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

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE

 

 

PRISON EDUCATION

 

 

Wednesday 17 November 2004

MR PHIL WHEATLEY, MR MARTIN NAREY and MS SUSAN PEMBER OBE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 558 - 700

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Wednesday 17 November 2004

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Mr David Chaytor

Valerie Davey

Jeff Ennis

Mr Nick Gibb

Paul Holmes

Helen Jones

Mr Kerry Pollard

Jonathan Shaw

Mr Andrew Turner

________________

Memorandum submitted by Department for Education and Skills

 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Phil Wheatley, Director General, Prison Service, Mr Martin Narey, Chief Executive, National Offender Management Service (NOMS), and Ms Susan Pember OBE, Director of Apprenticeships and Skills for Life, Department for Education and Skills, examined.

Q558 Chairman: Good morning everyone. Can I welcome Martin Narey, Susan Pember and Phil Wheatley to our deliberations? You know that we are now well on course in our evidence sessions on prison education. We are very grateful that such a distinguished group of people have given us their time this morning to answer some of our questions. Can I start, Martin Narey, by asking you to open up and tell us a little of what you think prison education is and what its purpose is?

Mr Narey: Thank you, Mr Chairman. I am delighted to have the opportunity. Can I say I am delighted that the Committee has picked up the subject of prison education so early in your jurisdiction for this subject. As you would expect, I have read with some interest some of the evidence that has previously been given to you. I think in one or two circumstances you might have been given a picture which is undeservedly bleak, so, if I may, I would like to say something about prison education but also the background in which it takes place. If I may start on the background, the pressures on the prison system remain very considerable. We have this morning close to a record population. There are 16,000 individuals living in overcrowded conditions, conditions which we consider to be gross. There are far too many short‑term prisoners, many of them being sent to custody in circumstances where they would never have been sent to custody ten years ago, and the overwhelming numbers mean that Phil and the staff need to frequently move prisoners up and down the country during their sentence to wherever there is an empty bed. Despite those pressures, and accepting absolutely that there is much we need to do to improve the prison service, I think we have a better run, a more constructive, a more cost effective and a much more humane prison system that ever before. I know that some of you will remember the 1980s and 1990s, which were characterised by major prison disturbances, riots, notorious escapes and, in some prisons, inhumane treatment. In the mid 1990s there were four or five escapes from prison every week; last year there were only five in the whole year. There were about two major prison disturbances every year through most of the 1990s; and there have been two since 1997. In 1998 there were only nine prisons with drug treatment; soon there will be more than 100. In education terms, investment in education fell in real terms during the 1990s as the service concentrated on security and good order, but since 1998 investment has grown very sharply from about 36 million dedicated to adult education in 1997/1998 to about 82 million this year. There are lots of things we need to improve. We need to improve the quality of teaching, and I am particularly grateful for the support of Ofsted and ALI in helping us to do that; we need to do much more to integrate work skills training with classroom and basic education; we need to get more prisoners into classes and deliver them on time and find ways of them spending more time there; but I am very proud that in difficult circumstances, with individuals who are generally being excluded from schools or excluded themselves, we are likely to achieve 60,000 basic skills qualifications this year and more than 100,000 work skills qualifications. Additionally, we have almost 1,000 Open University students in prison, about 2,500 individuals doing other distance learning financed by the Prisoners Education Trust, about 600 prisoners studying every day on day‑release, about 20 writing residents schemes and a flourishing artistic curriculum, culminating in the stunning Koestler Exhibition of prisoner writing and art every year. Whilst we are aware of the improvements that need to be made, and we will look with real interest at the recommendations that the Committee make, I think it is remarkable that in extremely difficult circumstances 13 per cent of the Government Skills for Life target up to 2004 (96,000 of the 750,000 targeted) has been achieved by prisoners in custody. What we hope to do in the next few years in this new partnership of the DfES with the Learning Skills Councils is to put education even more at the heart of an offender's experience, whether they are in custody or in the community, because we are convinced that that is the way to increase employability and to reduce crime.

Q559 Chairman: Martin, thank you very much for that. Susan, would you like to say something?

Ms Pember: Only to add, my role in the DfES is to manage the prison education, and what we are doing in the department is concentrating on three main areas. The first area is delivering relevant programmes of good quality. As Martin has said, in basic skills particularly we have very much seen success in the last few years, but we know that quality is an important angle. The Adult Learning Inspectorate has done some excellent work recently, pointing out where our priorities should lay. So improving quality is our second most important goal. Our third goal is to determine a new service which is fit for the 21st century that builds on the good work that we have already done in prisons, but it has to be a seamless service that goes from the offender in a secure environment to the offender in the community on to probation and then either into full‑time employment or into full‑time education and the education service or training service that we want to provide follows that offender/earner through that journey.

Mr Wheatley: I do not think there is much I should add to that other than to say that the Prison Service certainly welcome the partnership with DfES, not only because it has brought more money to enable us to provide better education, but because it has brought in new thinking and the chance to organise better and to make prison a more positive experience, because this gives a much greater variety of activity which prisoners can use which will help reduce re-offending. At the same time we have got to do all the other things that Martin spoke about to keep a system which is running under considerable pressure but is running successfully at the moment coping with a large population, maintaining security, maintaining order and hitting the many targets we have got.

Q560 Chairman: Martin, can I open the questioning by saying: what do you say to the view that this is really a bit of a waste of time, looking at prison education, that most of the people we represent see prison as a punishment; it is a punishment, people are sentenced for their crimes; and to start looking at prison as some sort of educational secure college where education transforms the individual into a non‑offending model citizen is an illusion and is not what the Prison Service should be trying to deliver?

Mr Narey: I hope you are teasing me, Mr Sheerman.

Q561 Chairman: No, those are the views we have heard.

Mr Narey: I do not think anybody should be sent to custody simply because it will do them some good, but I believe passionately that, in the right circumstances, we can reduce criminality and change people's lives, and the major way we do that is through education. It is stunning to meet offenders in custody and, I should say, increasingly in the community, where we are trying to repeat what we have achieved in prisons, who have had their lives changed by getting the education which they inevitably missed at school. At some of our institutions coping with the youngest offenders, those who are children, sometimes 75 per cent of the young men there have been permanently excluded from school from about the age of 12. When we started this programme of education in 1998 and when Phil and I started working it together as DG and DDG and trying to put education at the heart of prisons, we were told this could not be done. I was told that prisons could not benefit from classroom based learning and, in any case, we should be preparing them to use their leisure time because they were unemployable. I think that is a poverty stricken philosophy. I think if we educate people we can change their lives, we can make them employable, we can get them into jobs and we can reduce criminality.

Q562 Chairman: That is a good aspiration, but can you point this Committee to hard evidence that suggests that education in prison leads two a lower re-offending rate?

Mr Narey: The link is a very complex one. I can certainly point to evidence which shows that if we get somebody up to level one in basic skills and then up to level two, that their chances of being in employment are raised very significantly. I can also demonstrate that when NACRO audited the prison population in 1995 to see what proportion went into jobs and training on release, the conclusion was that the figure was about 11 per cent. I think, Phil, the figure is now 30 per cent.

Mr Wheatley: Yes.

Mr Narey: We know that this is complex stuff, but if we can get offenders into employment and somewhere to live, then the chances of their re‑offending radically reduces.

Q563 Chairman: Time and time again we have had witnesses suggesting that the heart of the whole problem that we face is the four packets. Even if you do quite good things educationally, a range of educational strategies in prison, if no‑one follows it through and the individual has to leave prison without support - housing, or a job, searching for a job - what is going to happen in that respect? Is that what is missing?

Mr Narey: It is absolutely what is missing, Mr Sheerman, and that is why we are creating this new organisation, the National Offender Management Service, which I will lead, managing both the Prison Service and the Probation Service and introducing the concept of offender management whereby we manage offenders coherently whether they are in custody or in the community. In my view that is the major weakness. The proportion of prisoners having succeeded in education or who have begun to achieve in education who follow up their education on release is far too small. It is rare, if ever, that I meet a probation officer who has received or is much interested in the educational record of someone who has left prison; and a very significant proportion of prisoners who leave prison are not, under the current law, supervised by the Probation Service at all. Next year that will change: everybody leaving prison will be supervised by the Probation Service and, with the partnership with the Learning Skills Council, we are introducing into the Probation Service a similar emphasis on education for offenders in the community as we have tried to do in prisons. If we join it up, we will make a difference.

Q564 Chairman: The other thing that constantly comes from witnesses, both in written evidence and oral presentation, is the failure to embed education into a prison, to make prison a place where there is a culture of education but it is embedded in the heart of the prison experience, that education is a bolt on, not central. What would you say to that?

Mr Narey: I would acknowledge that we are certainly not at that point yet. I think we are very close to it in the establishments that hold children, where education is genuinely at the heart of the regime. If you went to any of the institutions which held those aged 17 and under, you would find nearly all their time, about 25 hours a week at the moment, is spent in education, and with very considerable and laudable progress in terms of education. Phil and I were at Hindley in the North West last week and the amount of education, the range of education and the achievements being made by the young people there, particularly relative to their inevitable non‑achievement at school, was very exciting.

Q565 Chairman: Phil Wheatley, some people out there say to us, not in formative sessions but privately, here you are building new prisons not modifying old ones, but you do not build new prisons or modify old ones in a way that makes education accessible, that you are still building prisons that do not look at that aspect of prison life; in other words, they are poorly designed for a new purpose?

Mr Wheatley: In terms of building new prisons, the Prison Service, the public sector Prison Service, has not opened a new prison since Wood Hill was opened in the early 1990s. Wood Hill, interestingly, has no workshop provision but only an education provision. The new prisons have been private sector prisons. Martin is responsible for the private sector policy, so I would have to hand that bit back to him. In terms of expanding prisons, most of the expansion we have done over the last five years has been to create places very quickly to cope with the surge in the population to make sure that we could hold all the prisoners that courts were sending to us. We have expanded education in some cases, because we have tried to make sure we expand the ways of occupying prisoners as we expand prisons, but that has been essentially piecemeal work as we have put in a new wing here or a new quick build accommodation into prisons, as we have been coping with what was a crisis: hence the importance of the work the National Offender Management Service is doing to try and steady the population to make sure that that great increase in numbers did not go on as originally projected.

Q566 Chairman: Would you like an opportunity to build a prison that was properly designed for the 21st century?

Mr Wheatley: As you would expect with anybody in my position, the chance to build something with sufficient cash to build it in the way I would like to build it would be very attractive. That is a question for Parliament and the Government in terms of what money they allocate to us.

Mr Narey: May I add to that, Mr Sheerman? You are absolutely right. Nearly all the new prisons, which are in the private sector, were designed in the early 1990s, and the belief at that time was that if you had prisoners in work in workshop activity, in industrial activity, that somehow prisoners would absorb the work ethic and go on to seek employment. I think that completely missed the point that offenders were unemployable in the outside world; they could not get jobs without the most basic skills. We have been re‑negotiating contracts with the private sector operators who run those prisons and are beginning to change workshops to education, but - you are right - the design is not right. I think our two newest prisons, Ashford Prison, which is a women's prison near Heathrow which has just opened, and Peterborough Prison, which will open in about March, half women, half men, have much more education at the centre of their regime and the design reflects that.

Q567 Mr Pollard: On the 11 per cent, 30 per cent employment, this is at a time when we have virtually no unemployment in the country at all. It is very low. Is that not a contributory factor? One other thing I would say is that companies like British Gas and others are in prisons. They are not doing that from a philanthropic point of view; they are doing that because its hard‑headed and makes good sense, meaning that they cannot get people outside to come and do apprenticeships. So a very impressive 11 per cent to 30 per cent, but, in the context of virtual full employment, it is perhaps not as good as it might be?

Mr Narey: I accept that, Mr Pollard. I would say in defence that a large number of offenders in prison and in the community do not think the world of work is anything to do with them. They have never worked; their parents have never worked; their fathers have never worked (if there has ever been a father around), and sometimes we have to plant in their minds that actually we can get them out of social exclusion and they can do well in jobs. It is very difficult to do and we have to work sometimes against an assumption on their part that the world for them is a world of being on benefit.

Q568 Paul Holmes: Picking up on that 30 per cent figure, it was suggested to us a week or two ago that that might be a bit misleading, that to some extent if a prisoner on release was going for a job interview, or had got a job, that would therefore count as one of the 30 per cent going into work; but in fact there was no follow up to see whether a job interview became a job or whether a job was sustainable. Do you use criteria like New Deal, where it has to be 13 weeks sustained employment before you can count it as going into employment, or is it just the prisoner says on release, "I have got a job", and that is it; there is no check?

Mr Narey: Phil will have these details better than me. It is mainly prisoners saying, "I am going into a job", and in that scoring we give a weighting for prisoners who accept and attend job centre interviews. We have no basis for tracking those individuals at the moment and on to Jobcentre Plus. Jobcentre Plus's estimate is if we get somebody that far - and I think as far as managing offenders is concerned that is primarily our job to deliver people motivated to work to the job centre - a large proportion of them do go into work and remain in work.

Q569 Paul Holmes: So there is no hard figure behind that? The 30 per cent could be misleading?

Mr Narey: Phil will tell you what proportion of it is absolutely hard figures in terms of people going into jobs.

Mr Wheatley: I cannot give you as hard data as you would like. We score each Fresh Start interview, getting them into the Government scheme to try and employ people who are hard to employee, at a half point as we work out that versus a prisoner having a job to go to. We survey independently to establish whether prisoners do have jobs to go to or not. We do not just ask them ourselves; we have been using an independent survey. We have achieved rather more than 30 per cent into employment, and to some extent the 30 per cent figure discounts the fact that some of those interviews will not have led to jobs. We obviously are anxious to encourage people to participate in a scheme that is meant to get them into employment, and there is quite a lot of hard evidence behind it, but we have not got the 13 week follow-up that you speak about, mainly because we are trying to record our data very quickly to make sure we have got data to hand as to what we are achieving, and that long a delay would make it difficult for us to handle it.

Chairman: It is always the Chair's job to warm you up. Now I have warmed you up, I hand you over to our inquisitor, Helen Jones.

Q570 Helen Jones: Mr Narey, you gave us a fairly rosy picture of investment in prison education and rising standards, but I have to say that much of the evidence that we have had indicates that only a small proportion of prisoners have access to prison education, that the provision is very inflexible in many cases and often unsuited to their needs. If, as all of you seem to be saying to us, education in prison ought to be essential to getting people into further education or employment when they leave, why is more not being done to make sure that those aspirations become a reality inside prison?

Mr Narey: Miss Jones, I said that I accepted entirely that more could be done, and I certainly do not think we are at a point yet, as I said to Mr Sheerman, where education is at the heart of prison regimes. We are approaching that with prisons for young people, but I think relative to the challenges facing the prison system, the overwhelming number of prisons, the fact the prison population was 42,000 12 years ago and is now 75,000, I think a remarkable amount has been achieved. About 39 per cent of the prisoner population right now have some form of education. Most of that is part‑time; some of that might be only half a session a week as part of their workshop training. That is 39 per cent. I do not have a figure for 10 years ago, but I would have been very surprised if it had been in double figures at that time.

Q571 Helen Jones: Perhaps Phil Wheatley can comment on this. We are running a system where prisoners can often get paid more for working than they do in education, where they can be moved often in the middle of the course. We accept that sometimes people have to be moved, but a lot of the evidence is that people are being moved, sometimes quite arbitrarily, without reference to the courses they are on and the need to finish. Surely if we want people to achieve something and go to work when they leave prison that system militates against what we are trying to do rather than is helpful?

Mr Wheatley: It is quite true that we are trying to measure a lot of different pressures in prison and when we are running, as we did the best part of eight or nine months ago, very near to full capacity, as we ran through the spring of the year, using every place that we had, with only at times 100 or 200 spare places available, that was very difficult. Even then, the evidence that I have suggests that very few people were moved off courses that they were doing where it was a course that was expected to lead to a qualification. It did happen sometimes, and it happens sometimes because the courts bail people and people who thought they were going to get a custodial sentence do not so, and there are a number of other reasons that mean that we have not got absolute control over when people leave; courts control how long people spend in prison. We have tried to prioritise movements so that it does not move those who are on courses. We achieve that for most of the time. Running as we are at the moment with a little head‑room in the system - there are about 2,000 places between the number of prisoners we have got and the absolute capacity of the system - means that we are much less likely to do that, and that is one of the reasons I am very relieved that the population has dropped back slightly and we are not running this system at 100 per cent capacity - that is 100 per cent overcrowded capacity, that is right at its top maximum ability to manage - and that is enabling us to make better use of what we have got. What we have not got is provision for every prisoner. What we have been trying to do is to make sure that we target our efforts on those whose basic skills need improving, because we think the biggest effect comes, in terms of reducing re-offending, if we can make people employable, not exclusively to target on raising basic skills levels, but certainly targeting our efforts there. Were trying to do part‑time education, because we think people learn better if they do part‑time education rather than giving a small number a very intense full‑time experience, particularly when you are doing basic skills education. Traditionally, an old‑fashioned prison regime in the 1980s 1990s would have had lots of people on education full‑time because it is administratively easier: you do not have to move people around very much; just march them down to education and leave them there. We have moved away from that: hence the much wider spread of education. A large percentage are getting some educational input. I do not mean to claim it is perfection, and if there was significantly more investment we would do more with it, but it is certainly improved and we are using the investment we have got in more purposeful way that, I think, better matches what the country expects of us, which is to reduce the risk of prisoners re-offending and to give them a greater chance of being skilled up and being successful members of society.

Q572 Helen Jones: What about the pay structure?

Mr Wheatley: In my experience, and I have a lot of prison experience - regrettably I spent all my life in prison, working life that is - prisoners are not deterred from entering education by the vagaries of the pay system because education is a very attractive thing for lots of prisoners to do, particularly part‑time education, which normally does not much interfere with their ability to earn because they are doing part time work, and because there is not enough work to give everybody full‑time work. So prisoners are not normally deterred by the pay system. What we do have to do, however, with some of them is the most repetitive work, and a lot of prison work is essentially repetitive work because it is pick up and put down work that somebody can come in and learn to do within two or three days and can be picked up by somebody else when they are transferred on or they leave prison because they are only on a very short sentence or short remand period. That sort of repetitive work, unless there is some decent reward for it, we cannot get prisoners to do in a co‑operative and productive way, so we do need to make sure we can reward people in that sort of work appropriately. Education, which we do pay reasonably well for in prison terms ‑ I know it is not wildly generous, I hasten add ‑ is seen by most prisoners as an attractive thing to do because it is interesting; and the thing that above all dominates the prisoner inside is: how can you make your time fly? You have to make the time pass, and education is a wonderful way of making time pass because, for a bit, you are not in prison in your head, if you follow what I mean, you are doing something quite different that you could be doing outside that stretches you, and that is so attractive that I do not need to pay high pay‑rates to get people to do it; and if I did pay high pay‑rate there, I would have to drop somebody else's pay‑rate and I would probably have the person in the 'mindless shop' doing the repetitive work feeling very upset and annoyed, thinking, "I am not being paid properly for this. Why should I do it", and I cannot afford that.

Q573 Helen Jones: Bearing in mind the difficulties that are faced in delivering education in prison, could any of you tell me - perhaps Susan can - what research has been done into the various forms of learning which might be most suitable in prison, different ways of learning, and also what is being done to improve the qualifications of teachers and instructors who work in prisons, some whom are very good - we know that - but also many of whom are isolated from what is going on in the profession outside?

Ms Pember: If we start with the research into the teaching and learning of adults, we have got the benefits of a learning centre, we have got our own literacy centre research, the National Centre for Literacy and Numeracy. Both of those see the offender as one of their priority client groups. It is new stuff that we have only started in the last 18 months, but, saying that, for literacy and numeracy we do know our adults learn the best, and they learn best when it is actually embedded in something they are interested in or is embedded in a vocational area. The work that we have been doing in the strategy unit for the last two years is building up a bank of material that helps the lecturer - whether they are in a closed environment in a prison or whether they are in a workshop, in an employer's premises or whether they are in a traditional classroom - to actually deliver literacy and numeracy in a form that is best for that adult learner. We can give you lots of examples of material about all the projects that we have done to show how best people learn in different environments. On qualifications for teachers, one of the reasons education in prisons was brought into the DfES was about that isolation. The prison contract regime that we had set up for education, and I was one of the early contractors back in the early 1990s ‑ I managed prison education for four years in that way for the whole of Kent, so I know that regime very well and I know what we did well and I know how far we have come, but one of the reasons that I was quite excited that education was being transferred was to stop that isolation for teachers so that they became part of the whole big initiatives that we got - what we call Success for All - which is about transforming the workforce, transforming college management and allowing people to become more professional. Part of that is an insistence that new teachers come into further education and become qualified, and that needs to extend into the prison work so that we make sure that teachers coming into post‑16 education, whether they teach in enclosed environments, whether they are teaching in the community, whether they are teaching in an FE have the same status and the same qualifications as primary school teachers have. That is a big jump for lots of people. If you are already in employment, you have had three years to get yourself trained to do that. One of the things that we have been working on is to ensure that prison education teachers get access to all this training that is going on. Through our evaluation last year we realised that for Skills for Life work they were not getting access; so we have been running special events for prison education teachers; and that is what we must make sure in our new service, that the people who teach in a prison get the same access to the staff development and professional development that we have for everybody else post 16.

Q574 Helen Jones: Is that not rather difficult? In the current circumstances many of them are officially attached to colleges but the colleges can be hundred of miles away. Have you looked at what happen with prison healthcare and the way that changed to be delivered locally by PCTs? Also have you looked at the benefits to the staff from that for delivery? Have you also looked at the way that in healthcare terms we now do a needs assessment for prisoners which is funded, which we could do in education in the same way? Has the DfES learned any lessons from that?

Ms Pember: We have looked at health, and that is one of the reasons that we are going forward with what we call our "three prototypes" after Christmas in three areas working with the learning and skills councillors in those areas to make sure that the offender get assessed, the assessment goes with them, that the learning in that area can be delivered locally, if that is seen as the most favoured option. That is not to say that the existing contractors who work nationally will not be working in prison education in that way; but you are actually right, the idea of education being in charge of prison education is that the teacher in the classroom is not alone, is not isolated, is part of a family of educators in that area that can provide support and training. It happens in some places, but we need more of that, and that is why these prototypes with the Learning Skills Council which we are starting after Christmas are so important.

Q575 Helen Jones: When you talk about prototypes, will the needs assessments be funded?

Ms Pember: That is in the system now. We have got diagnostic materials; we have got screening tools; they can be done absolutely now.

Q576 Helen Jones: I do not mean an assessment itself. I am sorry, I was not clear. I mean when you have done the assessment and you decide what needs to happen for a particular prisoner, is the funding going to be available to do that?

Ms Pember: We are limited, as we were just saying, as regards the funding level, but I have not yet come across, unless you are going to tell me differently, an assessment being done for a prisoner ‑ and, you remember, half of them, we know, are going to be literacy and numeracy needs anyway ‑ to say that that person needs this support and we cannot. We should be able to provide that in their learning journey in custody.

Q577 Mr Gibb: Can I ask Mr Narey about the levels of literacy in prisons. We have just heard from Susan Pember that half the prisons have literacy and numeracy needs. Is that your assessment?

Mr Narey: About 45 per cent of prisoners when they come to us have literacy and numeracy levels at level one or below.

Q578 Mr Gibb: What is the level of literacy when they leave?

Mr Narey: We do not measure literacy when they leave, but we can do an approximate work‑out. We know that about 36,000 prisoners a year ‑ individuals this is ‑ improve their literacy or numeracy by a qualification. So about half of those individuals coming into prison at level one or below have some success in literacy or numeracy, not necessarily both, in improving their education while they are in prison.

Q579 Mr Gibb: You talk about these 36,000 prisoners. What do they achieve during the period they are in prison? Tell me a bit more about these things?

Mr Narey: Many more than 36,000 prisoners get some sort of qualification. The 36,000 are the individuals - because some individuals get more than one qualification - who are getting some sort of qualification in basic skills, in literacy or numeracy. They are spread between entry level one and level two.

Q580 Mr Gibb: What kind of test are they taking?

Mr Narey: Susan will tell you what the Examination Boards are, but these are national accreditations which measure the level which people should probably have reached before they leave school. For example, level one is equivalent to the reading and numeracy age of an 11‑year old. We have a large group of prisoners who are below that level.

Q581 Mr Gibb: What are the names of these tests that they are taking?

Ms Pember: They are national qualifications in literacy and numeracy, and there are entry levels three, level one and level two?

Q582 Mr Gibb: Is it possible to have a table on the precise figures of the qualifications that have been achieved?

Ms Pember: Yes.

Q583 Mr Gibb: Do you think there should be a measure, that prisoners should be assessed when they leave prison for literacy levels?

Mr Narey: Building on what we have achieved in prisons and as we introduce offender management, particularly for short sentence prisoners who go into prison and then go out and amount to nothing, I want to continue work in education very central to the work which we do with offenders. It would, however, be very expensive if at the end of every sentence we put somebody through a second assessment process to see what progress they had made. We concentrate on assessing people's needs when they come in and then trying to address them.

Q584 Mr Gibb: I am not talking about a general assessment, I am talking about an assessment of their literacy levels. Do you not think there is a case? It would not take very long. Probably about 20 minutes?

Mr Narey: I can go away and do some calculations and give you our best bet of what the exact answer is, but I am not for one moment claiming that we significantly reduce the 45 per cent figure. It would be impossible to do so. I think we have made a significant in-road into it.

Q585 Mr Gibb: You do not really know though, do you?

Mr Narey: I am able to tell you there are 65,000 people coming into custody every year who are at entry level one or below for literacy and numeracy. About 36,000 get at least one qualification in literacy or numeracy while they are with us.

Q586 Mr Gibb: So that is 30,000 that are not?

Mr Narey: That is right.

Q587 Mr Gibb: You said earlier that education is crucial to reducing criminality and changing people's lives. I would have thought that literacy was the most crucial aspect of that. It is not getting people through Open University that reduces criminality and changes people's lives, it is getting people who cannot read to read, is it not? They are likely to be the 30,000 who are not achieving level one or below?

Mr Narey: Yes.

Q588 Mr Gibb: So surely we need to focus on that group of people?

Mr Narey: Indeed, we are. The usual criticisms which are pointed at us so far are concentrating on basic skills rather too much. I need to stress that many of the individuals coming into prison with low levels of literacy and numeracy are not in prison remotely long enough to make any impact on that. As a rule of thumb, what teachers tell me ‑ Susan will know ‑ is that to move somebody up, for example, from entry level to level one takes about six weeks pretty intensive work. A very large proportion of people coming into prison have a stay in prison which is shorter than six weeks.

Q589 Mr Gibb: What is the average sentence? What is the average length of time people spend in prison?

Mr Narey: The average right across the prison population I could not give you an exact figure, but it will certainly be measured in months rather than years.

Q590 Mr Gibb: It is four months, is it not? I thought you would know this figure. We were given evidence that it was four months?

Mr Narey: I would need to check on that figure, but I will happily do so.

Q591 Mr Gibb: Can you tell me the average number of hours people spend on education? For those that are in education, how many hours a week do they spend?

Mr Narey: Of those that are in education the figure will be quite low, because a large number of prisoners are intentionally only in education for a few hours per week. A recent audit suggested that 39 per cent of the prisoner population were in some form of education, but many of those will simply be in education for two or three hours a week. They will work for four and a half days in the laundry and they will do half a day's basic education alongside their work.

Q592 Mr Gibb: Half a day a week?

Mr Narey: Yes. So the average across the whole prison population is a small number of hours, three or four hours for everyone in prison, but some individuals, of course, and all children in prison, of which there are nearly 3,000, are in education 25 hours?

Q593 Mr Gibb: Let us take the 39 per cent. Of that 39 per cent what is the average number of hours per week of education they have?

Mr Narey: About seven or eight hours, I would guess.

Q594 Mr Gibb: Seven or eight hours a week. Do you think that is enough?

Mr Narey: No, I would love to do much more. If I could I would have almost everybody who was able to do education benefiting from being in education.

Q595 Mr Gibb: When you transfer prisoners around why can you not transfer their notes on what they have achieved educationally from one prison to the next prison? Why is that so difficult to achieve?

Mr Narey: One of the reasons is that until very recently the Prison Service has not had an IT system which has secure e‑mail.

Q596 Mr Gibb: Can you not just give a bit of paper?

Mr Narey: Yes, we can, but it would be much easier to do it electronically. Through a project which the Offenders Learning and Skills Unit are dealing with - Phil's prisons and private sector prisons - that information will beginning to be transferred electronically next year.

Q597 Mr Gibb: So when we next have an inquiry into this issue this will not be an issue?

Mr Narey: I would be very disappointed if it were, and I would be very disappointed if at the same time we were not transferring information electronically to the Probation Service so that education could continue on release.

Q598 Mr Gibb: Why can you not deliver prisoners on time to their classes? We have heard that a quarter of the time is wasted because prisoners are arriving late, 90 minutes late in some instances. Why can you not get that right?

Mr Wheatley: We dispute that the figures are anywhere near the figures given.

Q599 Mr Gibb: Perhaps you could give us the correct figures?

Mr Wheatley: It is quite a major piece of work to do a calculation across 130 odd prisons about how many minutes everybody has been late, and we do not have that run of data. From my visits to prisons and reports on prisons I do not see anything like that level of slippage, but we do get slippage. As an example, if we find that we believe we have got a gun in a prison, we close the whole of the prison down and we search it from end to end and nobody goes to education - I think that is perfectly proper actually - and that will lead to a slippage in the delivery of education. Similarly, if an incident takes place so that we have a fight as we are moving people to go to work and to education, we stop the movement and deal with the fight. A prison has all those sorts of things going on in it. What we do is measure the amount of purposeful activity that establishments do and make sure that we see that not shrinking but being delivered consistently. It is one of the lines of data we have for all of our purposeful activity so that we can see that the prison is making the best use of the facilities available, and we monitor that on a monthly basis, area managers use that as one of the key pieces of data in the prison, and that shows when you have got slippage in regimes, which you can get if you do not organise well. There is a risk, if a place is not organised well, that movement to all the various activities is not brisk or does not take place when it should take place. So we monitor, we make sure that that is happening regularly, but there are a series of events that can occur in prison that will disrupt the delivery of activities.

Q600 Mr Gibb: So what you are saying is that, aside from those crisis moments in prisons, all prisoners, as far as you are concerned, are getting to their classes on time?

Mr Wheatley: Yes, and the crisis will include things like ‑ I have given you two fairly obvious crises ‑ but if we have got a number of staff who go sick in the morning, we only staff up to run the prison, we do not have a contingency of staff standing by ready to walk in if anybody goes sick, then we will have to trim the regime to we can sure we can do the essential things first, and the essential things will probably be‑‑‑

Q601 Mr Gibb: It is not just crises then; it is some routine problems that are causing delays in getting prisoners to classes as well?

Mr Wheatley: Any problem that restricts the full ability to deliver has to be balanced on the day. Do we send prisoners to court on time? Do we feed prisoners on time? Do we get people to the workshops on time? All those sorts of decisions are being taken on a daily basis in prisons. My experience of prisons is that running the big purposeful activity includes workshops, includes education; movements tend to take place at the same time.

Q602 Mr Gibb: So I am getting from you that there are delays?

Mr Wheatley: There may be delays, but nowhere near the scale of delays that you are talking about, and not because it is not organised properly but because prison has to cope with a wide variety of events not all of which can be planned.

Mr Gibb: Too much sickness; is that right?

Q603 Chairman: Can we move on.

Mr Wheatley: No, actually sickness is reducing and we are hitting our targets on sickness at the moment, but sickness is a problem in a world where staff are working under a lot of pressure with difficult in‑your‑face prisoners.

Mr Gibb: That means more viruses, does it? I do not quite understand that.

Q604 Chairman: Mr Wheatley was saying, it is a very stressful job.

Mr Wheatley: In a 24 hour a day job ‑ this is not something you do nine to five ‑ shift patterns, with difficult work to do, including the possibility from time to time of being assaulted, I think the sickness rates we are currently achieving are not bad; we must work to improve them, because I want to get the maximum amount of work I can get from staff and I want to keep staff as fit as possible.

Q605 Mr Pollard: Have you done any research into shift working and how that affects staff? I worked shifts for years and the concept was that you have a much shorter working life and a much shorter life expectancy if you worked regular night shifts particularly. Five years was the figure that was banded about some years ago?

Mr Wheatley: We believe that the fact that we are running shift schemes makes it more difficult to keep staff at work and not feel stressed and suffer sickness, and that includes unsocial working hours, which we have quite a lot because we have to staff our prisons 365 days a year, every Bank Holiday, every night. We cannot ever close them down.

Chairman: The general picture we are getting from other evidence is that the lack of joined up practice in prisons. You have very big ambitious schemes that seem to stop and then start and you have different areas that are not coterminous, and that is one of the problems. One of the ones we have heard a great deal about is Project Rex and its cancellation. David wants to lead on this.

Q606 Mr Chaytor: I want to ask about the relationship between education and vocational training. Perhaps I can ask Susan Pember: is it still generally considered that education and vocational training should be better integrated? If so, was this not the purpose of Project Rex and why was it abandoned?

Ms Pember: Absolutely, educational vocational training needs to be integrated, and that is why we have parted with the Home Office and the Prison Service, heads of learning and skills in every establishment, to make sure that education and training is seen as one activity in the prison itself, and they are making a difference. They are making a difference to the way that it is managed, the way that it is organised and the quality of that activity and the management of the contractor. That brings us back to the Rex project, which was the re-tendering project?

Q607 Chairman: Why was it called Rex?

Ms Pember: Why was it called Rex? There was an acronym. I asked this a year ago: "Why is it called Rex?" It is just about re-tendering. It was a re-tendering exercise and we got Rex. It could have been for anything. It did not have to be for prison education. The re-tendering exercise originally was just about the fact we had contracts that had been run for two sets of four years ‑ they needed to be done again ‑ but alongside that was the need to improve quality. Running alongside that, although it was not in the public domain, was the concept of developing NOMS (the new National Offender Management Service). The problem with the tendering contract originally, it was going to be, although a better contract in substance of what was needed to be delivered, it would have been substantially the same that had happened the previous two sets of four years, and actually life had moved on. One of the other things that was obvious to me last year was that we needed to improve the quality of the activity: the teachers needed to be supported and we needed to improve the quality of activity. With a tendering process all that happens is that you might get new management but all the staff get carried across - they would have been the same staff - and in that year of tendering we would have lost momentum about increasing better quality and, again, these would not have been supportive people. The reason that that process was stopped as it was going was the creation of NOMS, the need to improve quality and the need to support the teaching staff; the creation of the Learning and Skills Councils and them becoming incredibly active at a local level so that we had another vehicle that we could put funds through; and, lastly, the creation of a whole management service for offenders that allowed us to think about prisoner education, not just in prison, but in the community as well. When you think about the numbers in involved now, there are around 70,000 individuals in prison, but there are over 200,000 serving their sentence in the community. We needed to think about the whole offender management and the whole offender learning skills in a different way.

Q608 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the different groups of staff on the education side and the vocational training side, what are the issues there in terms of their background, rates of pay, their qualifications and experience?

Ms Pember: They are actually doing a sterling job and I think that should be noted. Many of them are really well trained, maybe not qualified in teaching but they are well trained. Many of them have really good practical skills that we need in the future service and, between them, they are actually accrediting about 100,000 individual vocational units in each year. What we need to be able to do, if I could just refer to the future, working with the local learning and skills councils, with the prisons in that area and with probation with JobCentre Plus, is to deliver a service that brings us all together and those VT trainers are going to be incredibly important to that service and they will be brought into that service at that time. The things you were talking about, pay and conditions of service and who actually manages them, will be taken on board at that time in that local area to meet those local circumstances.

Q609 Mr Chaytor: So, there will be standard terms and conditions and standard basic requirements in terms of qualifications. Will they all need to have a teaching qualification whether they are on the educational or the vocational training schemes?

Ms Pember: I cannot commit to standards in terms and conditions because the contractors up and down the country, FE colleges, do not have standard terms and conditions, full stop. That is not the way that further education is run these days. On the qualifications, we would expect them in the future, as we do with skills tutors in further education colleges, to be qualified in that particular vocational area. That is what we would be looking for from VT people in the future. However, we are where we are now and some of them are amazing and brilliant and therefore we do not actually want to displace people who are really good, we want to facilitate them in order that they can actually take part in this service in the future.

Q610 Mr Chaytor: If the re-tendering process were delayed and now could be delayed up to 2007, presumably there is some uncertainty in the field. What effect do you think this has had on the existing contractors and the existing staff within the prisons involved in vocational training? Is there evidence that it is stable or are staff leaving or is there an increased turnover of staff? What is the picture that emerges from this delay and uncertainty over the new contract?

Ms Pember: Last October when the discussions about Rex were taking place and there was uncertainty about where the next stage was, I think you are right, people felt uncertain and there was some staff movement. In the last year, there has been improvement in teaching and learning grades, so the teachers' grades are actually improving. Over 70 per cent of all classroom inspections are satisfactory or above. We have had two contractors getting a two in inspection grades for the management of that activity which is the first time in this sector that we have actually had two grades. So, yes, although there is uncertainty, on the other hand this has been balanced. The work of the heads of learning and skills is having a marked difference because the quality of the activity is actually improving. I think, talking to contractors, they are aware now that they are part of the real education world; they are inspected by inspectors, they have been managed properly by the prison itself and I see a marked improvement over the last year. If you talk to some people, they will say that it is dismal, that people are leaving in droves etcetera, but contractors are able to meet their contractual responsibilities.

Q611 Mr Chaytor: Over the last six years, there has been an increase of about 125 per cent in the prison education budget. Do you think there has been an increase in volume and/or quality commensurate with that 125 per cent increase in cash?

Mr Narey: In terms of output, very clearly, Mr Chaytor. In 1998 when we had the first serious injection of money to expend on prison education, in terms of basic skills qualifications, we could have got 2,000 a year. This year, prisons will get about 60,000 basic skills qualifications. I do not know what the figures were for work skills qualifications but it is about 100,000. Measured by outputs which I think is the best possible measure you can have as a rule of thumb, I think we have more than matched the investment we have been given.

Chairman: Let us continue with contracting arrangements.

Q612 Jonathan Shaw: Susan Pember, I understand that you were the person who made the decision to axe Rex, put Rex down; is that correct?

Ms Pember: I made the recommendations but it was actually ministers' decisions and based on the recommendations that we drew together. I cannot say that I personally took the decision about Rex.

Q613 Jonathan Shaw: You put Rex's head on the chopping block.

Ms Pember: No. It was a very balanced approach with the support of both the DfES and the Home Office at the time.

Q614 Jonathan Shaw: I would not expect you to say anything else!

Ms Pember: I have only been a civil servant for four years!

Q615 Jonathan Shaw: In taking this balanced decision or recommendation to the Minister, did say to the Minister, "Minister, we have had this PWC report ..." Did it take years?

Ms Pember: Yes.

Q616 Jonathan Shaw: Did the Minister ask, "How much did this cost?"

Ms Pember: Absolutely. We had to put through a rationale to say, "Right, this exercise has been going on for about 18 months, this is where we are now and this is what you will get, this is how much it has cost. However, the other side of the coin is that the learning and skills councils are working in each of the areas and nationally; they have been funded to provide learning for those in the community; they have been funded to provide staff training for people who are teaching post-16; we have the creation of NOMS coming on the cards in the following year. This is the service we want in the future and, if we carry on in the way we have been contracting through the Rex process, we will not get what we need in the future."

Q617 Jonathan Shaw: You know what I am going to ask you now and that is to answer my question. What was the cost?

Ms Pember: I will need to find the number for you. I was the person who contracted with Price Waterhouse Coopers who have been in at the beginning ---

Q618 Jonathan Shaw: This is quite a fundamental issue. It is a reasonable question for this Committee to ask. You had an 18 month process and you decided that you did not want to go ahead with the recommendations of PWC, so what right ---

Mr Narey: We will find that figure.

Chairman: We will have that figure.

Q619 Jonathan Shaw: Thank you very much indeed.

Ms Pember: It was not in any form of a deal breaker. It was not that extensive.

Q620 Jonathan Shaw: I understand the context in which you are putting it but there was a change in policy and obviously there was an expense to the public purse and I think it is reasonable for the Committee to have that information. Moving on from that, in terms of looking to the future, there are, I understand, three pilots operating with the learning and skills council. I do not know which institutions they are operating in. Could you tell the Committee a little about those three pilots and the different nature of those pilots, please.

Ms Pember: The three pilots were chosen because these are areas that we actually feel we can do a substantial amount of quite exciting work in. They were chosen with the learning and skills councils in order that we could actually see what type of different activities we could do in different places. So, they are made up of a consortium of the learning and skills council, JobCentre Plus and probation and some of the key providers in that particular area through a stakeholder group. The idea is that we actually begin to work out the seamless service. So, as soon as an offender is touched at all by the correctional services, they are assessed. That assessment goes with them; it goes with them to the different prisons that they are in and then it goes out with them into the community and it goes with them for probation and it travels with them depending on the length of time to JobCentre Plus - often JobCentre plus is the first agency to be involved with that prisoner after they have been released - and then into education. We need to change the infrastructure of that. It is not just passing the information from one service to another but it is actually ensuring on the way, say if we take literacy, that the literacy programme is continued and that the person is assessed at the appropriate time and put forward to the test. We need to develop in education what we call a unique learner number in order that we actually know who that individual is and we need to develop processes between probation and JobCentre Plus. We need to be able to ensure that when somebody goes into a job, they can continue their education. In doing that, we have to pilot assessments in order that we have a standard screening tool and a standard diagnostic tool. We have to be able to pilot programmes and assessment of those programmes. We have to be able to pilot even things like which awarding body we use because, up until now, everybody can choose which awarding body to use, so the prison might choose City & Guilds, somebody might choose Ed-Excel and somebody might choose ACR. So, all these partners have to agree on this absolutely seamless process and each of the prototypes are going to try things in different ways. Also, about re-tendering and whether we have to go forward in the future about straight re-tendering for prison education, whether we can do it in joint ventures and whether we can do it by the learning and skills councils' method of planned provision.

Chairman: We are going to have to move into shorter questions and shorter answers.

Q621 Jonathan Shaw: Do you envisage flexibility within the new regime for individual prisoners? We have heard that there is a great deal of constraint on the heads of learning and skills to actually adapt the contract to meet the particular individual needs. Is that something that is going to be possible? I recognise that you obviously are working on constraints.

Ms Pember: One of the constraints people say now is that we are very target driven and the targets are generated top down. That has worked really well in the area of basic skills, literacy and numeracy and I have targets to work to until 2010 and cannot see them being moved. Also, there is the question of each of the offender learners having individual targets and they have to be generated upwards and we are looking at that target regime at this moment and it should answer your question about flexibility because the provider in that prison is actually wanting to do what is best for that prisoner and therefore it might be getting a level 2 in a vocational area not straight literacy and numeracy activity and that is what we need to work for.

Q622 Jonathan Shaw: Am I right in understanding that when the £127 million - I think that is the education budget - is transferred to the learning and skills council, it will not be ring fenced within the learning and skills council's budget?

Mr Narey: That is correct.

Q623 Jonathan Shaw: You will understand, Mr Narey, our concern to hear that because, when we went to Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight, the staff there described the situation some years ago where budgets were not ring fenced for education and a particular governor decided that he did not want the education and training, so it was just axed.

Ms Pember: We give the learning and skills council their overall £9 billion through five finance heads in the department but we also give them a set of outcome targets to go with that. So, although the money would not be ring fenced, the actual targets that they have to achieve will be.

Q624 Jonathan Shaw: What is going to happen if there are financial pressures on the learning and skills council as we have seen? Is prison education going to be their number one priority or is it going to be schools and FE colleges?

Mr Narey: Either, Mr Shaw. What we will do is get rather more than our £127 million back until I have been persuaded by Susan and by the Chief Executive of the learning and skills council. I think the case we have to make in terms of what can be achieved educationally with an audience which is either literally captive or semi-captive is a very powerful one and I will retain, as head of this new organisation, an intense interest in education and I will be fighting very hard to make sure that I get more than a full return on the investment and I know that I would have the Home Secretary's support on that.

Q625 Jonathan Shaw: Susan, you mentioned earlier about the successful project in allowing teachers to get access to staff development and training. I have two questions. First of all, within the new contracting regime, would that include specific budgetary provision for training and development? Are you going to put your money where your mouth is basically?

Ms Pember: The money is in the system now for training. The Success for All initiative that offers support right across from early teacher training to support and training on materials is there for teachers in prisons to access now. The job of the contractor will be to make sure that they do access that activity but they are part of this larger professional development initiative that we have happening at the moment. I am satisfied with the improvement we have now happening in prison education; I am not satisfied with the lack of access these people have had and the isolation these lecturers have had and that is something that we want to change and that we are changing.

Jonathan Shaw: We have been advised that there are a number of staff working in the vocational area who have low skills levels themselves. In fact, there is quite a number who are functioning at level 1. Is that your understanding?

Chairman: Is that appropriate for Susan or for Phil Wheatley who is shaking his head?

Q626 Jonathan Shaw: If Mr Wheatley is shaking his head, perhaps he would like to enlighten the Committee.

Mr Wheatley: It certainly would be a surprise to me that we had a substantial number of people ---

Q627 Jonathan Shaw: I did not say "substantial".

Mr Wheatley: Or even a big enough number to notice who did not have the basic skills required for level 1 which is, as Martin pointed out, only that of a 11-year old or thereabouts. Our vocational training instructors are skilled in their trades and lead education, it is a form of education to those they train which involves them doing more than simply showing they can paint and decorate but also they can plan, they can work out how much paint they need to use and all the other things that go with most of the trades that are involved and they have the skill to do that. We can improve their educational skills, I think there is no doubt about that, but I do not accept that we are employing people of the sort of level that you suggest.

Jonathan Shaw: This is what we are advised. I am just telling you what we are advised, I am not suggesting it.

Q628 Mr Turner: Just to reiterate something where we started. I take it that there is no disagreement that prison has three purposes: one is punishment, one is protection of the public and the third is rehabilitation; is that correct?

Mr Narey: I agree with that, yes.

Q629 Mr Turner: You said, Mr Narey, that you are convinced that education is the way to increase employability and reduce crime and you believe passionately that it will do so, but you were a little thin on the evidence.

Mr Narey: I cannot yet give you evidence that the investment we have put into offenders' basic skills is leading to a significant proportion of those individuals committing less crime. That research is under way and we started that research in about the year 2000 and I hope we will produce it. Internationally, there is evidence available that investment in education makes a difference to crime in the long run. It is a very difficult thing to measure and, at the moment, our effectiveness of the whole of the correctional area of both prisons and probation is measured in an extremely blunt way. We are measured on the proportion of offenders who are not convicted for two years. That is a measure of no crime, not a measure of less crime and we are trying to improve that measure. I am very confident that we will be able to demonstrate that the sort of things we are doing, giving people an education, getting them off drugs and giving them somewhere to live and a job, will significantly reduce volume and seriousness of offending.

Q630 Mr Turner: By when will you be able to demonstrate that?

Mr Narey: I hope that we will be able to demonstrate it in the next couple of years when we start to get some data from the work we are currently doing. I think we need to be more adventurous than we have previously been on research and, for the first time ever, we are beginning to do randomised control trials in order that we can take a much more confident view of what we are achieving. It is very difficult to make categorically the benefits of education to re-offending when you just have control groups.

Q631 Mr Turner: So, January 2007. Can I ask each of you: what is your picture of who is responsible for what in prison education and to whom? Ms Pember, who is responsible for what and to whom in prison education?

Ms Pember: We are responsible for the policy of prison education and David Normington is the accounting officer for the £127 million and therefore has overall authority. The prison contract itself with the contractors is run by the procurement service of the Prison Service at this moment.

Q632 Mr Turner: They are nice distant paths from each other and there is nobody in between those.

Ms Pember: There are links between them. If I can explain the overall link. Martin is the chair of a board that looks at reconviction, that stops reconviction, and I am the chair of the subcommittee on education and employment which is a committee that oversees the work we are doing in both education and with the DWP and JobCentre Plus and we report from both our services up to this board which then goes back to David Blunkett at the Home Office.

Q633 Mr Turner: "We report from both our services" and, by that, you mean the Prison Service and the DfES?

Ms Pember: And JobCentre Plus.

Q634 Mr Turner: To the board, you said.

Ms Pember: Martin's board, NOMS.

Mr Narey: And then to the Home Secretary.

Q635 Mr Turner: Despite the involvement of the DfES, education is the responsibility of the Home Secretary.

Ms Pember: David Normington is the accounting officer for the funds and it is jointly managed by the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Education.

Q636 Mr Turner: So, the NOMS Board reports to the Home Secretary and the two elements, education and employment, report to reconviction who reports to the NOMS Board.

Ms Pember: Yes.

Q637 Mr Turner: So, where does education and employment report to the DfES?

Ms Pember: I report through our performance system up to the Secretary of State. We can draw you a drawing if it would help you.

Q638 Mr Turner: It probably would.

Mr Narey: On most substantial issues - on targeting setting and on where we are going to put financial investment - we report to both Secretaries of State and it is completely routine for me to spend as much time with an education minister as I do with a Home Office minister these days because we are generally working together in a way that did not happen in the Civil Service until quite recently.

Q639 Mr Turner: Now let us go down further. You said that somebody designs this contract.

Ms Pember: The contract was designed by the Prison Service about four years ago.

Q640 Mr Turner: And, in the future, it will be designed by yourself as education and employment?

Ms Pember: Absolutely.

Q641 Mr Turner: And it is let in a number of different bits, presumably.

Ms Pember: At the moment, the contract that was done four years ago was tendered and let as a contract and it has a specification underneath that that the contractor is expected to perform to.

Q642 Mr Turner: And lots of little bits of contractor let across the country.

Ms Pember: Yes.

Q643 Mr Turner: So, a number of contractors are responsible through the contract to yourselves.

Ms Pember: Yes.

Q644 Mr Turner: What is the relationship in your view between the contractors who are delivering a service within the prison and the people who run the prisons?

Ms Pember: There was a gap there. You had the contract managers in each of the prisons who were managing the prison education service but their line management is to their home body which could be a college 100 miles away. So, what we have done to make sure that we can actually feel secure that we are getting value for money is put in these posts called "heads of learning and skills" who, on the ground, can manage the quality and the activity of that prison contract and that allows us to report back to that prison contractor if we are unhappy about it.

Q645 Mr Turner: And the heads of learning and skills report to the governor?

Ms Pember: Yes.

Q646 Mr Turner: So, in effect, it is actually the head of learning and skills who is the contract manager. The contract manager is the manager of the delivery of the contract.

Ms Pember: That is right.

Q647 Mr Turner: Is that correct? Good, everybody agrees! I accept that contractual arrangements can be complex but what I am concerned about is the extent to which the man who most people think of as being in charge of a prison is in charge. Do you feel, Mr Wheatley, that the governor has sufficient (a) responsibility and (b) power to ensure that education is delivered?

Mr Wheatley: As currently structured, the prison governor with a head of learning and skills reporting to the governor who is in effect contract managing the contract for that prison, I think governors have the power, within the limitations of the contract - and the contracts were let four years ago and they are not the ones we would choose to let whenever they are next re-let - to make that contract work and it is the governor who is accountable for the results of the targets which are set and, yes, we do have targets and they are mainly about basic skills which I hold governors to account for delivering and they account through the management line to me for that delivery.

Q648 Mr Turner: How can they be accountable if they move around as quickly as some of them obviously do?

Mr Wheatley: Whoever is in charge of the establishment is accountable. The fact that somebody changes their post does not mean that they are not accountable. Their accountability remains with the governor. Governors do move. We grow governors, so that governors work in small establishments where they learn their trade having first of all assisted in other establishments and then we move them into bigger establishments and then into our biggest establishments and some people like me get pulled forward into running the whole of the system. We take governors into the service from a number of different backgrounds. We still have people who joined as direct entry governor grade from other jobs, so - and, please, bear with me - people do not all join at the age of 21. Pulling people through the various stages necessary to grow a governor to run a big prison, say, like Wandsworth or to do my sort of job means that we have to move them.

Q649 Mr Turner: I accept that but I think you will recognise the criticism of ministers sometimes: they are moved on so quickly that nobody knows who is to blame for what went wrong.

Mr Wheatley: I think that is misguided, if you do not mind me saying so. We do not move governors casually. I move governors for real reasons. Sometimes for reasons beyond my control. If somebody leaves an establishment to join the private sector or dies or wants to go to Australia as happened recently to the Governor of Nottingham, I have to replace at short notice and, because it is a little like house moves, there is a chain of moves. As the Governor of Nottingham moves, we will have to replace with a governor from a smaller establishment, Nottingham being a medium-sized establishment, it is not somewhere that somebody can cut their teeth on for the first time, so actually a skilled deputy governor moves and somebody else moves into that position and that is done in an intelligent and thoughtful way, not as some people suggest in a casual manner designed to reduce accountability.

Q650 Mr Turner: So, there is a plan?

Mr Wheatley: It is planned, yes.

Q651 Chairman: Is 20 months on average long enough for a governor to manage an institution?

Mr Wheatley: In an ideal world, I would slow down the departure rate of governors and I would not have people joining the private sector or transferring to Australia or all the other things that produce pull-through.

Q652 Chairman: Mr Wheatley, that is not a good enough excuse. All human organisations have people who change their jobs. They have turnover. In your own terms, they have churn. It is quite wrong to suggest that the Prison Service is unique. Managers who have come to this Committee say that it is chaotic to try and properly run institutions with the turnover that you allow in your senior managers/your governors. That is what they tell us.

Mr Wheatley: They may tell you that but I am telling you that we are planning carefully to replace our governors. We have moved a number of people during a period when we have changed the way in which we run prisons. In order to achieve the improvements that Martin Narey set out at the beginning in his opening statement, we have had to move governors and, on a number of occasions, move them away from establishments where they were not doing as well as I would have liked them to have done. During that period, we did speeded up movement quite necessarily in order to achieve significant improvement of performance and actually that is seen in our results. We are planning carefully to move governors between places in a sensible way that maximises the country's chance of having a good Prison Service. We are not helped sometimes by the fact that people leave unexpectedly, but we must always have a governor in position who is capable of doing the job and has the necessary track record. It is a job that you have to grow people into. I could slow down movement by making the Governor of Wandsworth a brand new governor and saying, "Stay there for ten years", but it would be running a very big risk for the very first time to take on a large establishment with all the complexities of operational management without that sort of experience.

Q653 Chairman: Come on, Mr Wheatley, no one is suggesting ten years but one is saying that if you have this high turnover of governors, no other management task I know of in the private or public sector allows you to get a hold on an establishment and run it. One of the real downs if you do have a constantly moving management is that somebody else is running the prison.

Mr Wheatley: That is very much not the case. Governors have a better grip of prisons than certainly at any time in my career, hence the improved performance. That is simply demonstrated in the performance we are achieving. You cannot achieve results on escapes, on riots, on hitting targets and on reducing offending behaviour without having a grip of establishments.

Q654 Chairman: I did not say that no one had a grip on them.

Mr Wheatley: The grip is a management grip. I can assure you that, if there were not a management grip, we would not be hitting those targets and we would not be looking at the sort of education figures that we are looking at today, nearly 60,000 - and I think probably at the end of the year over 60,000 - basic skills qualifications gained. We are delivering. We have governors who have been in post for a substantial period of time, so I can point to governors, if you want, who have been in post for seven years, for four years and for six years. There are other governors who have moved more quickly but it is being done in a planned way, though sometimes in response to things that were not immediately foreseen.

Q655 Mr Turner: Why does health work and education not in prisons?

Mr Wheatley: Both work.

Q656 Mr Turner: Why does health work better then?

Mr Wheatley: I do not think that is correct.

Q657 Chairman: I think Andrew is asking, why does the transfer to the Department of Health seem to have succeeded much better in health compared to education?

Mr Narey: Chairman, I think I would challenge that. The fact is that the transfer to health is more embedded. We started the transfer at an earlier stage. I should say that, at an official level, these transfers were both initiated from us in the Prison Service. When I was Director General, I read the rules, I think quite correctly, and thought that, in terms of investment, it would be rather better for prison health and prison education if the budgets were coming from Health and Education rather than from the Home Office. We started earlier with health. I think education is working very well. I am not complacent and I hope we have not conveyed that today, but I think that some of the things we are achieving with some of the people who have been unteachable and uneducatible elsewhere are quite remarkable. I am sure you must have seen that in your visits to the three prisons on your patch. We are achieving things with people that would never ever have been achieved outside. We have, with health, a rule of thumb. We say, "Are we providing healthcare which is equivalent to what somebody would get outside?" and we believe, with some exceptions, we are close to achieving that. In education, we are providing more than anyone can get outside because education outside for many of the young people we lock up just does not exist at all.

Q658 Mr Turner: You many not be complacent but I have to say that you are not convincing either because, even in the three prisons in my constituency, there is huge variety in the quality of education and training, as far as I can see, that is undertaken. Colleagues may have a different view on that but that is my view. One of the things that slightly worries me is that we have these different groups of people responsible in the same institution for the education and training process and education is different from health to the extent that, for the most part, the provision of health services as a specialist service is of a very different level from the provision of education. Prison officers can train in some vocational subject; prison instructors can be employed for those purposes. On the whole, prison officers cannot, although perhaps they can, I do not know, administer drugs, they cannot nurse and they cannot be doctors. My question is, how are you going to protect the position of the prison officers to ensure that they continue to have and develop a better working relationship with the inmates at the same time as improving the quality of training and so on that is available to all?

Mr Narey: Mr Wheatley may want to say something about training. I think the improvements we have been making in health and education, with the help of the Department of Health, the NHS and with the DfES have been substantial. I am sorry that I have not convinced you of that and I will look at the figures for your three prisons and I am confident that I will be able to demonstrate to you that significant qualifications have been achieved by people there that certainly would not have been achieved outside. This does mean a transition of responsibility. We have, in healthcare, moved from the position where we trained prison officers essentially as first-aiders to where we have qualified nurses in every establishment and healthcare has improved and we are giving compensatory healthcare in the way that we give compensatory education. Alongside that, I think the job of prison officers, both in Phil's sector, the public sector, and the private sector has been enriched, not diminished, because prison officers see the people they look after engaged in fruitful activity. They see them in education, on drug treatment and on cognitive skills programmes and we have embedded relationships as a very big part of the prison experience. We have a thing which has become known as the Decency Agenda which, when Phil and I worked together in prisons, we launched together and the essential decency and humanity of prisons is vastly improved. I have not been to a prison anywhere abroad - and I have visited very many prisons though I have not been to Finland and Norway but I might having read your evidence - under the pressures we are under where there is a greater level of humanity combined with what is now, under Phil's leadership, quite outstanding security.

Q659 Chairman: One thing that we ought to know before we move over this section is when the LSCs will take over.

Ms Pember: They are working jointly with us from January on three areas and, by 2006, across the country.

Q660 Chairman: When will the new contract range have been put in place?

Ms Pember: We are evidencing work from the prototypes to see if we can have a different type of contract arrangement and we will look at which one is most appropriate and that is what we will run out in 2006.

Q661 Chairman: Where are the prototypes being rolled out?

Ms Pember: The prototypes are being rolled out in the north east, north west and the south west.

Chairman: We must press on with education provision.

Q662 Valerie Davey: In Bristol at the moment, we are just having the assessment of a scheme for targeting prolific offenders and, in that case, probation, police and the prison have come together, magnificently I believe, to target the 20 per cent of offenders who are causing 80 per cent of the crime and, in that way, really homing in on individual prisoners. I would extrapolate perhaps from the conversation but, in health, we are looking at individuals, so whether they are diabetic or whether they have a drugs problem or whatever, and perhaps in education we should be doing that more to look at whether a younger or older person is still dyslexic and has all those problems or whether they have very special needs. My first question is to Susan: in that first assessment, do you actually have people sufficiently qualified across the whole country to be doing an assessment at the level and in the depth that is necessary?

Ms Pember: That is one of our goals. We have trained up people right across the country now to do early screening in order that they can identify straightaway if somebody has a literacy or numeracy problem. Then we have instituted something that we call a diagnostic assessment to see how severe their problem is and, from that, you can lead off a pathway to see whether they are dyslexic or they have some other form of specific learning difficulty. Our goal is to make sure that there are people trained up in each of the services or they can signpost to somebody who can do that for them and, once we have that individual diagnostic assessment of the individual, it transfers with them and we have an individual learning plan that goes with them and exactly what you were talking about with the joint project between probation and the police, we would want the learning and skills council to be in that from day one in order that we can actually help that individual and that is the learning plan that goes with them.

Q663 Valerie Davey: So, under the new contracts, whenever they are finally let, that initial assessment would be a crucial element of it.

Ms Pember: Yes.

Q664 Valerie Davey: Secondly, the facility to follow through for those individuals to meet their special needs where they are seen.

Ms Pember: Yes.

Q665 Valerie Davey: Martin mentioned the additional funding which has come into the system which you are obviously pleased about. How have you prioritised the spending of that money within the education development?

Mr Narey: When the money began to arrive in 1998, we agreed with ministers an educational strategy for prisons with an emphasis on basic skills and essentially we put almost all the new money into basic skills provision and we redirected some of the money which had been spent elsewhere on education also into basic skills because the primary mover on this - and I do not know whether you have seen the survey - is Alan Wells of the Basic Skills Agency who was very much a friend and supporter to us in that period told us that, from a survey carried out by the Basic Skills Agency, the overwhelming problem in the prison population was that two thirds of them were essentially ineligible for about 97 per cent of jobs advertised in job centres. So, we do other things as well, as I mentioned at the beginning - sometimes people believe that we do nothing and that is not the case - but, overwhelmingly, we concentrate on the barriers to employability, so basic skills primarily.

Q666 Valerie Davey: Is the money that we are talking about all revenue or is there a capital element or is that separate?

Mr Narey: The figures I reported to you for adult offenders were entirely resource money. There has been also significant capital investment in the establishment of facilities for children. Most of them have had, for example, new educational blocks and we had a lot of money from the capital investment fund to improve education facilities in some adult prisons as well

Q667 Valerie Davey: Is the revenue - and let us concentrate on the revenue - leading to more prisoners getting education or is it leading to the depth of quality which some prisoners on basic skills really need? What is happening? Where is it going?

Mr Narey: It is leading to both as demonstrated by the statistics which I quoted you. There are very many more individuals in education: 39 per cent of prisoners at the moment have some sort of participation in education. I would estimate that, five or seven years ago, that would have been in single figures. Also, the depth of education is much more. Before I did Phil's job, before I became Director General, I was responsible for education on the Prisons Board and, in 1997/98 when I looked at education, I found that we had hardly any outputs at all in terms of making any effect on individuals. There were still quite a few people in education but most of that education was largely recreational and, in terms of doing anything to change their life chances, there were hardly any. We now have these huge amount of progress and very significant levels of qualification in prison.

Q668 Valerie Davey: One of the ways that would take this forward massively would be if prisoners could use the Internet. We did find in Norway that, for the first time, they had found a way of screening in order that it was educational provision by the network. Are we going to be able to develop through the Internet levels in attainments of education which would obviously take this forward amazingly for many, many prisoners?

Mr Narey: The short answer to that is "yes". We are already giving prisoners access to the Internet in some establishments. We are being very, very careful. Both Phil and I will have truncated careers if we have individuals in prison who are getting access to paedophilia and matters such as that and also have truncated careers if victims are finding themselves being contacted through the net. So, we are taking it very carefully. A number of establishments have already done this and work which we are doing in partnership with the DfES I am confident will open up access to limited sites in a controlled way. I can tell you that the Home Secretary will want to be very convinced that we can be absolutely sure that the firewalls and everything that we can put in can work. If anyone has had the experience that I have of a 15-year old at home, you will notice how people can get round things unless you are really sophisticated and we must be very, very careful.

Q669 Chairman: There is good international experience now in the United States, Norway and other places that is showing that it can be done.

Mr Narey: Indeed and we have not been ignoring it. Until very recently, with Learn Direct, we used the Learn Direct Intranet, CD-based learning, and that has been of variable success but I think it is accepted that we need to go further though I just want to be absolutely sure and Phil and I will want to convince the Home Secretary that this is not going to cause public embarrassment.

Valerie Davey: I am sure this Committee would endorse everything you have said provided we know that there is also at the same time exploration of what will be for many people in the future, I am sure, something of very great value.

Q670 Mr Chaytor: Just returning to the question of the emphasis on basic skills training, one of the Government's new policies for adult skills as a whole is the level 2 entitlement which will give free tuition for level 2 courses for all adults who do not have it. What are the implications of that for prisoner education? Will offenders both within prisons and on release be eligible for level 2 entitlement and what are the implications for your budgets if the whole budget has been skewed towards basic skills training over the last few years?

Ms Pember: The level 2 has been piloted in two geographical areas of the learning skills council as we speak and it is an expectation that it will be rolled out next year and that is exactly what the new service has to cover especially for those who are going to serve their sentence in the community because they will be entitled to free level 2 training and that is the funding that Martin was saying that offenders need to get access to. So, yes, there will be a priority group there. For the work that we have been doing on basic skills, we have been getting ready for the launch of the level 2 entitlement because if you are an individual who has luggage of the past about school, you actually do not really want to do basic skills. We have had to do a great deal of persuasion nationally in prisons and outside of prisons for people to take the basic skills tuition up but they do actually want to get level 2 qualification. So, the work that we have been doing is to secure materials that embed literacy and numeracy in the level 2 activity in order that it is cost effective because you are doing the two at once. However, it does mean more training for the individuals who are actually teaching this activity and that is the work that we have to do for the future.

Q671 Chairman: That is one of the problems though, is it not? I know that you are very highly respected people in this field and we are learning a great deal from this, but what worries me about some of the answers we are getting is that they do not really square with the rest of the evidence we have had. You have read some of the transcripts presumably. Some of the evidence we have been given from real prisons, governors in prisons and people working in prisons, say that the situation is much less coherent and less satisfactory than you seem to be suggesting and they say they are really struggling. One of the things they are struggling with is in regard to the quality of competencies available to them in a prison. I think, Martin, it was you who cut down the training period for a prison officer to something like six or seven weeks. In the Scandinavian countries we visited, it is a year. You have a churn of prison officers which is horrific.

Mr Narey: No, we certainly do not, Chairman.

Q672 Chairman: Just wait a minute. That is what we hear. There is low-level qualification amongst prison officers themselves. So, to be able to train them up to be part of a learning environment seems to be challenging. Secondly, the people running the workshops are much lower educated then we would hope they would be. Thirdly, even the teachers themselves have pretty rusty skills that need upgrading. That is what we are hearing. The three of you seem to be saying, "Chairman and Committee, come on, don't believe all those voices, everything is all right." Is that not what you are saying?

Mr Narey: Chairman, the reason I made the opening statement that I did was because I did spend last night reading some of the transcripts and some of them frankly horrified me. I thought they were misleading.

Q673 Chairman: And even your friends.

Mr Narey: I do not mind saying publicly that I was horrified by what one of them, someone who I greatly admire, Mike Newell, the Governor of Durham, who has been a friend of mine for 20 years, had to say and I think he is quite wrong. I would simply urge you to speak to as many governors as possible. I am delighted that you are going to visit a prison and I would urge you to call governors at random. Governors are committed to this and they have a grip on this. We could not possibly be producing the qualifications that we are if this were not being taken seriously.

Q674 Chairman: Martin, come back to that one thing: do you really think that six/seven weeks of training for a prison officer is enough, with no qualifications?

Mr Narey: This is Mr Wheatley's business now. I am not backing out and I will happily come back to it but I should let Phil speak to this.

Mr Wheatley: It is actually eight weeks of training; it used to be 11 weeks of training. The part of training we removed was primarily the fitness training because we used to do lots of PE with staff and drill which we seemed at one point to think was good for prison officers. Actually, because we are recruiting people following a fitness test, we know they are fit and we do not need to make them super fit just in training, it does not make any sense, and we thought that the drill added nothing to the learning and we were able to take those things out and leave the real training of a prison officer intact without reducing any of that training. It is eight weeks of training; it is not as long as they do in Scandinavia but it gives prison officers the basics of training to take out in order that they can begin to do their job and a great deal of the learning is intended to be done on the job. It is part of the probation period and further training is done with prison officers. On average, we are doing about six days of training per member of staff and we keep on trying to improve the skills of our staff.

Q675 Chairman: There are those who have said to us, "Look, they are having a short training period and they never get any more training except training in restraint."

Mr Wheatley: That simply is not true. You are right, they do get training in restraint and it is very important that they do, actually.

Q676 Chairman: But nothing else?

Mr Wheatley: They get training in suicide, they get training in diversity, they get training for specific jobs for staff. If they go into reception and into observation and classification work, they get trained for that. This is not to say that every prison officer is spending most of their time in training but there is further training for staff and there has to be to make the prisons work. Similarly, when somebody says there is a high resignation rate, actually, there is a 2.2 per cent resignation rate for reasons other than retirement in prison officers. That is tremendously low. It is a problem to me sometimes that actually the rate at which staff churn, to use that phrase again, is very low which makes coping with any budget reductions difficult because actually staff do not leave in very large numbers. So, the idea that we have an enormous churn of prison officers, heaven knows where that came from but it is not reality. It has been - and I have the figures in front of me - round about 2.2 per cent since March 2002 which is where my figures go back to. It has been as low as 2.1 per cent and no higher than 2.2 per cent, which is what it currently is.

Q677 Chairman: That is very interesting compared to the other information we have been given.

Mr Wheatley: I suspect that you have not been told the truth.

Chairman: We will now move on to key performance targets.

Q678 Paul Holmes: In a way, it is carrying on from the theme we have just been talking about regarding the possible gaps between perception and reality between the official figures and what is actually going on. People would say that performance targets can be very useful for driving up performance and for measuring success and people would also say that there can be quite a false image of what is happening as well. As somebody who was a teacher for a long time, I can give you chapter and verse on how schools manipulate information in order that they hit the targets and I was speaking to somebody yesterday who works in the Accident & Emergency Department at my local hospital who was complaining about the very distorting effect of the four hour waiting list target on A&E provision. I think there is a set of examples like that from the Prison Service. We have heard a great deal from Phil and Martin regarding the success rates they have. They are getting more prisoners into education through basic skills etcetera, etcetera. The Prison Reform Trust has said that the achievement of targets in basic skills masks very significant shortcomings and the opportunities for learning available to all prisoners across the board. How do you reconcile that?

Mr Narey: I read the evidence from Juliet Lyon and I am afraid that I think it was partial. She did not tell you about the numbers of students doing Open University work; she did not tell you the number of people doing distance learning funded through the Prison Education Trust which we fund in the first place; she did not mention people on day release. It is simply not the case that this is only basic skills. It is primarily basic skills because it is the greatest challenge we face but there is a great deal of other education as well. I do not know if any of you ever get to see the annual cursor(?) event launched recently at Wormwood Scrubs to which I went a few weeks ago. That is just a representation of what prisoners are achieving in the arts. We have 20 writer-in-residence schemes. There is a great deal more than basic skills. It is true and we are not ashamed to say that basic skills remains a priority because that is the best possible way that we might reduce criminality.

Q679 Paul Holmes: Is it still reaching the majority. I think Phil was saying earlier on that there is no problem about prisoners getting access to education, there is no problem about them being able to earn more money for phone cards by doing work rather than undergoing education and yet we have been told, both in the prisons we visited and by evidence we have been given, that there are actually big barriers to prisoners. The money factor is a big barrier because, if it is the only source of money for cigarettes and phone cards, they will go and do the work, as boring and repetitive as it is, that pays them slightly more. We have heard that a number of prisoners cannot get access to education courses because there are not the spaces for them. Martin, you yourself said that about 35 per cent are in education which means that 65 per cent are not.

Mr Wheatley: I certainly would not claim that every prisoner who wants to have education will have as much education as they would like to have. What we have is much greater resources than we used to have, primarily targeted on basic skills, which we are trying to make sure that we use to maximum effect. We are certainly well short of resourcing for every prisoner who wanted to do education and many do for the reasons I set out earlier and they are not bad reasons, prisoners want to improve themselves in prison. If we set out to achieve that, that would cost the country a great deal more money and, at the moment, that is not being allocated to us in that way. I think trying to hit a standard in which we met absolutely the express needs of every prisoner would be quite difficult to defend. There will be some prisoners who have basic skills problems who are not motivated to attack those problems as I think we have brought out already and you have to be motivated to attack those problems. We are filling the educational places for which we have funding for people who have skills deficits with which we are managing to deal. I am not trying to say that this is perfection but I am saying that we are using the resources to good effect to do what we are meant to be doing and the results show that 60,000 basic skills qualifications this year will be a substantial improvement on the previous year. It is pretty good going. It is a large percentage of the Government's overall target. I think we are using the resources to good effect, not that governors are not finding the role difficult as they cope with lots of pressures on them and not that prisoners are getting everything that they want because they are not.

Q680 Paul Holmes: There was a recently published report from Ofsted and the Adult Learning Inspectorate which said that although the Skills for Life initiative had been highly successful in increasing the number of students doing various types of basic skills and raising the profile of that area of learning, they said there needed to be much sharper focus on the quality. So, you are ticking the box for numbers but the report said that the quality needs improving.

Mr Wheatley: I think that, for the public sector prison service, that is right. We need to work on quality. The Adult Learning Inspectorate work is an important part on helping us to work on quality. The heads of learning and skills have gone in specifically to help us to do that and the re-tendering process that we will go through as LSCs take on that responsibility will also give us another chance to build quality into the contract in the way that it is not built into the current contracts. So, it is perfectly accurate that that is what we should be doing and that is what we are trying to do.

Mr Narey: It would be very easy just to measure bodies in education, that is very easy to manipulate. We are being measured by hard outcomes. Phil holds his governors to account for getting prisoners with qualifications; I hold Phil to account and I hold the private sector prisons to account. This is hard outputs and we could not be doing that if we were not doing something right. We all acknowledge that the quality could be much improved. I not infrequently visit a prison and believe that the tutors who we are getting from a particular college are not exactly the pick of the bunch and we do need to address that and improve that, but I think we are doing something right otherwise we would not be getting the outputs that we are.

Q681 Paul Holmes: The Independent Monitoring Board have said that you are ticking the boxes for basic skills and basic skills are essential for employment but they are not sufficient in themselves because particularly the prisoners would then need a lot more help in life skills and the motivation to apply for jobs and the higher level skills that are needed for any decent job in the job market now and we have seen again the icing on the cake examples like the Transco training information for gas fitters, but that is the tip of the iceberg. So, is it enough just to tick the box for basic skills or do we need to be having a lot more than that?

Mr Narey: Certainly not and the primary challenge, and the primary challenge for me leading this new organisation, is to make sure that the gains made on education in prison are built on when people go out and we do very badly on that. That is much my greatest worry. It is hard to get offenders in the community to attend basic skills. It is much more difficult to motivate them and retaining them and building on what has been achieved in prison is a huge challenge and I think that is the key to improvement. Basic skills are where it begins. I know David Sherlock spoke to you - he has been a great friend to both Phil and myself throughout this and has been very, very supportive - and he said to us, "In terms of addressing the main problems that your offenders have, you should continue to concentrate on basic skills."

Q682 Paul Holmes: I have a question regarding following up when they leave prison but, just before I ask that, I do have another very quick point. We heard examples of a very crude way of a tick box culture having an effect in that you go into some prisons and they would actually advertise key performance target classes and you would ask the prisoners, "What are you learning here?" and they would say, "We're learning key performance targets" and they were not really making a connection or the emphasis was on ticking the target box, it was not actually on the educational process.

Mr Narey: I have never heard that. Phil and I were at Wandsworth a fortnight ago and at Hindley last week and we both spent quite a long time in education there and I saw a number of young people who knew exactly what they were doing. They did not much enjoy it, they were not exactly motivated. One of the reasons why we will always have relatively small class sizes is that you cannot teach 20 people who have never been to school in a single room. You have to have class sizes sometimes of six or eight. I saw a great deal of learning going on. There is nothing to hide here and I urge you to believe that we do not think all is perfect but I would urge you to visit as many places as you want and speak to as many governors as you want, not just the Chair of the Prison Governors' Association, and I think you will find a real commitment right down the Prison Service which, frankly, I wish I could yet say I had replicated in the Probation Service and, ironically, I am finding that a greater challenge than I did with the Prison Service.

Chairman: We will be coming to that in a minute.

Q683 Paul Holmes: My final question, which I touched on in my first question near the start of the session, is, you just said a few minutes ago that you would need to look more at what happens after they go out of prison and I asked you right at the start about you saying, okay, we have met the Home Office target for getting 31,500 prisoners into employment, training or education outcomes on release, but we have heard evidence to query how true that is because what you are basing that on is a questionnaire that you give prisoners before they are released and they say, "Oh, yes, I am going for an interview" and "I am going for a job", but you have no idea in effect whether that interview actually becomes a job or whether that job lasts for more than week, ten weeks or 20 weeks. You do not know what the actual outcome is, it is just a questionnaire in which prisoners say, "Yes, I am going to do this when I am released" and you do not know what the quality is. The Adult Learning Inspectorate have said that the targets should relate to employment and reducing re-offending rather than just being a tick box where they are saying that, yes, they are going for a job interview, but you need to be able to measure and target whether they are actually reducing re-offending and whether they are going to sustain employment.

Mr Narey: I have to admit, though it is not very fashionable at the moment, that I am great fan of targets. Targets change organisations; they send messages to your workforce about what you want to do. If you look at the targets which Phil and I inherited as Director General and Deputy Director General when we started working together in 1999, you would see targets which concentrated almost entirely on ordering, control and security. Phil now has targets to which I hold him to account which cover those things but also cover getting people into employment, reducing their use of drugs, getting people into accommodation, improving their education and improving their cognitive skills and the Prison Service has changed accordingly. So, we are doing much more than that and overall the thing that underpins it, all the targets to which the Home Secretary holds me personally responsible, is to reduce re-offending by five per cent based on people leaving prison in 2002 and in the longer term by ten per cent and that is what all this adds up to and what it is for.

Chairman: I have two patient colleagues who want to get their section of questions in. Work, pay and employers.

Q684 Mr Pollard: Martin, you mentioned earlier that kids you have seen eventually in your prisons have been out of education since they were 12, generally excluded. It seems to me that we should be doing much more positive pro-active things well before they get to become guests of your establishments. It would be initially very expensive to do that but, in the long term, perhaps much, much cheaper. Are you talking to the Home Secretary and to Charles Clarke about that very issue?

Mr Narey: Certainly. Over a long time, the Department for Education know of our concerns about exclusion and have been doing a great deal to address that. I should say that I have great sympathy with heads. My kids have left school now but it is relatively recently that I was shopping around for which school my kids would go to and headmasters sell the schools on their exclusion policy and it is very attractive. If I worried about my son who is a little small for his age getting beaten up, I would be greatly reassured by a head who said, "Anyone who touches him will be thrown out." The fact is that 13,000 or so people a year, a worrying proportion of them young black men, are being excluded from school and a much greater number are being informally excluded - and that is what very much I get from visiting youth offending teams - and it is a time bomb which we inherit. Of course, I would much rather that it was not happening but it is happening and we have to deal with realities and we have to try and do what we can.

Q685 Mr Pollard: What needs to happen to enable all prisons to take a joined-up approach to work and education and training opportunities?

Mr Narey: Do you want me or Mr Wheatley to answer that?

Mr Pollard: Either of you.

Q686 Chairman: Joining-up does run as a theme, so we would be grateful for an answer to this.

Mr Wheatley: The key to the joining-up is in fact offender management which is what the National Offender Management Service has at its heart. Actually, what you have to do - and I think one of the members of the Committee referred to it - is take somebody, work out what the things are that are wrong with them and then, as far as resources allow, try to then do what we can in prison, linking through to the outside, to deal with those problems and that is how the joining-up should be achieved. So, as we move into working as part of a service that has offender management at its core, that is how I think we make those links, by making offender management the way in which we run establishments. So, you are looking at what the needs of the offenders are, what we can stack up to cope with those needs, what the best order is in which to do them and then how to adjust the things that we learn about offenders during the period we have them in custody. So, if somebody has a positive drugs test while they are inside, we will have to adjust to take account of the fact that something we were doing was not working. I think that joining up is best achieved in that way. It is also achieved by having a senior management team that owns the whole of the aims of the prison and the targets of the prison, and I think that actually the importance of the head of learning and skills cannot be underestimated in this because previously there was not a champion for education on the senior management team. The person who was most qualified in educational terms was usually the manger in the establishment who was actually the contractor's staff and I think that we did miss a trick in the Prison Service as we moved to contracting as opposed to delivering direct in not putting somebody in to be responsible for the management with skills and knowledge about what could be achieved in education. So, I think that the head of learning and skills post in enabling education now to punch its weight as part of the team to make sure that we do integrate things, and they do need integrating because quite a lot of education can be done not in education but in places of employment, on the wings and as part of other things. I can think of a particular example that I saw at Onley where I saw young men, over 18s, in a workshop making concrete blocks. Not the most exciting of jobs but they liked it because it was big, strong men's work as they saw it and it involved using dumper trucks and a forklift truck and things that give you skills that are actually very employable skills outside. The instructors who were doing that were also doing a basic education class as part of the work they were doing and that played back into calculating things, recording stuff that they had made and you had the whole integration very neatly. We should be doing more of that and trying to make sure we do that and head of learning skills is a key part of that and a concerted senior management team built round, as we move into the future of the National Offender Management Service, carefully planning for offenders in order that we do our best to reduce the risks they present.

Q687 Mr Pollard: You mentioned the head of learning and skills. A very old friend of Mr Narey told us quite recently that the head of learning and skills in his prison was not part of the senior management team. If education is so important and so crucial, why was that person not represented on the senior management team in order that it gave the clear view to one and all that education was at the core of your activities?

Mr Wheatley: I must admit that I agree. I think that the head of learning and skills should be on the senior management team.

Q688 Chairman: The Governor of Durham said that he cannot control the contract, he cannot control the education, so why should that person be on the management team.

Mr Narey: Chairman, he certainly can control education.

Q689 Chairman: You read the transcript and that is what he said, is it not?

Mr Narey: Yes, that is what he said and, as I explained, I am dismayed by what he said and I am not quite sure why he should say that. Mike Newell is very proud of his prison; he has been a very fine Governor of Durham and he has achieved a great deal.

Q690 Mr Pollard: You say that he has been.

Mr Narey: He has been a very fine Governor of Durham and has achieved a great deal; he is very proud of what he has achieved. I have recently been round Durham with him and been round education and have seen the things that he has been doing and, in very, very difficult circumstances in one of the most overcrowded prisons, and he has been doing a good job. I barely recognised anything of what he said to you and certainly I shall be taking it up with him.

Q691 Mr Pollard: You talk about NOMS being the coordinating body. We were told earlier that, apart from Martin, there are ten other people doing this throughout the country. How is that going to be affected if there is a man, a boy and a dog doing this, no matter how good the man is?

Mr Narey: I promise you that is not the case, Mr Pollard. I have the resources of prison and probation. That is one thing that I cannot complain about either when I was doing Phil's job or doing this job in terms of the resources I have been given. I would like much more obviously but I have done pretty well. We have 64,000 staff all being brought together into this organisation. At the moment, we are still running the organisations and Phil is still Director General of Prisons and indeed will remain so and I have a Director General of Probation and we are running them as separate services. The work to do to bring them together, to introduce regional offender managers who will hold the budgets for prisons and probation in their areas, is only just under way. It is going to mean a very, very large change. It is a change which we are taking steadily. I cannot possibly put at risk the performance improvements that we have had. I think one of the greatest achievements that Phil has made as DDG and DG is that he has taken prisons, for months at a time, off the front page of the papers and the Service has been allowed to prosper because of that. We are taking the organisation steadily but it will make a dramatic change and the whole purpose of the organisation is to bring together that coherent management of offenders and manage them as individuals in and out of custody.

Q692 Mr Pollard: What opportunities are there for prisoners to get paid real wages in order that they have the dignity that goes along with that, perhaps sending money across to their families? I appreciate all that you said earlier about the low skills, low levels and all that.

Mr Narey: Phil may want to comment but one of the things which amused me when I read the Prison Reform Trust evidence which talked about the need to pay people was that, separately and quite rightly, the Prison Reform Trust are very keen for the number of experiments that we have around the Prison Estate in public and private prisons where we do pay prisoners real wages and, as a condition of that, they have to save money for their release. There are quite a number of these real pay schemes, some of their wages are sent to Victims' Support. There are some real difficulties with what we would really like to do which is for them to support their dependants on the outside because of the effect on benefits. We are doing a number of these things but of course, in doing that, in giving people real work and real money, perhaps £60 a week to work in an industrial production workshop, then we are providing, it would be argued, a disincentive to going into education. I share Phil's view. I have been more than once to every prison in the country and I have never been stopped by a prisoner who has said to me that wages are preventing him from wanting to go into education.

Q693 Chairman: Just on NOMS for a moment, what we are hearing is that it is a wonderful idea, wonderful aspiration again, but that it has been torpedoed. The Probation Service, aided and abetted by 130 Members of Parliament signing an Early Day Motion, has frightened the Government totally and they have really backtracked very, very fast on NOMS. NOMS, as Kerry said, is you and ten others and not going very fast because you cannot get the Probation Service to cooperate. People are saying that you are dead in the water, Martin! Are you or not?

Mr Narey: I am certainly not dead in the water and I can promise you that the Probation Service do not believe that. I can tell you that, three Saturdays ago at the NAPO Conference, they did not think that NAPO was dead in the water, they were still very, very nervous about it. NAPO hate the concept of the National Offender Management Service primarily because one of the things we will introduce is greater contestability. My experience in leading prisons and in this job is that injecting contestability into public services hugely improves the effectiveness of those public services. Contestability in prisons has produced 12 shortly to be 13 very good private prisons and has allowed Phil to drive up standards in public sector prisons. I now want to do that with probation. I think I can make more effective use of the money we spend on offenders in the community if there is some competition. I stress competition, not privatisation, competition. NAPO hate that but NOMS is very much up and running and, in some areas, particularly in sentencing, we are making some very, very encouraging progress. I spent a great deal of my time in the first few months as Chief Executive speaking to sentencers, some 300 of them just last week, trying to get home to them what the Home Secretary and the Government's message is about sentencing, which is not "bang up everybody", it is about locking up dangerous offenders, often for longer, but, wherever possible, using community punishments for minor offenders and that is beginning to pay off. The prison population is still very high but it is 5,000 smaller than statistical projections suggested it would be last year. That and the development of offender management are coming along steadily but very well and it is certainly not dead in the water. NOMS is here, it is a reality and some members of the Probation Service will have to change.

Q694 Jeff Ennis: Paul Goggins, the Prison Minister, recently described one of the main problems with the system as being the high number of short-term prisoners in the system with whom very little can be done, to which we referred to some extent earlier. He then went on to say that what was needed was robust alternatives to prison for short-term prisoners in order that they are dealt with more effectively in the community. Is he right and what would be the robust alternatives?

Mr Narey: He is absolutely right. He is my minister! I agree with every word of that. There has been the most astonishing change in sentencing policy in the last ten years. First-time offenders did not used to go to prison when they committed minor offences. In 2002, the last year for which we have full figures, 3,000 individuals convicted of minor thefts - theft of a bicycle, theft from a shop, theft from a car - without a previous conviction went to prison. That is just one example of the way custody has been almost the first choice for many sentencers and we need to turn that around in order that we can use prison for what it is best for, which is for dangerous people who are going to be there for long periods. I have to pick a confidence in the Probation Service which has deteriorated somewhat. I need to convince sentencers that, if they give somebody a community punishment, it will be enforced rigorously and, if someone does not comply, they will go back to prison. That is now beginning to happen but there is always a lag between making something happen and convincing the world that it has happened and, to be almost frank, it has not yet happened at all satisfactorily in London which is still struggling. There are very different community sentences. For example, the drug testing and treatment order is not the half-hour with the Probation Service which used to characterise probation supervision - half-an-hour a week - it is now 25 hours of activity including clinical treatment in order to get people off drugs. I have been given the investment to roll out more of those sort of sentences and I believe we will be able to convince the courts that, in terms of effectiveness, they should not send to prison for short periods of time, they should leave them in the community, but with the absolute understanding that, if they mess up, if they do not take that opportunity, they will end up back in prison because they will be in breach.

Q695 Jeff Ennis: Are we able to incorporate more education into community punishment measures or do we need to do more of that sort of thing, Martin?

Mr Narey: We need to do an awful lot more. It has been very difficult to turn this around and Susan has been by my side while we have done it. I think that we have made a breakthrough and, even this year, with radically improved performance relative to last year, we will only get 8,000 basic skills qualifications from offenders in the community which, set to the 60,000 we will get in prison, is still far too few. It is more difficult. Phil has a literally captive audience and we do not have that with offenders in the community but we can do and must do much better. What we plan to do is make education absolutely at the heart of the offender experience in custody, out of custody and between the two.

Q696 Jeff Ennis: So, you are developing the strategy to achieve that.

Mr Narey: Absolutely and the targets are being pushed up year on year and it is back to Mr Holmes's point about targets. The Probation Service are in no doubt now that the real priority is education and we have made a sort of retreat from cognitive skills programmes to which I think to some extent the Probation Service had attached themselves rather too closely and believed that they were the one and only way of dealing with offenders and they are not.

Q697 Jeff Ennis: We have already mentioned some of the barriers to prison education being delivered in the prison environment such as overcrowding, the churn factor, staff shortages, etcetera. What progress is the Prison Service making towards overcoming the various barriers to prison education within the regime itself and I guess this question is more to Phil?

Mr Wheatley: I think the barriers are the ones you have listed.

Q698 Jeff Ennis: How do we overcome these barriers?

Mr Wheatley: We are now nearer to target staffing level than we have been at any point over the last ten years and that is primarily because we have managed to get local recruitment to work in London. That has made the really big difference. We have also targeted the spending we have and will lift up pay by area, very targeted, and we are putting additional money into prisons to which we are having difficulty in recruiting in order to make it more attractive. Getting our staffing levels right is crucial to running prisons effectively. We are running a performance improvement programme which again is targeted on prisons which we think can be improved that gives governors the chance - this is not a stick approach - to rethink their prison and re-organise it. Prisons are very complicated interlinking organisations and, if you are going to re-sort the regime in order to make sure it delivers better, you have to alter a number of things and letting them have the time and some additional resources to do that thinking in the performance improvement process is improving a number of establishments that were not performing quite as well as we thought they could and that has proved very successful with the bottom end of that, those that we really thought were in difficulty, using a rather more robust benchmarking process which actually performance tests establishments with the possibility that, if they do not lift their performance to an adequate level, of going to private sector contract. That has proved a major incentive to get everybody to pull together to try and make sure that this establishment works. So, out of those things, we are getting improvements. That is not to say that it is perfection. If I ever thought I had perfection in every prison, I should probably be sacked at that point because I would be deluding myself. I think we have a steady process of improvement and part of the improvement is making sure that we use the educational spend better and we integrate regimes better, which comes back to your question. So, we can actually sentence plan at the moment and then, later on, I think offender plan in order that we are thinking through to the outside in a more organised way.

Q699 Chairman: Why, when you were talking about the barriers with Jeff Ennis just now, did you not mention drugs? We are finding a great deal of reluctance to talk about drugs in prison and whether they are a barrier to the education and training process in prison. That was the first thing that the Norwegians wanted to talk to us about. They said, "We have 60/70 per cent of the people here addicted to some form of substance abuse, drugs, alcohol or whatever, and that is a very big problem." Is that not a very big problem for English prisons as well?

Mr Wheatley: It is a big problem and you have not asked about it. Of our prisoners coming into custody, we think round about 80 per cent will have been using drugs in some form and just over 50 per cent problematical drug use, opiate abuse. That is a number of people to detox. We are very successful at detoxing prisoners. Prisoners have to detox. Nobody can keep a street level habit going in prison. The supply reduction methods we have is that we have dogs to check visitors, there are searches of people and there is good surveillance on visits, supervision of the perimeter and all those sorts of things which do not absolutely prevent all drugs coming in but they do reduce the supply. So, the chances of keeping an opiate habit going are simply non-existent in any secure establishment and our mandatory drug testing, which is quite a good measure of the rate of drug use, suggests that opiate use turns up in about four per cent of samples. That is four per cent too many, but the level of opiate use has remained fairly static having dropped from an original high, as we first brought in mandatory drug testing, and it has been quite a good disincentive to prisoners to use drugs in prison. For some prisoners who are addicted, until they have got over the detox process which is relatively rapid for opiate use and actually more difficult for alcohol abuse interestingly - it is much more difficult to get people off alcohol addiction safely - for the fairly fast detox, once they are detoxed, it is not a barrier to what goes on in prison and, in most prisons - not in every prison - I can confidently say that we have drug use under control, but have not completely removed it anywhere. So, it is not a barrier to education. It is less of a problem because we have quite robust methods of dealing with it. There are some prisons that I worry about and that is primarily when somebody has found a way of getting drugs in that has got around our control mechanisms and, until we have found out what it is - Is it a bent member of staff? Is it some contractor coming into the prison? Has somebody found a way of throwing things over the wall which are picked up by work parties? - and have closed that method down, then I do worry about the stability of the prison and there is a risk that too many people are thinking about drugs and not improving themselves. I am not complacent about it. Overall, the Service's performance has got drugs to a steady level but I would like to reduce it.

Q700 Chairman: Martin, Susan and Phil, this has been a very, very good session for us. We could have gone on longer because there are so many questions we wanted to ask you. I hope that you have found it not too uncomfortable and we look forward to being in communication with you. As you go away on the tube or in a taxi, I always say, "If you think of something you should have told that darn committee", do email us, phone us or get in contact.

Mr Narey: Thank you very much indeed, Chairman and members. We will do that.