MR MICHAEL NEWELL

Evidence heard in Public Questions 428 - 557

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Wednesday 10 November 2004

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Mr David Chaytor

Valerie Davey

Jeff Ennis

Mr Nick Gibb

Helen Jones

Mr Kerry Pollard

Jonathan Shaw

Mr Andrew Turner

________________

Memorandum submitted by HM Inspectorate of Prisons

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Ms Anne Owers CBE, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons; Mr David Singleton, HMI, Deputy Director for Education, and Mr Bill Massam¸ HMI, Head of Prison Education Inspection, Ofsted; and Mr David Sherlock, Chief Inspector and Chief Executive, and Ms Jen Walters, Inspection Manager, Adult Learning Inspectorate (ALI), examined.

Q428 Chairman: Can I welcome Bill Massam, David Singleton, Anne Owers, David Sherlock and Jen Walters to our proceedings and can I say that it is a pleasure to have such a distinguished group of witnesses. I have to single out Anne Owers, as I am very impressed by Anne, as I said at a recent conference we both spoke at. I am something of an admirer of yours and also your predecessor's as I think you do a wonderful job, but that is the only nice thing I am going to say to you! We take this inquiry into prison education very seriously. It has only been part of our remit for a comparatively short time and it is something that we are committing quite a lot of energy and time to. Indeed we have just decided that we will be taking evidence in a prison shortly as well, so we are looking forward to that opportunity. Anne, when we have five or a large number of witnesses, we do pick on one, so do you want to say anything to open up our questioning and if you would like two or three minutes to do that, you would be very welcome.

Ms Owers: Thanks very much and thank you for your kind words. In turn, I would like to say on behalf of the Prisons Inspectorate how much we value and how much I think the inspection process has gained by the colleagues on both sides. The Adult Learning Inspectorate and Ofsted, I think, have raised the game of the inspection of education and training in prisons quite significantly and I think they have also done a very important thing which we look for in all aspects of prison life, which is to demand that what is offered in prisons is equivalent to what is offered outside. Whether they look at the education of under-18s, juveniles, which obviously is Ofsted's bag, or the further education and training available to those over 18, they are looking for the same standards and they are applying exactly the same criteria as they would apply to places outside. For too long in aspects of prison life, I think prisoners have had a very second-rate service, so I very much welcome that. I think that is one of the positive developments that has happened in relation to prison education and I think that has been followed too or that has been paralleled by a very helpful ring-fencing of education and training budgets within prisons, which has meant that governors cannot just poach it for other purposes, and a professionalisation of the delivery of education within prisons with the appointments of heads of learning and skills, the use of FE colleges to deliver education and training and so on. Therefore, I think there are some positive developments, not least the significant additional resources that have gone into under-18 education in prisons through the Youth Justice Board which we very much welcome. We recognise, as undoubtedly the Prison Service will have told the Committee, that the prison system is probably the largest deliverer of remedial education in the country and they will point to the significant targets that have been reached. I think, though, that we would be unwise not to recognise some of the drags on that process which are still apparent. I will rely very much on the expertise of colleagues on both sides to tell you about the quality and the professional aspects of the delivery of education and training, but I would point to three things that are difficulties within prisons just now. The first in this, as in all other areas that I report on, is the effects of overcrowding and population pressure, the fact that there are too many prisoners within the system, that the resources to provide what they need are quite thinly spread and that prisoners are moving around the system quite regularly. We were at a young offender institution not very long ago which had turned over the equivalent of its whole population in three months and where only seven per cent of those in workshops were staying long enough to gain qualifications, and that was in an 18 to 21 institution. That is not untypical, so I think the effect of that, and I can say more to the Committee about that, is very apparent. I think the second thing is that prisons are geared still towards security, quite rightly, but that sometimes means that they are not sufficiently geared in their heads towards education and training being critical, so prisoners are not always delivered on time to the resources that exist. At one prison we were at recently, prisoners were routinely arriving 90 minutes late for workshops and sessions, and that is because the prison as a whole is not signed up to education as an integral part of it and that is a task that needs to be done. The third block, I would say, is what I call the "before and after block". We are using in this country our prisons as what I have called the "most difficult tray", the place where we send people that we do not know what else to do with in outside society and that is as true in education as it is in other areas, that many of those who arrive in prisons, particularly young people, have been excluded from school or have truanted from school. They have been avoiding, or been avoided by, education for most of their lives. Prisons are picking that up and trying to dealing with it and they are dealing with some of the most difficult and damaged people which the rest of society has not been able to provide for, so when we look at what is happening in prisons, we critically need to look at what has happened or not happened before and, very importantly, what will happen next. There is no point in providing people with education and training if they are not able then to make use of that when they leave and if they are rejected by the rest of society and do not have the support and the links that they need to use that afterwards. I think those are the points that I would want to begin the session with.

Q429 Chairman: Thank you very much for that opener. The Committee would be very grateful if there are parts of your reports that have dealt particularly with education and training which you could flag up to our team and even perhaps the speech you gave at the conference that I also spoke at perhaps because that, I think, follows through some of the points you have made today, so if we could have a copy of that too, that would be most useful for our report.

Ms Owers: Certainly. I am in the process of preparing my annual report, so I could let the Clerk have some of the material from that which could be helpful.

Q430 Chairman: So there you are, sitting there as Her Majesty's Inspector, and you are surrounded by, a bit like a chorus of The Producers, and winged by four other people who are also inspectors, and the question I am going to ask you is this: is there not a feeling that there is some confusion here against most other inspection situations, and we know Ofsted and ALI very well from their other roles in other parts of the sector and we know that is their remit, that they are the inspectorates for those particular establishments, but they only can go into institutions with your approval, as I understand it, that you are the person who gives the approval for their inspection work, but why is that?

Ms Owers: That is not strictly true actually because under the 2000 legislation I think both Ofsted and ALI can go in on their own account and indeed ALI now have a system of follow-up inspections, which I am sure David will want to talk about.

Q431 Chairman: Where does, "at the invitation of HMI for Prisons" come from then?

Ms Owers: Well, that was the case, but my understanding is that the 2000 Learning and Skills Act, and I may have got the name of it wrong, actually gives, and certainly the Prison Service is very open to, inspectorates going in on a sensible basis, so what ALI have negotiated now, quite rightly, with the Prison Service is that having gone in with us on the full inspection, they will then do their own follow-up of education and training, depending upon the grading that the prison has got in that, so I do not think it is so much of a confusion. I would say that in fact I believe that when we do full inspections, what is important in a prison context is to get an holistic view of what is going on in a prison and, for that reason, we inspect healthcare and we are shortly going to enter into a protocol with the Healthcare Commission to make sure that what we are doing fits in with what they are doing. That is why I think it is important that we all go in as a piece because, as I said earlier to the Committee, what happens in education on its own needs to be seen in the context of whether the prison as a whole is a supportive environment for education and training where what is being provided there links in with the initial assessments, links in with the sentence plan, links in with the whole ethos of the prison and, for that reason, I think that it is helpful if we go in together, but that ALI and Ofsted have their own ways of being able to follow up if they need to.

Q432 Chairman: Okay, there is some diversity of inspectors and thanks for clearing that up, but what about the question about who owns education in our prisons? There are several calls on that, but who do you think owns education? Could I ask the two Davids who owns it? Is this not a split responsibility in a sense?

Mr Sherlock: I do not feel so. I would echo absolutely what Anne says, that the important thing is to get a view of prisoners learning in the context of the whole of the regime. As Anne has said, the choice of going in alone, I think that would be a step backwards. I think the strength of this whole process is to look at a number of specialist aspects of the life of a prisoner and see how they fit together into a total regime which supports them hopefully to go back and not reoffend. We are perfectly clear that the overall responsibility for learning and skills lies with the governing governor. I think the learning and skills managers as part of the management team of the prison is a real step forward and it is not universally the case, I have to say, that they are full members of the senior management team, but nevertheless that is where the responsibility lies, with the total regime of the prison and with the governing governor.

Q433 Chairman: Who is likely to be there on average for about 15 months.

Mr Sherlock: Something like that.

Q434 Chairman: So he or she is the main person?

Mr Sherlock: Yes.

Q435 Chairman: And below them?

Mr Sherlock: The learning and skills manager and then the staff of the education and training parts of the prison. Often, as Anne has already said, those do not fit together quite as well as they might.

Q436 Chairman: We have been to four prisons in this country now and one in Finland and one in Norway, so we are building up our expertise a little, but is that not a problem, David, in terms of the part of the prison system you look at, this inability to say, "Here is the full responsibility for education and training in the prison" or a young offender institution?

Mr Singleton: I think I first want to echo what David has said. If it were the case that we had the statutory powers to go it alone, as it were, we would not dream of doing it because we do think that the whole thing needs to be looked at holistically and we need to look at education in terms of all that is going on in a prison, so that is, I think, agreed. I think the question is about the follow-up to our inspections and about all of the responsibility for that is always quite clearly allocated. I think there are a number of fingers in the pie, and Bill may want to talk about that.

Mr Massam: This is a really important issue for Ofsted in the sense that we fully recognise the contribution that is being made by the heads of learning and skills who have recently been appointed, but there is some confusion, as far as the juveniles are concerned, about the roles of heads of learning and skills. In some cases they do not actually sit on the senior management team within the establishment and would perhaps report to a head of resettlement rather than just being a member of the senior management team. The other confusion that comes through is that on occasions staff are unclear about the responsibilities of heads of learning and skills vis-à-vis the education managers, so it is a very important post. Strategically, I think the YJB have got it right in introducing the posts, but as yet there is that settling-down period with the change in culture and understanding that is required, so there is some progress to date, but further work really to be done to interpret the role and understanding of heads of learning and skills, but quite clearly I agree with everything that has been said, that the governing governor is such a key person in getting the mood right and also supporting education. The quote that we have had before about attendance, for example, we have inspected a young offender institution recently where about 25 per cent of the teaching time was being lost each day because of poor attendance and punctuality and that is quite a serious issue about the regime.

Q437 Chairman: The mind boggles when you say that there is poor attendance in prisons for education. Does that mean that the staff do not deliver them or they stay in their cells and say, "I don't feel like it today"?

Mr Massam: The problem in this establishment is that the regime itself has difficulty in getting young people to education on time and to leave at the approved time in terms of the contract, so, for example, with a two o'clock start, young people would drift in and teaching would not really start until 2.20 or 2.25, and then they are being called back to the wings well before the end of the teaching time. Therefore, a significant amount of teaching time is being lost mainly because there are regime issues and I think that in many ways is down to the governing governor and how the whole regime is managed.

Q438 Chairman: How are we ever going to get a real education ethos in prisons if you do not have a holistic approach where everyone in that prison is part of that education ethos? Can you have that? In Norway and Finland we saw prison officers who were trained for a year before they became full prison officers, whereas I understand it is down to six or seven weeks' training in the UK and then very little training during their career.

Ms Owers: There is an issue of prison officer training that we have raised quite frequently and I think it is probably at its most stark in relation to the under-18s, who are children. If you think of the qualifications you would require anywhere outside of prison to get anywhere near working with a child, we are asking people who are dealing with the most difficult and damaged children in our society to do so on the basis of very little specialist training, so I think that is an issue. Nevertheless, I have seen prisons, and I know that my colleagues have, where the ethos has been turned around and the place does see itself as a place that is focused around education and training. It is often about the governing governor, it is about the whole management team, it is about the whole staff team, but you need to get around, I think, three things which are critical. One, which Bill has mentioned, is that the regime in prisons is often something around which prisoners have to fit and you have to make the regime around the needs of the prisoners and particularly the education needs. You need to have officers on the wings who are positively encouraging particularly young people who have spent their lives out of education and not simply letting them serve their sentences on their beds. You have got to have that all meshed together with the education department and if those things work, you do see results. If they do not, you see the kind of things that we have described.

Q439 Chairman: But this Committee has had evidence that there are some very good things going on in prisons, that there are some very good prisoners who are highly motivated, with governors who care about this sort of thing, but what we wonder about the system is why this is not systemic, but it is sporadic, it is patchy and we keep getting this evidence about the patchiness of the system. Surely a well-managed prison system should be better than this and why is it that Bill can tell us just now that the learning and skills person is part of the senior management team in some prisons, but not in others? What on earth is going on where we do not have a system that is built into the constitution, if you like, or at least the organisational rules? Why is that, Anne?

Ms Owers: There are two things from the prisons' point of view and David was talking to me earlier about ALI's perception which you may want to ask him about. I think there are two things from the prisons' point of view. One is that the prison system, the Prison Service, has moved within the last decade or so from being one where prisons were almost the personal fiefdoms of governors where the governor decided almost entirely what happened in a prison to a much more organised and centralised system, but the mechanism for delivering or trying to deliver consistency across the piece has been targets, key performance targets, and, as I am sure colleagues will want to say, we have some issues with those about whether they are flexible enough and whether they really record what is going on. We have seen in prisons examples where targets have been met that are inappropriate to prisoners or targets have supposedly been met by counting, for example, leaning on a broom in a corridor as a purposeful activity, so I think that the next step is to get a more coherent, a more flexible management system going within the Prison Service. As I say, I know David from the education perspective has a very particular take on that.

Chairman: I am thinking of the parliamentary equivalent of leaning on a speech in the Chamber as describing a purposeful activity! My job is to warm you up really and we are now going to drill down with some really searching questions.

Q440 Jonathan Shaw: You said that in terms of inspections, you look at the prisons holistically, every part of them, but the Prison Service, do you look at education across the piece? It feels like it is very much sort of piecemeal where you have one prison and then another prison, but actually what I and the Committee would be interested to hear is whether the inspectorates have an overview.

Ms Owers: I think you are right, that the process of inspecting prisons does mean that you get an holistic view of a particular institution. Putting it all together into a picture of what is happening in the system is more difficult and we do not do a great deal of that, although that has happened. Ofsted recently, for example, have done two thematic looks at learning and skills, one about girls in education and one about learning and skills, which has been very helpful. My remit, certainly as it is at present, does not extend to inspecting the Prison Service, so I cannot easily within my statutory remit go beyond individual prisons to the central parts of the prison system. ALI, I think, and Ofsted can more readily do that.

Q441 Jonathan Shaw: Is that a discussion you have had either with the Director General of Prisons or the Home Secretary?

Ms Owers: It is a discussion that has been going on for quite a considerable time. There are, as the Committee will probably know, some discussions going on at the moment about the whole issue of inspectorates and I am not sure, in what may be a reorganisation or may not, we are still not sure what is going to happen, what will happen about the remits of different inspectorates.

Jonathan Shaw: Well, you say you are not quite sure what is going to happen, but you will be part of that process. What are you saying? What do you want to see happen?

Q442 Chairman: Are you referring to Number 10's Policy Unit's ----

Ms Owers: Well, there have been various proposals around criminal justice inspectorates and Number Ten's proposals. There has been a lot of discussion about the role of inspectorates. My view is that certainly on occasions it would be helpful to be able to look at service-wide issues, but I think it is important to recognise that the key role of the Prisons Inspectorate is to report on the conditions and treatment of those held in incarceration and I would not want that key role to be diluted by too many other tasks that inevitably would not be accompanied by the resources that you would need to do them as well.

Q443 Jonathan Shaw: Can I hear from Mr Singleton?

Mr Singleton: I think your analysis is exactly right, if I may say so. I think there are two sorts of questions. We ask a lot of questions about education in prisons as elsewhere, but they fall into two categories, I think, clearly. One is what is the quality of the education department in itself, does it provide an adequate quality of provision, is it properly managed, is the teaching okay and so on. The second question is about whether it is functioning effectively as part of the service or a system which is actually delivering what the young people need. I think at the moment the answer to the first question is slightly clearer than the answer to the second question. The answer to the first question about the adequacy of the education department has been that there has been quite a lot of progress. There are better resources, there is more capital investment, more staff, reinforced management and so on, but a lot more needs to be done. In 2001, for example, we contributed to a report on basic skills provision which described a very poor position in young offender institutions. The Youth Justice Board has done a great deal about that, but we would say, and we are about to say again, that not enough has been done, but, nevertheless, there has been clear progress which we have been able to track. On the second question, which is essentially, are we effectively helping the young people not to reoffend and, if so, how are we doing it, what's working and what isn't, well, we think we are probably as far away as ever from getting a clear answer to that and on the whole it looks as though the fundamental difficulties about prison education are not being overcome and they are the prior experience of the young people themselves with very short custodial sentences, quite often, it appears to us, not accompanied by effective support in the community outside the custodial bit of the sentence, variation in the priority given to education and difficulties in attracting and retaining key staff.

Q444 Jonathan Shaw: If you were taking a parallel with schools, for example, where a school is failing, then Ofsted would put the school into 'special measures'. Do you go around prisons and put their education and training departments in special measures?

Mr Singleton: Well, we do not, but we do visit them very regularly.

Q445 Jonathan Shaw: Mr Sherlock says he does?

Mr Sherlock: Well, we do essentially.

Q446 Jonathan Shaw: You say you do and they do not?

Mr Sherlock: Would it be helpful to give you some statistics?

Q447 Jonathan Shaw: We always like those!

Mr Sherlock: Last year ALI participated in 33 inspections of prisons and young offender institutions. In just over 60 per cent of those, the overall education and training provision was found to be inadequate to meet the reasonable needs of those who were partaking of it and that is a substantially higher proportion obviously than you would find outside the Prison Service. Where that happened, we reinspected within 12 months. On a pilot basis, we are also offering the services of the Provider Development Unit, which is a unit of ALI, in order to assist them to raise those standards. There is a lot of work being done in order to shift, I think, the standard of education and training areas in prisons and to upgrade them and in fact the Offender Learning and Skills Unit has, I think, potentially a key role to play in that, and that is certainly one of the steps forward that has happened in the last few years with the transfer of the funding for learning and skills to the Department for Education and Skills.

Q448 Jonathan Shaw: I am right in saying that the Adult Learning Inspectorate and Ofsted have different assessment frameworks and methodologies?

Mr Sherlock: No, you are not. We all work to the Common Inspection Framework. What we have is separate remits by age group.

Mr Massam: I just have one point of clarification on that and I think it is an important point really. We do not have a formal system for placing establishments in special measures, but we do visit them on an annual basis. There is an annual inspection programme and we do follow up the recommendations made on an inspection the following year. ALI's programme of visits is less frequent. They are on a three-yearly cycle, I think, so it is slightly different in terms of emphasis.

Q449 Chairman: How many institutions have you got? It is all right saying you visit every year, but you have got a small number, all for the under-18s.

Mr Massam: That is right. Within Ofsted we have responsibility for inspecting 14 young offender institutions, male, and a changing number of female establishments. We also inspect the secure training centres and the local authority secure children's homes, so in total we would inspect a total of 30 establishments a year.

Q450 Jonathan Shaw: One of the major things that has been said time and again, and you said this to us as well, Anne, is about changing the culture. Now, you go back each year, keep going back, it improves a little bit, but not significantly, but you cannot sort of slap a special measures notice on the education and training, so if it were a school, it is likely that the headteacher would be down the road, but that does not happen with a governor, does it?

Ms Owers: It can do, but it is not necessarily the solution. I think there is a structural issue here about the levers that are there to improve education and training in prisons both within the prison and also more generally within the service and I think those are not yet sufficiently clear. I think the second bit of my answer to the Chairman earlier was going to be that I think prison governors now have a much different job than the one that prison governors used to have only five or ten years ago. They are now managing some sophisticated and professional deliveries which they cannot directly influence, and that is true now in their healthcare, which is now being run increasingly by primary care trusts and, quite rightly, being professionalised, and it is true in education with the heads of learning and skills. Therefore, what they are now having to do is to manage almost second-hand these properly professional, skilled services within their prisons rather than simply being able to use the chain of command and say, "Do this", and it gets done. That is quite a different way of managing locally within prisons and it also requires, I think, a more sophisticated approach from the Prison Service generally and I do not think those things are yet in place either nationally or locally.

Q451 Mr Gibb: So the governors do not own the education then? You said that they did.

Ms Owers: They are responsible for it, but they are not responsible for it in the way that traditionally governors have been by saying to the person next down in the chain of command, "You do it". They need to manage a contractor, they need to negotiate with a head of learning and skills, they will have the Offenders Learning and Skills Unit requiring things, and, if they are a children's establishment, they will have the Youth Justice Board requiring things. It is a much more sophisticated management model.

Q452 Jonathan Shaw: You mentioned the contractor. We know that Rex had the plug pulled on it all of a sudden and we will be speaking to people about that next week. What I would like to hear from the inspectors of prisons is your view on what should replace Rex and how should prison education be organised, as it once was with local colleges, so that there is a local knowledge base as to the skills required and the labour market that is available, or should it be done as it presently is through the private contractors? I would like to hear the views of all of you, please.

Mr Sherlock: I personally think it was deeply regrettable that the Rex project was pulled. Certainly the time it had taken had caused a great deal of damage, particularly among civilian instructors on the training side, a number had left and so forth. However, I suspect that most of that damage had already been done at the point that it was withdrawn and there was a good deal of potential, I think, from Rex to rationalise a number of the problems which we had been finding, which both Ofsted and ourselves had found over a number of years.

Q453 Chairman: David, in a sense you are talking in a bit of code here. Tell us, what was Rex intended to do?

Mr Sherlock: Rex was intended to bring education and training together and plainly they needed to be brought together. The two lines of contracting where prison governors were responsible for the training side, the occupational training, and colleges were dealing with education and never the twain met ----

Q454 Jonathan Shaw: Prison staff were not very keen on that.

Mr Sherlock: Well, the staff never met really. The training staff tended to be locked up in a workshop with a group of prisoners all day and the education staff were normally employees of a college with which they had very little contact because it was at the other end of the country, so you had a group of professionals who were deeply isolated both from one another and from the professional infrastructure of which they needed to be a part in the world outside. Now, Rex should have dealt with a great deal of that; it should have allowed integrated contracts to be formed for the whole of the education and training regime and it would have allowed perhaps things to have been done on an area basis so that rather than a single institution having to go on its own with a limited group of skills at its disposal, it might very well have been able to call on a much wider staff pool, a much wider expertise on an area basis. I think there were all kinds of possibilities with Rex which at the moment are in abeyance and which need to be tackled again. At the moment we are in a kind of Never-Never Land really.

Ms Walters: One of the issues we have observed is that the responsibility for education and training still really lies at a very local level and at the moment we are involved in talking more with the area managers for prisons to see how we can further that so that the responsibility can be broadened, and the area managers are certainly very interested. One thing that we have noted this year is the responsiveness and the commitment of both governors and area managers in raising standards of education and training and they are very interested to come together.

Q455 Jonathan Shaw: You have given us a commentary on Rex, but what is your view? What do you think should replace the current regime?

Mr Sherlock: I think probably some sort of area-based regime where learning and skills are seen as an area activity, where staff can be transferred between establishments in that area, where particular establishments specialise in particular parts of the learning and skills regime so that, for example, the local prisons which are, generally speaking, taking in people for a very short time, I think, should specialise in initial assessment rather than in training and, therefore, they do not need to have basic skills targets to achieve as they need to be achieved on an area basis, not on the individual establishment basis, with a proper range of opportunities available within the area, properly staffed with people moving between them. I think that is probably one way forward. One of the things that I think you mentioned, Mr Shaw, the system level, it seems to me that the system has not been properly designed so far as the Prison Service is concerned and that there are quite a lot of issues which heads of learning and skills, however good they may be, however committed they may be, however positive their governing governors might be in backing them, cannot resolve on their own and that decisions need to be taken about what needs to be done at an area level and about what can only be done at a national level.

Q456 Jonathan Shaw: And what can be taken at a prison level as well?

Mr Sherlock: Indeed, absolutely.

Q457 Jonathan Shaw: One of the complaints from the heads of learning and skills is that they have no influence whatsoever over the contract.

Mr Sherlock: That is right.

Q458 Jonathan Shaw: Do you think that there should be flexibility within that contract for the heads of learning and skills to be able to make adjustments according to the prison population?

Mr Sherlock: Absolutely.

Q459 Jonathan Shaw: And that is achievable, is it?

Mr Sherlock: In fact they have quite substantial budgets now and very little choice over how they might be spent and that does not seem very sensible.

Q460 Chairman: In terms of this area aspiration, are these areas coterminous or anything like coterminous with learning and skills regions? Is there not a move for learning and skills councils to have much more involvement in this?

Mr Sherlock: Yes.

Chairman: Could you tell us about that?

Q461 Jonathan Shaw: And I would like to know what the view of Ofsted is about the new contract.

Mr Singleton: I would not dissent from what David has said, but I think it still leads to some systemic difficulties not tackled from the point of view of juveniles, and I will bring Bill in to give a more expert view of that in a moment. One thing that has emerged certainly from the survey report we did on young women in prisons recently was that the link between the custodial and non-custodial aspects, detention and training orders, for example, is not secure and that one does not sufficiently support the other, so although some of the provision that we saw in the prisons was perfectly adequate or even good, the support which the youngsters received outside was insufficient actually to take them forward. Now, the contract issue does not seem to me of itself necessarily to bear on that.

Mr Massam: The issue for me really is that, as far as the young people are concerned and thinking of that group selfishly, I am attracted by the area model. It does mean that the young people, many of them, are way, way from the 50-mile radius that the YJB stipulates, and that concerns me. I do have particular concerns about the new girls units which are being established because the majority of them are in the south of England and there is only one, I think, in the north of England, in Wakefield, and there are issues there. A fundamental question is the very complex set of organisations that are already in place and I think that does create problems for establishments because they do have responsibilities to the Youth Justice Board, to the Prison Service and to the OLSU. Therefore, to bring in another regional level I think is important, but that needs to be done alongside some sort of rationalisation and much clearer lines of reporting because at the moment there is this fuzziness and lack of clarity which in some senses the inspectorates compound because we are involved in inspection and the establishments are also involved in audits and monitoring visits, so there is a very complex set of arrangements. I do support the notion of some area provision as I think it does make a lot of sense as far as the young people are concerned, but there is a big "but". It is not in addition to existing structures, but it needs to be co-ordinated and improved upon.

Ms Owers: I am also attracted by David's area model. It is the way that resettlement work in prisons, for example, is working best, when it is taken on an area level rather than an individual prison level, but there are two big "buts" to it. One is that it would be lovely if each area had its own juvenile establishment, its own women's establishment, its own young offender establishment, but they do not and prisons are not sensibly located within areas. The second is that whilst, yes, ideally it would be lovely if local prisons only did assessments, and there will be people in local prisons who will never move outside a local prison, some short-term prisoners will serve all their sentence, a lot of people on remand in local prisons, and if we do not offer them anything substantive at that level, then they get nothing at all.

Q462 Chairman: What is the relationship between what you would call an "area", what we might call a "region"?

Ms Walters: I think the tensions will be between what the learning and skills councils, when they take over the funding, consider their areas and how that will apply to prison areas because there will be a crossover and I think there are going to be some tensions there. I think the other tensions will be in the development of a curriculum for an area and then developing a core national curriculum as to which one will come first because at the moment there are prisoners transferring to different prisons, unable to carry on their studies and there is a need, I think, to look at the whole basis of the curriculum that is offered right across the prison estates and, whether that is done firstly on a national basis or an area basis, I would suggest, and my view is, that it would be better first off on an area basis and building it up to a national level and, therefore, I think the LSC funding can follow that.

Q463 Chairman: Can any of you here give us the areas we are talking about in terms of prisons?

Ms Owers: If we are talking about prison areas, yes.

Q464 Chairman: We are going to have to be able to look at prison areas and learning and skills areas and really look at how this will all map out, but you still have not answered the question as to who pulled the plug on Rex and why - who did it?

Mr Sherlock: As far as I am aware, the Offenders Learning and Skills Unit pulled the plug because of concerns about the harm that it was doing in terms of staff leaving and so forth within the Prison Service, hence I made the point that in fact I think that many of the people who were going to leave had left and at that stage, if it were to be done ----

Q465 Chairman: But it did not go higher than that?

Mr Sherlock: Not as far as I am aware.

Q466 Jeff Ennis: The Chairman's last reply actually leads very nicely into the question I was going to ask Anne in terms of her opening remarks when she said that there are a number of challenges facing education in prisons, one of which was the fact that prisoners seem to get moved, for no apparent reason, from one institution to another and the last thing that is taken into account is the educational course that the prisoner is on. Is there a need actually to raise the sort of priority of education in terms of when governors are looking at transferring a prisoner from one institution to another?

Ms Owers: Absolutely. I think it is the case that in some prisons you see that happening. We have been in quite a number of prisons recently where governors do put a hold on people who are on courses and try their very best to make sure that those people are not transferred. In a separate, but not unrelated, tack, we have been in prisons where governors ensure that the wages available to prisoners who engage in education are not significantly lower than for those who engage in quite unproductive contract working, but we also still find prisons where neither of those things is happening, and that, I think, goes to the Chairman's point about consistency.

Q467 Jeff Ennis: The other point I was going to make, Chairman, because we are looking at the co-ordination of inspection in prisons, is that it appears to me from evidence we have already received that there is a missing link here and that is the suggestion that was made by a previous witness to the Committee, that there should be an inspectorate for aftercare because the main problem is that while they are in prison, some of the students are actually following courses and then, when they leave prison, they actually then put them to one side and there is not a real need here to establish what this witness said was an inspectorate of aftercare. I just wondered, Chairman, if our witnesses have got any views on trying to establish an inspectorate of aftercare and, if there is a need for it, who would be best placed actually to administer it?

Ms Walters: One of the things that we do when we are inspecting prisons is to look at the number of prisoners who have been released within the last six months and try and track and see whether any of them have continued their education and training or what jobs they have actually managed to secure and whether there has been training attached to any of those jobs. I think the numbers currently are very low because there is no system in place to properly check that through, so I think there is a need to establish a form of aftercare to take that on and to enable particularly the sub-contractors to hold some responsibility for that which at the moment the contracts do not, it is purely compliance and does not require them to supply that support.

Ms Owers: There is of course an Inspectorate of Probation which is responsible for such organised aftercare as we provide which is only for prisoners who are serving sentences of 12 months or more. One of the things we are doing with probation is we are working up a methodology for better inspecting offender management through the prison gate, in other words, to try, in probation inspections, to look back at what has happened in prisons and, in prison inspections, to try to sort of point forward at what might happen. I think the National Offender Management Service and the way that we might inspect through that does have some potential gains in this area. However, one of the problems is that what we are often pointing to is a gap and you cannot inspect a gap. If nobody is picking up aftercare, there is nothing to inspect and in some cases I think it is also the responsibility of other inspectorates outside criminal justice to pick up how the institutions they are responsible for, whether that is local authority housing, further education or whatever, are discharging responsibility in relation to ex-offenders.

Q468 Mr Pollard: Could I just explore something that David Sherlock said earlier when I think he said that 60 per cent of your inspections were below par and you went on to say that you revisited, but you never sort of completed the answer by saying what happens then. Had there been a dramatic improvement?

Mr Sherlock: About 50 per cent of them are satisfactory or better after we go back. Again that is well below the proportion outside. We would expect at least 85 per cent of providers in the world outside the Prison Service to have improved very substantially, so the question then is what happens to the other 50 per cent. We have been asked by the OLSU to work with those 50 per cent in terms of providing a service to help them raise standards, so that is what is happening. I think it is a bit too early to say how successful that is going to be, but obviously there is no choice, but to get them right, so we are involved with OLSU in trying to get them right.

Q469 Mr Pollard: I am worried about this holistic approach. You have repeatedly said that you have to have a holistic approach, and I understand that, but is there not a danger that one of these drags that you were talking about earlier on, Anne, could result because you were having a holistic approach, so the movement forward is so slow as to be almost imperceptible, when I think everybody recognises that education is the key to getting for young folk some job prospects at the end of it all. Education - move that forward quickly rather than saying, "Well, if we don't all move forward together, it will drag".

Ms Owers: I can see the danger that you are pointing to, but unless you get the establishments signed up to it, you are simply not going to be able to deliver the quick gains in education that you want. Nevertheless, I think that the way that we have both inspected and the way that the systems have been reorganised have provided the possibility for some quick gains in education, what David is describing, for example, in terms of follow-up and what Bill was describing in terms of additional resources available to the Youth Justice Board. I think this is one of the areas in prisons which has visibly sharpened up and moved forward and I do not think inspecting it as a whole is going to place a drag on that. What I do think it does is to contextualise it and to say to the whole establishment, "It's your responsibility", but also to recognise that, in spite of the disappointing figures that David is producing and that Bill and the other David have produced, prisons are working with some extremely difficult and damaged people who will spend their lives avoiding, or being avoided by, education and that the gains will be slow. I think what we ought to be measuring much more than we do in terms of prison education, instead of targets of how many people have reached Level 1 and 2, we know those are important, but we also know that they are not important for all prisoners, what we ought to be measuring is value added, and we do not measure that nearly enough.

Q470 Mr Pollard: I was in youth justice some years ago and we visited a place called Hollesley Bay and I was so impressed with that. They took young people there, they ran a farm and were doing good work, and for the first time many of these young people had some self-respect and dignity, but we do not seem to do that anymore and that, it seemed to me, was a cracking scheme. The prison governor thought it was wonderful and what he said to us was, "What I want to do is get these lads jumping up and down, working hard all day long, absolutely tired out and straight off to bed at eight o'clock at night, and also to be able to read a letter from home and write a letter back home", simple. Should we not be concentrating on that basic skill and giving them self-respect?

Ms Walters: One of the difficulties, one of the tensions in this area is the fact that self-evidently around 70 per cent, as everyone knows, of people coming into prisons lack the basic skills that will make them employable and they need fundamental teaching in literacy and numeracy. The difficulty is that if we get into that solely as the sole thing, then there would be a lot of particularly young people in our prisons who will not buy into that and certainly will not buy into it immediately. I am encouraged by the fact that basic skills are increasingly in prisons being delivered in the context of work, learning pods in workshops, so the young people are doing something, such as, real men do bricklaying, so they will do bricklaying and in the course of that they will have to learn how to count and they will have to learn how to write up their projects. I also think we should not lose sight of those other soft things, working on farms is one, but also our drama, all of those things which give people, particularly young people, self-respect. I was at Brixton this week looking at something called the Dream Factory where young prisoners were performing Shakespeare with Sinatra. This is the sort of thing that gives them the kind of self-respect they had never had. Let us not be so focused on useful skills that we forget the routes that are needed to get people to drink at the trough once we have provided it.

Ms Walters: It is in our reports. In virtually every report we report on self-esteem and the building of confidence and the change in the individual. It is not just about measuring what they have achieved. It is about measuring how they are progressing in developing themselves and it is something we take very seriously in our reports.

Q471 Chairman: How is this all linked to the other things which happen in a prison, given the self-respect and self-esteem and all that, which this committee has heard a great deal about? How does it link with the pretty awful work that goes on in workshops? Does that give self-esteem? They get more money for that to do drudgery as I see it rather than education or anything else. Do you inspect all that: the workshops, the work, the education and the training?

Ms Owers: Yes, everything.

Ms Walters: Even when there are no qualifications.

Q472 Chairman: So your reports do say regularly, "This is not joined up. There should be more incentive to do it in education"?

Ms Walters: Yes.

Ms Owers: Yes, but the words "missed opportunity" occur very often in our reports.

Mr Singleton: Can I make a point that takes us back to Mr Ennis's question about inspecting aftercare? You do see some wonderful things which raise young people's self-esteem and take them forward dramatically, but that can all disappear very quickly when they go back into the community. Your question about aftercare is very well put. We have done some inspection of aftercare. When we did our inspection of girls in prisons we interviewed the young women on detention and training orders while they were in custody and then followed up those interviews afterwards. The aftercare was by no means of the same standard as the education they had received in prisons, and therefore much of the effect of what happened in the prison was largely dissipated, it seemed to us. It may well be that we ought to be doing more of that work. I know you feel very strongly about that.

Mr Massam: In terms of priorities it is something we would like to do. We did a small-scale exercise when we looked at the girls in prison but if we are going to be true to the Detention and Training Order perhaps we need other inspectorates to consider a review of the total Detention and Training Order because that is the experience of young people, ie, they spend the first part of their sentence in custody and then there should be a smooth transition into the community. One of the disappointments, Chairman, even though there are some examples of good practice, has been the lack of support from the Connexions partnerships because it is one of the issues that many of the Connexions partnerships do not feel that these establishments belong to them because many of the young people do not come from their home areas. I think that has been a key factor in that the whole quality of support and guidance at the time of transition is something that we would say is a major weakness. I would pick up Mr Ennis's point and fully endorse and support that.

Q473 Mr Turner: Perhaps I could pick up one point from my own experience, which I agree is unusual. Very few prisoners are local, very few indeed, and yet we seem to have this idea that prisoners can be accommodated in areas where FE colleges will be delivering a service to them after they leave as well as while they are in prison. What is the truth of that?

Ms Owers: It is, sadly, the truth that although there is an aim that all prisoners, and particularly young prisoners, should be held within 50 miles of their home that aim is a long way from being realised. We did some research recently for our annual report looking at prisons' own population profile information and what we established was that around half to 60 per cent of prisoners in local prisons come from within 50 miles of the prison. It reduces to about a third when you are looking at training prisons, which of course are the prisons that really should be focusing on education and training, and certainly in David's area model would be the ones that did. There is a real problem within our present overcrowded system where there is little headroom to move people to where they would like to be or where they should be, or indeed to move them to a place where they are offering the kind of course that they need.

Q474 Mr Gibb: I am interested in this ownership of education in prisons. I am always staggered by the way the managers in the state sector seem unable to manage as clients their sub-contractors in a way that in the private sector is quite routine. I get the impression generally in the Prison Service that there is a crisis of management going on with governor grades moving every 15 months. There is something very seriously wrong as far as I can see from the evidence we have taken so far on this issue. Mr Singleton, in your report it says, "Too many young people fail to receive an education that meets their needs and prepares them for the transition from custody to the community". That is a devastating indictment of education in prisons. Can you tell us a bit more about that? What led you to that conclusion?

Mr Singleton: Could I ask which report you are referring to?

Q475 Mr Gibb: The 2002/2003 Ofsted annual report. Is that no longer your view then?

Mr Singleton: No; it is still our view. Despite the improvements that we have seen in prison education and education for young offenders recently that still would be our view. If the objective is to put young people in a position in which they can realistically expect to survive after a period without support in the community, we are still not there. I have already suggested some of the fundamental systemic difficulties which prevent that happening. The inspection that we have done most recently is a reprise of our 2001 report on the provision of basic skills in young offender institutions and that again shows progress but not enough progress.

Q476 Mr Gibb: Can you just give me some facts about why you came to this conclusion; not what the dynamics are but what the facts are which led you to this conclusion?

Mr Singleton: The facts are that far too many young people still have insufficient basic skills for employment. The education which they receive in prison, partly because of the sentencing policy which places many in custody for a very short time, does not allow them sufficiently to develop those skills. If the objective is to give people the basic literacy and numeracy that they need for employment then it is not being done and arguably it cannot be done in the time that they are there.

Q477 Mr Gibb: And even those that are there for a longer time, are they getting good training in these basic skills?

Mr Singleton: I think on the whole they are not. It would be fair to say that there is a great deal more progress that needs to be made. The Youth Justice Board has issued a specification nationally which defines an entitlement for young people to have, for example, five hours of basic literacy and numeracy a week and many of them are not receiving it.

Q478 Mr Gibb: The reason we have been given as to why it is not happening is that they are moving prisons, but even the ones that are not moving prisons and who are therefore there for a sufficiently longer time are still not getting five hours a week education in basic skills?

Mr Singleton: No.

Q479 Mr Gibb: Why is that, do you think?

Mr Massam: Can I answer it in terms of the evidence? There are a number of issues which link to that which we need to highlight. There are staffing issues in terms of the establishment and not having adequate numbers of staff in some establishments and also staff with the appropriate training and background. That is a key issue to the conclusions. We are dealing with, yes, some of the most challenging and difficult young people but we are also, for teaching purposes, putting them into age groups which go from 15 through to 18 in the same group. We are also finding that not all but significant numbers of teachers do lack appropriate qualifications either for specialist areas or in terms of basic teaching qualifications in some areas. We also find in establishments that the resources that the young people have access to vary significantly. The Youth Justice Board has put a lot of funding resource into new accommodation blocks but there is great variation across the estate in terms of the provision. We have also got the nature and quality of support of the education contractors that you made reference to before. The colleges vary in their commitment to and support of the education contracts. I am not saying that they are all poor but they do vary in many respects. When you look at the educational experience of young people, and we have already talked about this word "churn" and the movement of young people through, we know that the average length of stay is just over four months, so it is very difficult. A key finding we are coming up with is that the provision for those young people at Level 2 and above is quite limited. Because of the emphasis on basic skills and because of the way the programmes are timetabled many of these young people are being rotated around courses at a particular level with little chance ---

Q480 Mr Gibb: I will just try once more to establish some facts. As far as Ofsted is concerned what proportion of prisoners coming into prison cannot read properly?

Mr Massam: Our figures would be linked to the Youth Justice Board figures, which I think in previous evidence to this committee were that about 50 per cent of young people have problems with reading and writing.

Q481 Mr Gibb: What about when they leave? What proportion in your opinion still cannot read when they leave?

Mr Massam: Evidence is difficult because one of the problems we have made reference to already is the question of value added. I was in an establishment last week where they test young people on arrival and on departure and make some judgments against the progress made in terms of reading age, but that is quite unusual. It is difficult for some establishments because of the churn and the movement around to test people before departure because in some cases the departure is quite hurried; it might be an early release, so we do not have the quality of data available at the moment that gives meaningful information on value added.

Q482 Mr Gibb: Do you think we should have that data?

Mr Massam: I think it is essential that we do.

Q483 Mr Gibb: So do you think that should be one of our recommendations?

Mr Massam: I would hope you could do that.

Q484 Mr Gibb: Can I turn to Anne Owers? We have just heard that prisoners even on long sentences are not getting five hours of training in basic skills, we have just heard there are not enough staff, we have just heard that teachers lack the basic qualifications. What are you doing about this in your report? Are you highlighting these things and making a stink about it because this to me looks like a shambles that is going on in our prisons? I am not just talking about the prisoners that are moving around, and I understand that that can be problematic, but even those that have longer sentences are not getting even five hours' education a week in basic skills, such as teaching them to read. Will this be the headline of your next report?

Ms Owers: It is raised in all our reports and it is raised in the separate reports that ALI and Ofsted do on the prisons that they inspect. It is something that we refer to constantly. It is a major problem. It is not a problem that prisons on their own can solve. It is about the way that we sentence particularly young people because actually there are very few under-18 young prisoners serving long sentences. As Bill said, the great majority are serving an average of four months inside. We have to ask what we can reasonably do to the kind of damaged young individuals who end up in our prisons in that period of time. We have to ask questions about the recruitment of teachers and about the unpopularity of working in prisons in some areas. We have to join it up with what is going on outside. In our reports we continually highlight it. I do not think it is a shambles. It has improved from an extremely low base with the injection of some professional standards of management, but it has got an awfully long way to go and it is that joining up, it is establishing the right levers, that still is not happening.

Q485 Mr Gibb: Why can we not give all young offenders five hours' lessons a week, even if they are only there for four months? I do not understand why they are not getting five hours' training a week.

Ms Owers: For the reasons that Bill said: sometimes the establishments cannot get the teachers in order to deliver this. They cannot get properly qualified teachers.

Mr Gibb: It just seems a shambles. They cannot get the teachers? What about all these contracts, all these FE contracts?

Mr Turner: They are breaching their contracts.

Mr Gibb: There is an insouciance here.

Chairman: We are talking about the Inspectorate now.

Q486 Mr Gibb: I know, but when I listen to the inspectors on Radio 4 I do not hear these things being mentioned. This is catastrophic. There are 24 hours in a day, eight hours of working time in a day, and they cannot get five hours' training a week in an institution.

Mr Massam: I think "shambles" is a bit hard but I understand the point. What we have seen over the last two to three years is a significant injection of funding from the Youth Justice Board through heads of learning and skills, and we have seen the appointment of learning support assistants on a ratio of one assistant to ten young people, and we are starting to see some major benefits stemming from those appointments. We are seeing, not only in terms of learning and support assistants helping out with basic skills but also in a one-to-one setting helping out with all sorts of pastoral support issues. What we are also seeing, however, in some establishments where they do have problems in staff recruitment is that they are not able to meet the specification and the targets that are being set for them at this stage by the Youth Justice Board. It is improving. There are concerns in some establishments and there are particular concerns that we are going to raise in our report in relation to basic skills, but I do not think it is as bleak as you are suggesting.

Q487 Mr Gibb: So what do you think would be a good number of hours a week, if it is not bleak?

Mr Massam: I think the hours are realistic in terms of a target but the issue that we are having, and it happens in FE colleges too, is that there are problems in finding specialist staff who are able to work with young people in relation to the development of their basic skills. It is not just an issue for the prison estate. I think it is also an issue for the colleges and it is reflected here. Again, some of this work is not all that attractive to people in terms of the options. If they can find work in a local FE college, to work in a prison establishment is not attractive to some people and it comes back to the question of recruitment and retention of staff. The targets that have been stated at the moment are appropriate. They are not being met in some establishments but we have also seen significant progress and improvements in the quality of support in terms of basic skills for juveniles over the last two years.

Q488 Mr Gibb: There is a thing called the Expectations for Inspection that you have and there is a whole list of things, like learning plans should be into integrated into custody plans, and yet we hear that prisoners are continually arriving 90 minutes late to sessions. We are talking about a pay structure where there is still a gap in many prisons. We are talking about continuing their courses on release and transfer, and this is not happening as well. It sounds like what is going on in prison education is a million miles away from this list of expectations. What is happening about trying to bring this within some proximity to what you are expecting?

Ms Owers: A million miles is probably a greater distance than I would say. Our Expectations document is what we think should be happening in prisons. We would not need to inspect as regularly as we do if they were happening. In all aspects of prison life what we do is hold the prison up against what we expect it to be doing. That is the whole point of the kind of detailed inspection that we do. We can get beneath sometimes what managers would like to believe is happening in their prison and point out what actually is happening. That process of inspection, of trying to pull institutions up towards what we expect them to do, is the business we are engaged in.

Q489 Chairman: We must move on but, very quickly, there is one thing you have touched on. You keep saying that four months is very short. That is in very different circumstances than you regularly inspect. What pedagogy has been developed, what research has been done, for an appropriate form of education and training for this very specialist type of student? Are you not just carrying what you see in colleges and other adult learning outside and delivering it into prisons inappropriately? Should there not be a specially trained group of teachers and trainers and a special way of teaching that is appropriate for people who are only around for a short period? How much innovation is going on in terms of teaching method?

Mr Sherlock: I think there are other contexts where people are there for a very short time. Military initial training is one of them; aspects of the New Deals are another, and Jobcentre Plus activity is another, so I think there are plenty of areas where one might find some precedents, but I am not sure they are carrying over.

Ms Walters: One of the main issues that we have identified is the lack of an appropriate curriculum for short term prisoners. We are talking about a curriculum that may be able to give someone accreditation for an hour's learning, for two hours' learning, a week, whatever it is, and that they can take that with them and it can mean something when they leave the prison and perhaps when they go into employment. We are working with the OLSU and with awarding bodies to try and set up a structure that will satisfy all prisoners serving sentences regardless of the time. I think the area structure will allow this to happen much more easily. Talks have begun with different awarding bodies to try and set this up.

Q490 Helen Jones: I want to come back to the question of staffing if I may because I think that is linked with effectiveness. One of the problems I keep coming back to, which we had with the prison officers, was that there was no adequate career structure within that service for staff. It seems to me we have a similar problem in the education sector. To attract good staff and staff who keep in touch with developments in their area, who can interact with other staff and so on, we need to have a much more effective career structure and much more effective links with local colleges so that staff can move in and out of the system. I would like to hear your views on how we can best do that because it seems to me we are very poor at doing it so far. We have got some very good, very dedicated staff but they are very isolated.

Ms Walters: In regard to the sub-contracting arrangements with colleges, often colleges have many prisoners within that contract with colleges over 150 miles away. This is an issue that relates to staff development and I think that one of the solutions to this would be looking at the area model which would allow much more frequent visits between the prison staff and the college and staff development arrangements. We are broadening that out and also for them to take part in the Prison Service staff development opportunities, and the two need to be dovetailed to bring the best possible advantages for the staff delivering that education and training in prisons, which is not happening at the moment and which we have highlighted in reports.

Mr Massam: We endorse what you say. A key factor is the quality of the staffing and the staff development opportunities. It is surprising on occasions to think that many of the contractors are FE colleges but in many ways there is very limited contact between the main college and the establishment itself. It seems to me that there are issues around development in terms of the curriculum, issues to do with individuals in their own career development etc, which are being neglected to a certain extent. I would not want to take away the commitment of the staff in terms of the work itself, but I think you are right: it is a major area for development. Part of it is to do with the fact that because of the staffing issues we have identified there is always a reason why people should not be involved in staff development, because of the day-to-day happenings in the education department. There are some examples of good practice but again it is something I would endorse.

Mr Massam: I do not think there is anything wrong inherently in staff working for the Prison Service. Instructors work for the Prison Service. There is nothing wrong with that as a model and I do not see why sub-contracting is necessarily part of the mix. Were all education and training staff working for the Prison Service, were there a structure within the Prison Service right the way to the top with a head of learning and skills for the Prison Service, that might work perfectly well. We are talking about a lot of staff here. It is a big enterprise.

Q491 Helen Jones: But it would cut them off from developments in education and training outside their own sphere, would it not? A lot of FE colleges are developing some very good models for dealing with young people. The worry I have about what you are suggesting is that the institution then starts looking inwards. We saw that with health and that was a real problem.

Mr Massam: I think that is why I was suggesting that deployment on an area basis might well work perfectly well. I really do think that there is at the moment very little being gained from the apparent wider community of education to which education staff belong.

Q492 Helen Jones: Can we look at the actual effectiveness of the education, the targets that people have to meet? Anne referred earlier to the value of what we call some of the soft skills - drama, art and so on - in building up people's self-respect and then in preparing them to learn. Do the targets that we have currently in your view militate against people gaining those skills and, if so, how would you change the targets? I get the impression that a lot of the system is not delivering effectively and therefore we are going to have to set targets for it. The question is how you define those soft targets. As someone said before, we have a very difficult group of young people here in many cases, and a very difficult group of adults, and a lot of the work is about preparing them to learn, it seems to me. Do you have any comments on that?

Ms Owers: I have two. The first is to refer back to what I and others have said about value added. A sophisticated way of looking at it is what comes in the prison gate and what goes out the other end. That value added needs to be based secondly on an individual assessment of the needs of each person. At the moment we are adopting very much a one-size-fits-all approach. We know that it is a size that many people coming into prisons need because we know that overall we are looking at around 70 per cent of prisoners who are deficient in basic skills and without those basic skills it will be very difficult for them to gain employment, but we are pushing everything into that pot and I am seeing, for example, in some open prisons, where prisoners tend to have better qualifications than others, that there is no opportunity for anything above Level 2. At some young offender institutions there is no opportunity for anything above that level. There are some who will struggle to get to Level 1 and there are many others, as you have said, who will only come to do education by a fairly circuitous route, and that route needs to be mapped out for them. What we need to do is look at individual needs assessments where education is, as Mr Gibb was saying, attached and brought into everything else that is happening to that young person within the prison, but also where we look at what value prison has been able to achieve even if it is only a two-hour module that gives them some sort of certification in something they have been able to do probably for the first time in their lives.

Q493 Helen Jones: What about employability though? It seems to me that one of the keys to preventing people re-offending is getting them into work when they leave prison. There is a tension between talking about the soft skills, if you like, and also saying that we want people prepared for work when they come out. Do there need to be more effective targets in prisons for linking education, employability, for involving employers perhaps, and do you have any suggestions to put to the committee about that? We saw a very effective project in Reading with people working for British Gas, but it is very small-scale. Would you be able to make any suggestions about how we can build into the system more of that sort of approach?

Ms Owers: I think it is critical. I think the Transco project in Reading is extremely good. It works for a relatively small number of prisoners who will be high achievers, but that is not to discount that. It is the notion of working out what the local job market requires, which may be fork lift truck drivers in some areas, or is almost certainly likely to be plumbers. The problem with farms, for example, is that there is going to be very little work available on a farm for most young people. It is absolutely about getting those links with the local job market, getting the buy-in from outside. A lot of what we have been talking about this morning has been that organisations outside prisons should engage with their prisons, should not just assume that these are places which do their own thing but that they should be part of their local community. I absolutely agree with that but, again, when we are looking at employability we need to be sophisticated about what we expect and what is actually happening. If we set too rigid and mechanistic targets where employability means that someone turns up for a job interview we are not solving anything. What we need is to make people employable so that they can hold down employment, and that is about the whole area of self-esteem. It is not about being able to hang on to a job for a day or a week. It is about being able to engage fully and properly in the job market which people have never properly done before.

Q494 Valerie Davey: We have looked down the telescope at the institution and I want to follow on my colleague's emphasis on the individual. You have been quite right in recognising the importance of a sophisticated approach and I would like to ask you about that initial assessment: who does the initial assessment, in what depth is it done, what happens to that record, especially when a young person moves, indeed when anyone moves.

Mr Massam: I will talk about juveniles in terms of the initial assessment. It is common practice that on admission a young person would be asked to complete a basic skills assessment. One of the issues would be that if that person has been moved from another establishment it could be the same or a very similar assessment that he or she would have done previously. With the appointment of the special educational needs co-ordinators we have identified some improvements in initial assessments over the last year because in some establishments we are seeing an attempt to look at the person in a much broader context, ie, to look at their learning styles and other aspects of their particular needs. What they all should have is an asset form that has been completed by the youth offending team. We do find that the asset forms are very limited in their usefulness because these forms really should reflect a young person's prior educational attainment and experience and they are very patchy and of very limited use. Really, therefore, initial assessment in most cases is from a fresh start. Sometimes it is the guidance staff who conduct the initial assessment; sometimes it is teaching staff. That information is brought together and then forwarded on to subject teachers. Occasionally at that time there will be some attempt for the guidance workers or those involved in assessment to try to conduct some sort of dyslexia screening, but that varies again between establishments. The process then is that the information is forwarded to the subject teachers and the subject teachers, depending on their approach, would conduct some assessment in terms of the mathematics, the science or whatever that they are responsible for. We have seen improvements. We have seen the special educational needs co-ordinators intervening when young people have not reached a particular level in terms of literacy and numeracy and that triggers individual guidance interviews and also an entitlement to one-to-one support through the learning support assistants. It is an improving picture as far as the young offender institutions are concerned but it is still very limited in terms of its scope.

Mr Singleton: There is a "but" as well, and that is that the assessment is not always sufficiently carried through into the design of the programme, so the youngsters can still end up not getting quite the provision that they need.

Q495 Valerie Davey: I recognise that many of these youngsters have not come from schools straight into prison but is there any opportunity to look back at their record at school? Is any of that forwarded? Is there any way in which that can be used?

Mr Massam: There are instances where, say, a person has been admitted and has been involved in a school programme taking GCSE and you see transfer of work and some communication between the school and the establishment, but it is very difficult to give specific guidance. In some establishments it would happen; in others it would not, but there are case studies where that does take place.

Q496 Valerie Davey: How confident are you in the expertise of the assessor? You say that in some cases dyslexia is screened. I have a particular interest in that area but there are some very special needs which in some cases I believe have led to the disaffection of these young people. How sophisticated is it because it would seem to me to be cost effective to put huge expertise into this initial assessment? Secondly, it appeared that you were saying that this is then done at the next establishment and the next establishment and it may not be a common factor. For goodness' sake why are we re-assessing somebody on possibly different criteria? Should not this initial expert assessment be done and then the information transferred?

Mr Massam: Perhaps I can take the second question first. The major problem in transferring information about young people between establishments, not only in terms of initial assessments but also in terms of their performance in subjects, is that they could be moved after two or three months on to another establishment. It is a major problem in terms of management information systems that are in place to transfer information from one establishment to another. In terms of your first question, the issue for me is that the initial assessment process is quite mechanistic, that you arrive and you have to meet certain deadlines and target dates that have been set by the Youth Justice Board and you go through the basic skills assessment. Again, that could be quite mechanistic. We find some young people who are just not ready to complete it because it could be their first sentence and within a matter of days they are being asked to sit down and people are making judgements about them and all sorts of things are going on in the mind of the young person for the first time in custody and so on. The timing is quite crucial in some senses. For some people it is all right but for others it does not provide any meaningful data because the young person is not able to complete what is being asked of them. It is quite a mechanistic process and if we are going to look at value added what we need to do is to have a very detailed, sophisticated approach to the initial assessment which we are able to respond to in terms of provision, which is not always the case.

Q497 Valerie Davey: I am sorry to come back to you. I am still not sure who does this assessment and what qualifications they have to do it.

Mr Massam: Again, on some occasions the guidance worker is appointed by the education contractor and their specific task would be to be involved in initial assessment and guidance, so they would have a guidance qualification. In other establishments it would be teachers, members of the teaching team who would be allocated time to be members of the initial assessment group. It varies. It could be a trained teacher or a guidance worker.

Mr Singleton: We will be commenting on this in our forthcoming report on basic skills and we will be saying that virtually every, if not every, young offender institution has at least one member of staff who is trained in and can deal with dyslexia, so there is some expertise available.

Q498 Valerie Davey: Could I move on to the adult side? We do seem to be improving at the young offender level with the SENCO. Should there not be that kind of development at adult level as well?

Ms Walters: Yes, I concur with a lot of what Bill has said. The issue in the adult institutions is that there is no system for transferring information from prison to prison when a prisoner is transferred. When prisoners come into a prison they do not have to undertake initial assessment; it is their choice, so our calculation is that no more than 80 per cent of those prisoners take an initial assessment and of those probably only 15 per cent get any delivery of initial assessment, and so the numbers are very low. Also, when they come into the prison the initial assessment is given as soon as they come into the prison where emotionally, physically and mentally they may not be able to cope with that. As Bill said, the timing is absolutely crucial as to when that initial assessment is given. The initial assessment until recently has been a very brief initial assessment and has concentrated on getting them into the basic skills programmes in order to meet the key performance targets rather than looking holistically at what that person needs as well as the initial support in literacy and numeracy and language. In adult prisons they have recently been introducing assessments of dyslexia and dyspraxia needs but that is very new. There have been improvements; they have been happening relatively recently and the heads of learning and skills certainly have been very aware of this and many of them are acting quite forcefully in the systems they are putting into place.

Q499 Valerie Davey: Would you mind sending the committee the details of the dyslexia and dyspraxia initial work that you started and where and how it has been done?

Ms Walters: Yes, we will do that.

Q500 Valerie Davey: In Bristol last week Lord Chief Justice Woolf came to congratulate those who were involved in a scheme looking at prolific offenders, and this is essentially looking one-to-one. It seems to me that there are lessons to be learned here, that it is this lack of individual assessment, this lack of individually taking matters forward which leads to the lack of prevention of re-offending. I think the initial benefits of this have repercussions for our education style and perhaps it is that we are looking forward. Is it true, do you think, that we are looking too much at creating an ideal institution which would not benefit the individual unless we know what the needs of the individual coming through the door are?

Ms Owers: I would agree with that and, as all of us have said, that actually relates to what is going to happen next. We are rightly critical of our prisons. My job is to hold prisons up to the standards that we require of them and on some occasions find that those are not met. What we have to recognise, however, is that prisons are dealing with people who have come to prison with a history of disasters in their lives, of chaos in their lives, of dysfunction in their lives, but the rest of society has often given up on. We are somehow expecting a short period in prison, a matter of weeks or months, to be a magic fix that will suddenly turn them into well-educated and fully functioning citizens when they go out. It is not realistic. We talk about a holistic approach within prisons but what we need to have is a holistic approach to what is happening to people who are people as well as offenders.

Q501 Mr Pollard: Stop them getting there in the first place.

Ms Owers: Exactly. There is upstream work that needs to be done which, to be fair, in terms of young people, the Youth Justice Board is doing, but there is also downstream work that needs to be done. We are talking about people who have been failed many times in their lives and in some cases the worst thing you can do is to make assessments that you cannot carry out in prison or to offer promises about what is not going to happen later. That is almost worse than not doing anything.

Q502 Jonathan Shaw: Twenty three per cent of males and 11 per cent of females sentenced to prison attended a special educational needs school compared to one per cent of the population. We have heard that there are SENCOs at young offender institutions. It is not the case, we understand, in adult prisons. Is that something that you are recommending? If people have all these high levels of disability, it is vital that people have the skills to assess them.

Ms Owers: Yes, I would welcome advice from the ALI on that.

Ms Walters: There is a need and an opportunity now to provide a structure whereby there are specific pockets of help within the adult prisons for both males and females. One of the things that we have identified is that in some prisons, where the majority of those prisons are short term serving prisoners, there is an opportunity for a strategy to be put in place which becomes an elongated initial assessment and diagnostic assessment centre where you can put this SENCO arrangement into place so that you are preparing the whole person rather than just dealing with the key performance targets.

Q503 Chairman: We must, to do justice to the Prison Governors' Association, move on. There is just one thing before we finish this session, which has been an excellent session. I hope all of you will maintain a relationship with the committee because we want to make this an extraordinarily good report. It is a very important report to us. If you think of things that we should have asked you or things you should have said, do communicate with the committee. When we were in Oslo and Helsinki something that went right through the discussions we had with people about prison education was drugs, and none of you has mentioned drugs, that 60 or 70 per cent of people in our prison establishments are abusing alcohol or other substances. We saw a wonderful aftercare service in Oslo that seriously tried to address the drug-taking problem. Is that not a problem that runs right through our ability to educate and train people?

Ms Owers: It absolutely does. Both Jen and Bill made the point about initial assessments. One of the things that happens is that you are assessing people who are still coming off drugs in most cases, but it also goes to the point that all of us have made, that you cannot just treat education as if it was some sort of separate thing to the life and needs of the person as a whole, and those will be about the need for help and support with substance abuse and other kinds of abuse, and all the family links, all of those things that need to go together. Education on its own is not going to change people round.

Chairman: Thank you very much for your evidence.

Memorandum submitted by Prison Governors Association

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witness: Mr Michael Newell, President of Prison Governors Association and Governor of HMP Durham, examined.

Q504 Chairman: Welcome to the committee; you have been very patient. I hope you understand. We have overrun a bit but that should not stop us giving you plenty of time to answer some of our questions. I gave Anne Owers a chance to say a few opening words. Is there anything you would like to say to the committee to get us started or do you want to go straight to questions?

Mr Newell: I would like to open by saying that from a governor's perspective education in the list of areas is the one that most governors feel that they have least control of as the system has changed over the variety of aspects of running a prison and their regimes. I think it is moving in the right direction. There is a huge transition problem at the moment which means that we have not got the clarity of what we want from education and we have effectively not got the resources and the will to make it happen.

Q505 Chairman: Thank you for that. You are a very distinguished governor with a remarkable record in the work that you have done with the Prison Governors Association. I was surprised to see that you trained as a chemical engineer originally.

Mr Newell: Yes. All learning and skills are valuable.

Q506 Chairman: Absolutely. We have some other chemical engineers who have gone wrong as well. Can I open by saying that the thing that comes through and astonishes us is that if you were running any other enterprise, commercial or public, to get the sort of staff turnover you have at governor level is amazing. How do you run an establishment where the average length of stay of a governor is 15 months? How do you do that effectively if you have got such turmoil, if you take it that the men and women you are managing have a 60 per cent drop-out rate within two years? How do you run an organisation with that amount of instability?

Mr Newell: One of the difficulties is that there is a difference between the amount of instability which is being created by history; in other words, the way that we went about recruitment and standards of our staff over the years, and the failure to look now to introducing stability. Governors move very frequently because we allow them to move very frequently. It is as simple as that. We do not career manage any of our staff now, so there are no governors where they know what they are doing next. Basically what they do is read adverts, and if they see something that they think is better a week after they have taken on a job and responsibility they go and apply for it. That is why we have this chaos almost in the movement of governors, simply because we make no attempt to control it and we think that that is good for equal opportunities. We feel that that is appropriate for a modern approach to our staff, but unfortunately it has this catastrophic effect on the management of institutions.

Q507 Chairman: What about the turnover in prison officers, the men and women who work for you?

Mr Newell: That is very variable. That is geographical. That is about where the job of a prison officer stands in the pecking order of the particular community or region. For example, in my part of the world the turnover of prison officers is quite low, in the north east. There are a lot of people with backgrounds in shipbuilding and mining and when those industries collapsed they moved into more stable employment as they saw it. If you take London, it is a very competitive market and there is a very high turnover. That would also be reflected in other parts of the country. Milton Keynes, which I understand has virtually zero unemployment, has great difficulties in recruiting for that very reason. A lot depends on how it is seen in relation to other job opportunities in that area. It is not a picture that is the same throughout the country.

Q508 Chairman: The witness that gave evidence last week said that by and large the starting rate for a prison officer was about £22,000 with no formal qualifications and a six-week training period. That is about the starting salary for a fully qualified teacher. That is a remarkable salary level for someone with very few qualifications, is it not?

Mr Newell: Yes, it is. I do not know where the starting salary of £22,000 is. I assume that is in London with London weighting arrangements on or additional payments because the starting salary for a new entrant prison officer is round about £16,000 out in the regions without any additions.

Q509 Mr Turner: My first question, Mr Newell, is about your institution and the rest will be addressed to your Association. How many prisoners in your prison cannot read and how long does it take you to teach one to do so?

Mr Newell: It is not easy to answer it in those terms. The number of prisoners who can read and write to adequate standards within my establishment is very similar to the number in any other establishment which is receiving direct from the courts, and that puts it at round about the 60 per cent figure where there are difficulties at Level 1 or 2. In relation to how long it takes to teach them and how we rectify the problem, as was given in earlier evidence, as a local prison people are generally moving on from us. We have a lot of starters but very few completers in the process, although we do meet all our targets for the number of basic skills that we deliver at Level 1 and Level 2. It is impossible to say how long it takes. There is a large number of things that we could do better, both in my institution and nationally, to ensure that we get a handle on the process.

Q510 Mr Turner: But you must have some idea as a manager how many hours you need to put a prisoner in front of an instructor on average.

Mr Newell: No. I do not think an educationalist would take that viewpoint. I think it is a very dangerous approach to suggest that there is a certain level of saturation necessary, that it is an indoctrination process. What we do know with all the prisoners in custody is that they have been failed in the community by the system and that the learning strategies that have been employed have not worked. As I said, we are dealing with a very damaged group and we have to be a great deal more inventive about how we engage them. How long does it take? The key question is, how long does it take to engage that prisoner in believing that education is positive and helpful and will do a number of things for them in their lives? For example, we often use PE as that approach. You will get someone who will work effectively with PE and then will want to move on and take a certificate but the barrier to the certificate, of course, is that their ability to read and write is not of the necessary standard. By engaging them in that way they see a purpose to the education which they take to support it. I think it would be wholly wrong of us simply to say, "It takes six hours". How long does it take to train a prison officer is a more interesting question which we may come back to.

Q511 Mr Turner: Why do 20 per cent of prisoners arrive late for education?

Mr Newell: I think that this is a really important issue that has to be tackled across the service. A great deal of it has to do with the way that we have already signed up to contracts and who is interested. Quite simply, we signed a contract for teaching hours. That is a very bad way to sign a contract because, from the contractor's point of view, as long as they are not the people responsible for the fact that there was a reduction in teaching hours they have fulfilled their contract. They do not have any outcome; they therefore do not have any interest, and I mean that not in the way of saying that teachers generally do not care. They do not have any interest in whether anybody turns up to classes today and certainly what time they turn up to them. Equally, when you look at it in prison management terms, we have not been able to be absolutely clear about raising the profile of education within prisons. It was mentioned earlier that there was an issue about security and its balance. When you listen to the messages that come centrally from the Prison Service then education does not get into its appropriate place. I think if you asked any member of staff they do not know who leads education in the Prison Service. There is no champion.

Q512 Mr Turner: This does bring on my next question, which is, who are you personally responsible to for your prisoners' learning?

Mr Newell: I am responsible to my area manager, my director, in the same way as I am for everything that takes place in the establishment.

Q513 Mr Turner: You would expect a higher level of engagement in your success or otherwise in achieving that learning from your area manager and your director?

Mr Newell: Yes. I would expect someone to be asking me for a plan. The interesting thing is that I have a whole series of business plans, action plans, strategic plans, everything that you could possibly think of for every aspect of the development of my prison except education.

Q514 Mr Turner: And that is the responsibility of the Prison Service, that you are not asked for that. Is it your responsibility that you have not done one?

Mr Newell: I think it is my responsibility that I have not done one in the way that perhaps you are thinking. What I have is that I know what I want from prison education but I have no mechanism for doing it.

Q515 Mr Turner: Why is that, because you have got instructors who work to you and you have got a contractor who is supposed to deliver a service for your prison? Why can you not manage them?

Mr Newell: First of all, in terms of the contractor and the service, it is not let by me, none of the measures within that contract is set by me, none of the mechanisms. They are all set by central contract negotiation. In many cases the original contracting process produced for prison governors education providers that they had never heard of.

Q516 Mr Turner: But it is not unusual to have to manage something which you did not design?

Mr Newell: Indeed. In fact, you get very good at it in the Prison Service. There are some real difficulties about trying to manage the way that this contract has moved around over the last four or five years. First, let us go back to 1999. 1999/2000 was the change period. Prior to that time the governor had a total budget and they had a budget for education and they had a provider. They moved money around. If I wanted to improve education I would find some funds. I would come to some arrangement with my contractor and I would change education and it was as simple as that.

Q517 Chairman: Or you could abolish it. We went to an Isle of Wight prison and the new governor came and he said, "Get rid of it all".

Mr Newell: Exactly, and obviously that is not desirable. In my time as Governor of Hull I did the opposite in putting an awful lot of additional money at that time into education, and I was able to do that; I had the freedom to do that. When the money moved to the Department for Education and Skills and then subsequently now on through Learning and Skills Councils, that ability was lost. At the moment I am trying to get a very large amount of money at Durham because I started a number of years ago on my plan. My plan was to create additional facilities - accommodation. That has been delivered. My part of the plan has been delivered. I could technically put 240 people a day into education services but I have a contract that provides me with 90. I have created the facilities but I do not have the mechanism now to lever the additional funds that can match the need for prisoners. Previously I would have been working on the funding stream at the same time as working on the accommodation stream, so it is not easy to manage. As I say, we need the ability to add to it the necessary strands. We have talked about how damaged these individuals are, how poorly they have been served perhaps in previous attempts at education. We have single providers with single approaches and single skills. We want multi providers, we want a contract which allows to us call off services as we require them for the individual that we identify. When you look at funding streams out in the community now it is quite interesting. I can go and get some specialist funding for dyslexia because that is how the funding stream takes place outside, but I cannot add that into the system because the contract deals with a single provider and they would have to sub-contract and get that from that funding stream. It is hugely complex. It needs simplifying and there needs to be more control back at local level to meet local need. We have to find a way of doing that. It is working exceptionally well with PCTs and it is interesting how the energy for that has gone in, how the very simplistic approach of having a health needs analysis, a mental health needs analysis, looking at the standards, looking at what we do in the NHS and then moving to deliver those, has worked exceptionally well, and there is no energy in education.

Q518 Mr Turner: Presumably they have exactly the same problems with innate churn and delivering them to the right place at the right time. Perhaps you could - not now - let us know why PCTs work and why education does not.

Mr Newell: Yes.

Q519 Helen Jones: We have heard quite a bit of evidence about the impact of staffing problems on the ability to deliver education, with prisoners sometimes arriving late, problems with overcrowding in prisons and so on. Can you tell the committee what in your view the impact of staffing problems is on the ability to deliver a proper prisoner education? Do you have any suggestions for how we might improve matters? The second one is more difficult than the first, I admit.

Q520 Mr Newell: We have to go back to the way that we deliver our staff for duties and activities within our prisons. We still run some very old systems. The attendance systems of prison officers are based on a 1987 agreement, Bulletin 8. It is wholly inflexible. Some of our prisons have begun to move to systems of self-rostering but they still do it against a background of a 17-year old agreement which is not fit for purpose. When we look at the availability and needs of our staff, high security prisons as an example, which obviously I have been governor of for a number of years, getting staff on duty, getting them through search procedures, getting them ready for the start of the day probably can take, from first to last person, half an hour out of the day. That has knock-on effects. Everything is late in that process, but we have been too ambitious in what we have said, so we have a core day for delivery which does not match the reality of life. What we have are systems which do not allow us to deliver, plus, if you take the point of where is the priority in daily life within a prison, where is the profile of education, how have we raised it, it is almost seen as flexible. If we are 15 minutes late, fine, we are 15 minutes late. We have to do more about that in managerial accountability but we have to be able to devise a way to get our staff on attendance in a way that allows us to ensure that it is better delivered. Until we do that I think we will be up against a situation where the hours of instructors, the hours of teachers, the tradition of the Prison Service, all move against how we would like to deliver education in the modern day.

Q521 Helen Jones: Does that also relate to the way in which we train prison officers? You will have heard us talking before about the fact that there is a seven-week training period for prison officers which seems to us incredibly short for the job that they are being asked to do, which is a very difficult and stressful job in many ways. Do you think that the training prison officers get enables them to support education effectively or even to understand the value of it within the system?

Mr Newell: The short answer to that is no. I have been one who has constantly, on behalf of the Association, raised our concerns about prison officer training, which has been moving backwards for a number of years.

Q522 Chairman: Who moved it backwards?

Mr Newell: As an individual it was the belief of the previous Director General that some of the matters in training were not appropriate and that there was too much time spent on a residential basis which was therefore deterring people from joining the service who may not be able to attend for lengthy residential periods. It was never anywhere near the levels that we would expect, so the issue of where education gets a mention even in current training, I do not know but I would guess is not in there at all. There is no explanation, and you are quite right that until we make people understand some of the components of prison regimes and what we are trying to do from the very first day that they join we are unlikely to improve.

Q523 Helen Jones: Is there any in-service training which encourages prison officers to help offenders take up educational opportunities? Does that exist at all that you know of?

Mr Newell: First of all, there are some qualifications that people can take to assist. Without knowing the exact numbers, there are quite a number of staff in the service who have taken those. They effectively train to be the equivalent of, I guess, what we would call classroom assistants or learning supporters. Each establishment will have its approach to education where it will try and involve some uniformed staff in education provision. For example, it may run an education block where it provides to that education block different officers every day who really are not interested in the task. Equally, it may provide them from a core who are there, who are interested in the learners, who do have some background training, who do feel part of an education team and are actually there to help build education and relate that back to wing. There are different approaches by different governors. Training is lengthy. The standards are going up. I am sure we will talk about reqs but the plight of instructors is very serious now because of the standards.

Q524 Chairman: Tell us a bit more about standards. The plight is -----?

Mr Newell: If we are going to do the sensible thing, which I think is to bring education and training and skills and using our workshops all under one umbrella, however we deliver that through contract, the vast majority of the staff who are on Prison Service books are a very long way away from the training requirements that would be necessary from the education point of view to deliver those.

Q525 Helen Jones: If we could recommend one thing that would help officers to engage more in prisoner education what would it be?

Mr Newell: I would have to think about that. Certainly we need to get something in training. There needs to be an awareness, but I believe there needs to be a champion. I know who is responsible for education in the Prison Service but I am not certain that many other people do.

Helen Jones: If you have any further thoughts on that perhaps you could let us know later on.

Q526 Chairman: Can I just push you on that? Your learning and skills manager, is he or she on your management team?

Mr Newell: No.

Q527 Chairman: Why not?

Mr Newell: I have a very small senior management board of six people.

Q528 Chairman: You are complaining about prioritising education and you have not even got this person on your senior management team?

Mr Newell: I am not quite certain if I have got the proper connections to monitor whether where people sit, which is really an ethos issue in those terms, is relevant. The reason that I have a senior management board of six people is that I previously had a senior management team of 14 people with direct reports, including chaplain, psychologist, educationalists, etc, and that was not working. They were not getting the attention and we were not getting the strategic overview and loads of people were coming to meetings who were totally bored by nine-tenths of the content of those meetings, so we have adopted something which is based on two operational directors. It is a very small team but they are then the next direct links. My Director of Regimes obviously takes on that matter on my behalf.

Q529 Mr Chaytor: Who is responsible for education in the Prison Service? You said you knew the name of this person but no-one else does.

Mr Newell: It is Peter Renge. In Prison Board terms that is where it lies.

Q530 Jeff Ennis: I am fascinated by the process undergone to decide which prisoner transfers from one prison to another and the fact that Anne Owers pointed out that education comes very low down the priority list in terms of deciding whether one prisoner should go to which prison or whatever. What are your views on that?

Mr Newell: We are always chasing numbers; that is the difficulty. Whilst we have got a lull in population at the moment it has been for a very long time simply a case of moving prisoners into any available slot. Therefore, on the list of things which would make someone available for transfer or prevent them going education comes quite low down. If you have to send 15 to the only 15 places in the country then obviously they must meet the security category and they must meet some health issues and so on.

Q531 Jeff Ennis: Is there a need to re-categorise education further up the list in terms of transfers?

Mr Newell: Ideally, of course, what you want is to get some of those population pressures off and ensure that they remain off. We are going through a period where we have some gap. What we do not know is whether that is going to remain that way. I think that where people are on clearly identified courses most governors do hold them, for example, if they are doing some particular 12-week course, and obviously if we are doing something in cognitive skills training or if we are doing something which is a PE course or an education course which has a start and finish. The problem is, obviously, that where we are dealing with basic learning and skills there is no start and finish to it. We put someone on education. They may have been with us six weeks and doing fantastically well but they come up for transfer. We have to look at that, but I would add that medical holds, as PCTs have taken over in the service, are getting larger in simple terms.

Q532 Jeff Ennis: In your submission in paragraphs 25-27 you refer to the problems with aftercare, a consistent approach to aftercare, which is the other line of questions I pursued with Anne Owers. I floated the idea of an inspectorate for aftercare. Do you think that is a goer and how would that be managed to bring in some consistency of approach?

Mr Newell: The National Offender Management Service, of course, is intended to provide exactly that so that when the prisoner is released into the community we are following the same plan handled by the same offender manager. Whether we are going to get there and when we are going to get there is a little more difficult to predict with the difficulties that there have been with the National Offender Management Service plans this year. There is no doubt that we do an awful lot of good work in prisons, not just on education but on drugs as well where there is a risk when people are released into the community. What we should be doing is that when we contract education we should be contracting for the release element of it. That should be all part of the same contract. It seems to me absolutely pointless to say that we do not have that continuity of care and the responsibility remains with the organisation which is contracted in prison. That is one of the things that we would also like to see in drugs.

Q533 Mr Chaytor: Mr Newell, the impression that most of the members of the committee have from all the evidence sessions and all the visits we have made is of a service that is completely fragmented and chaotic with lack of leadership, lack of accountability and where largely under-qualified staff are forever sticking their fingers in the hole of the dyke. Is that fair comment?

Mr Newell: It is not far off fair comment. We make far too many excuses.

Q534 Mr Chaytor: We have had prisons for a long time. Prisons are not new institutions. Education and training in prison is not a new activity. How has this been allowed to continue decade after decade? It seems to be only now that there is some interest in this and some investment going into it.

Mr Newell: Generally we have been at the bottom of that pile for investment. We have seen over the years prison education do its own thing to varying standards and no-one has really been too bothered. When we moved to being taken over by DfES we had a real problem. The real problem is that if we really do want to impose standards, if we do want to say something about the appalling facilities in which we are conducting education and the failure to have trained and prepared our staff, there is a huge bill on it. The consequence of anything where there is a huge bill is that you have not liked to take it on in the way that you publish and lead a whole change of service action plan. What is happening with the PCTs may be mirrored by the Learning and Skills Councils; I do not know. It is certainly nowhere near as advanced. We do make excuses but the consequence of tackling this is that we have to spend some money.

Q535 Chairman: There has been substantial money put into prison education in the last number of years.

Mr Newell: There has been a substantial amount of money put in the last few years, undoubtedly. In fact, both education and drugs and cognitive programmes have seen investment sustained now for several years. However, what is not clear is what level we are trying to fund for. In other words, we are not clear about what the future standards are that we are aiming to and what the funding gap is. There is lots of money going in but there probably needs to be substantially more.

Q536 Mr Chaytor: Accepting your point earlier that a lot of the governor's direct power and control of budgets has shifted to PCTs and the LSCs, at the end of the day the prison governor is crucial in determining the ethos of the prison. What proportion of governors in English prisons today attach the highest priority to education and training in the ethos that they are trying to create?

Mr Newell: Probably those who are in juvenile establishments, working to contracts with the Youth Justice Board. The next level up would be those within young offender establishments, the over-18s.

Q537 Mr Chaytor: And the mainstream adult prisons?

Mr Newell: In the mainstream adult prisons most governors on the whole are driven by what their area manager is shouting the loudest about: the targets. Let us get real. That is what happens. I am not going to stand up in my establishment and say that we really have to do something about education when actually my area manager says, "You really have to do something about security".

Q538 Mr Chaytor: Can we come back to this question of this post of heads of learning and skills? In your submission you say that these people are management grade E, so this is uniform across the country?

Mr Newell: Yes.

Q539 Mr Chaytor: Presumably there are five management grades, are there, A to E?

Mr Newell: No; F covers our grades as well.

Q540 Mr Chaytor: But there will be some grade E managers who are on the senior management teams in certain prisons?

Mr Newell: Yes.

Q541 Mr Chaytor: On your slimmed down management team who then has the responsibility for regimes?

Mr Newell: The Director of Regimes.

Q542 Mr Chaytor: So the head of learning and skills is directly accountable to the Director of Regimes?

Mr Newell: Yes.

Q543 Mr Chaytor: What do you think is the picture generally with the role of the heads of learning and skills? Are they making an impact and do you think this is a positive development or is it a token gesture?

Mr Newell: No; I think they have made a real impact. It is a very important move. I think when we moved to contracting in the early stages one of the difficulties was that there was no specialist adviser on the governor's team any more. Effectively your head of education was working for the contractor and that is not an ideal situation to have, so you need some specialist on your team helping to develop and assess and analyse and do your own self-audit of standards, which eventually ALI will come and see you about, and we were satisfactory, I might add, in Durham. I am sure you have checked that. I think they have made a real contribution. I would like to see that continue. I would not like to see it threatened by any of the arrangements. What is disappearing and what has become less certain is the structure of both of them now in that there was a whole series of area learning and skills advisers and there was to some extent you might say a management structure in that they had people to go to. It has now become unclear what their relationship into the LSCs is and we need to clarify that.

Q544 Mr Chaytor: What you are saying is that the fact that the heads of learning and skills are fairly low in the pecking order in your management team is not the totality of the problem. The problem is in the Home Office structure in that at the area manager level and above there is no strong strategic direction about making prisons secure learning centres?

Mr Newell: Yes. I do not think there is a strategic direction but I think that the move to the local skills councils can expose local advisers so that they can become the conduit, if we are not careful, to improving or not improving education within any particular establishment. You have to say that we do not know yet - the jury is still out - on where LSCs stand with prison education in their pecking order. As I say, there have been tremendous improvements in health through PCTs. It has been hard work to get it up the agenda on local health, and that has taken place by a mass of meetings and goodwill and commitment on my side and by the Chief Executive of the PCT. I do not see anything resembling that taking place in education.

Q545 Mr Chaytor: Through the LSCs?

Mr Newell: Yes.

Q546 Mr Chaytor: But this is part of the problem, is it not, because you are saying there is no strategic direction through the area board and the Home Office; you are saying that in the individual establishments not all heads of learning and skills are on the senior management team, and you are saying that in the Learning and Skills Councils there is no evidence that they are going to take it seriously, so we have got a fragmentation three ways?

Mr Newell: Yes.

Q547 Mr Chaytor: And in none of the three key forums is there anyone who has got the power or the clout to move this up the agenda?

Mr Newell: That is the difficulty about who is going to break some of the logjams or the different interpretations which will take place in different parts of the country within departments. For me there is no doubt: prison education is improving. The underlying message is that it is getting better; we are doing more, there are more opportunities and there are more connections with the community. It is quite a positive message and I would like to think that a lot of what is happening is the transitional phase but, to use a good old prison term, it does need gripping and gripping quite quickly.

Q548 Mr Chaytor: Finally, on the question of your staff, there is no minimum qualification that people need to apply for a job in a prison, and if they apply and they are appointed they get a seven-week training scheme and then they are a qualified prison officer?

Mr Newell: Yes.

Q549 Mr Chaytor: After that does your prison provide any updated training for its officers? What are the opportunities for professional development for the typical prison officer?

Mr Newell: I think they are quite poor. Let me go back to the start of that. Not only do we not require qualifications. You will have noted that money is being provided for basic skills for staff in that there is a recognition that within those targets up to 2,000 staff could be funded to Level 2 skills. That shows some of the pace. In terms of additional training, most prisons have development programmes for their staff. They are often overtaken by skill training which is necessary for the job, and as people move around within jobs locally within prison, there will be substantial training that will go with that and will eat into the amount of their training time. Most individuals are expected to follow up personal development which the service will often fund but it is not good.

Q550 Mr Chaytor: That training also is largely directed to improving their skills in respect of the traditional functions of the secure functions of the prison rather than the training and education functions of the prison?

Mr Newell: Yes, indeed.

Q551 Mr Pollard: You have mentioned several times, Michael, about having a champion for education. You are a very senior and experienced governor. You are also President of the Association. Why can you not be that champion? Why can you not set by example, as David was saying earlier on, by having somebody on your board whose direct responsibility is education? You are that man.

Mr Newell: I think that is slightly unfair. I do champion a number of things when I have the opportunity. There are so many things to champion. We need to share some of them out. One of the things that I do a lot of championing for is mental health in prisons and the inappropriate use of prisons for mental health. It is not a role that I am going to take on. I think it is a Prison Service responsibility, jointly, obviously, with DfES. In terms of my own structure and whether I decide to put a head of learning and skills on my senior management team or not, I am not certain about the token gestures that go with that. If I were to say that it is showing leadership by putting that person on my senior management team, that is a long way away from my definition of leadership. My education inside gets an enormous amount of support in moving towards better education within Durham and I do not think that my individual learning and skills adviser's position would be enhanced by being on the SMT and then me taking no interest in it, which is the other side of the coin.

Q552 Chairman: Who is in charge of the quality of the work that your prisoners do in the workshops? Who decides what contracts you get with outside providers and who is the entrepreneur in your prison?

Mr Newell: It is effectively a principal officer and a senior officer in industries that are doing that. Yes, it is going out and engaging with the local community and seeing what we can get. We have done some things and we have been able to make progress but, as I am sure you will be aware, we do not have an industrial strategy within the Prison Service other than one which seems to be backward-looking, which is to move to internal consumption, but that means bringing back sewing machines rather than getting rid of sewing machines. One of my proud achievements at Durham was to get rid of sewing machines in the workshops because it seems to me that that is not going to help gain jobs on release.

Q553 Chairman: What about pay? Why do people get more pay to do routine work than to do education and training?

Mr Newell: They do not in my place. We have changed the pay system so that education is a flat rate job just the same as the workshop is a flat rate job. The only additions on those payments are related to performance, so you might say we have performance-related pay for our prisoners. A lot of it has been around because of piecework shops. A lot of it has been around again in old structures. Education historically sat there and no-one knows how to get additional funding into their total pay budget for prisoners, so they do not know how to make up the gap. There are lots of reasons but I think that there are a number of things that we could do. I was very impressed in America a number of years ago in the federal system about how they made sure that all their jobs had educational qualifications to them, so that every prisoner who came in who felt they were of a low standard went on to education; they did not have any option because there was not anything else available. We do not seem to grasp the nettle well enough about is education compulsory or is it voluntary? What we need to do is make sure that guidance workers do guide. I have prisoners who come into custody time and time again who end up as the dreaded wing cleaner who avoids the education system and we give them a job and we let them opt out. We need to think about our incentive structures for education a great deal more without getting into compulsory, but if you do not have anywhere else to go, compulsory, coercion, they are quite close together. We need to do something about that and we need to get better facilities; we need to get a more diverse approach to delivery of education. Talk and chalk in 2004 for people who did not think much of talk and chalk ten years ago when they were going through the school system is not a way forward.

Q554 Jonathan Shaw: You heard earlier from the inspectors that they favour this area based contracting system. Is that something that your organisation supports?

Mr Newell: We would be quite happy with an area based contracting approach. We were quite happy with NOMS trying to move the National Federation of Management Services to an area structure, a regional structure effectively, and we wanted everything to be coterminous in that approach with the government offices of region, constabularies, etc, and in a way that if we could do that with education then, wherever the National Offender Management Service is going to go for the future, at least we will have put in place something which is not going to run contrary to it. Because we do not have grand plans in some of these areas one of the dangers is that we end up doing something which we then have to damn well untangle at a later date. Regional contracting would not be a bad idea and certainly would give us the opportunity in some of the specialist areas to have more of a call-off approach so that those who have got particular learning disabilities we were able to respond to far more easily.

Q555 Chairman: How many prison areas are there?

Mr Newell: There are 13 Prison Service areas. There are nine regions plus Wales, and there are 42 Probation Services and 42 Chief Constables. We have to go some way to get that right.

Q556 Chairman: Do you have a close relationship with Durham University?

Mr Newell: Reasonable.

Q557 Chairman: Do you see Ken Coleman reasonably frequently?

Mr Newell: Yes. We have a reasonable relationship but the education we need they do not advertise that they are the experts in.

Chairman: Thank you very much. It has been a very useful session for us.