Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
30 JUNE 2004
PROFESSOR ANDREW
COYLE AND
PROFESSOR DAVID
WILSON
Q20 Chairman: We are grateful for that.
We are new to this area and some of the acronyms we are about
to learn, obviously.
Professor Wilson: Okay. Are they
inspectors? Do they inspect prisons? Do they lead prisons at the
minute? What is the guidance that is going to come from OLSU?
At the moment I can tell you from the various talk shops that
the Forum has hosted, most recently in Taunton, that there is
a great deal of confusion about what they have done, what they
are doing, and that confusion seems to have been intensified as
a result of NOMS. So with my blank sheet of paper I would try
to do some of those three things.
Q21 Mr Gibb: Could you give some figures
for the proportion of prisoners who cannot read properly and have
problems with reading?
Professor Wilson: The figures
we have got—I am looking at Steve Taylor from the Forum
and he will give me the chapter and verse—come from the
Social Exclusion Unit and actually the figures have never really
been tested empirically, so I am anxious about suggesting what
those might be. I think what we could say is that it is significant,
but I could not put my hand on heart and give you an actual figure.
I do not know if Andrew knows. [2]
Q22 Mr Gibb: So what does the Social
Exclusion Unit say?
Professor Wilson: I thought it
was 75%; 75% of prisoners going in could not reach skills level
1. [3]
Q23 Mr Gibb: In reading?
Professor Wilson: That includes
reading. They do not have the skills to read or write, or cannot,
that an eleven-year-old would have.
Q24 Mr Gibb: Right. I am slightly concerned
that prison academics do not know these figures. That implies
that the prisons themselves are not testing prisoners when they
enter prison for these kinds of skills?
Professor Wilson: Oh, no, they
are testing them constantly for those types of skills. What you
are reflecting, quite rightly, and I will take the slap on the
wrist, is that there has been very little academic attention being
given to prison education in the past.
Q25 Mr Gibb: Sure. I was not slapping
you on the wrist, it was whether prisons take reading seriously
and whether they bother to test the prisoners as they come in
for their reading skills. They do?
Professor Wilson: They do.
Q26 Mr Gibb: So those figures should
be available then?
Professor Wilson: Those figures
are available, but can I give you an example there? When these
tests are done is during the initial assessment and reception
to prison. So you have got some problems there immediately because
often the new receptions will be confused, will be high on drugs,
will be coming down, will be anxious, depressed, whatever range
of human emotions exist when they are initially entering jail
and therefore that makes some of the figures difficult. Secondly,
often what one will find is that in some prisons like Highdown
in Surrey they have over 275 new receptions per month and an initial
assessment, therefore, under the contracting arrangements might
be no longer than ten minutes. So again that places some stress
on some of the figures they will get.
Q27 Mr Gibb: So how do they know then?
Do they have a further assessment later on? How do they know whether
a prisoner really should be given remedial reading tuition?
Professor Wilson: Every time a
prisoner moves he will be given that initial assessment again.
Some of them have done the initial assessment twelve times. Some
of them are improving as a result; they know the initial assessment
inside-out. Some people with degrees are given the initial assessment.
So they will be constantly tested but only on the basis of what
the key performance target is in relation to what the prison is
expected to achieve in relation to prison education.
Q28 Mr Gibb: So you are saying we need
some improvements in those assessments?
Professor Wilson: Absolutely,
and not to be used constantly.
Q29 Mr Gibb: Yes. What proportion of
those that are diagnosed with having problems with reading then
go on to take educational courses as opposed to working in the
workshops?
Professor Wilson: Well, again
it will depend on the amount of space that is available in that
particular jail. I think as a rough and ready rule of thumb, which
I have always used, about a quarter is the short answer to your
question. However, there are different pressures in different
jails, not just in terms of space, not just in terms of the image
that prison education might have amongst the inmate population
or the prison officer population, there are also difficulties
in relation to how prisoners are paid. If they go on to the workshop
they might earn four times as much as they would earn if they
went into education. So if actually the difference between being
able to make contact through buying two extra phone cards is that
you go and work in the workshop as opposed to doing remedial reading
then what you do is you go and work in the workshop.
Q30 Mr Gibb: We have the situation where
three-quarters of our prison population cannot read to an acceptable
level. Of that, only a quarter then go on to take educational
courses. Is this not where the problem lies in our prison education
system and that that is where the focus should be, not on trying
to get twenty-five people on to university degree level?
Professor Wilson: Oh, I would
want many more people to go on to university degree level. I do
not agree with that statement. One of the things we have been
doing at the moment is simply talking about the throughput of
prisoners who are serving incredibly short sentences where much
of the continuing problem about people being under-skilled in
terms of reading and writing emerges. What we have also got to
remember is that there are 6,000 prisoners currently serving ten
years or longer in the prison population and there are some 4,500
lifers. So there is a core 10,500 people who quite clearly have
gone through basic skills and should be doing something more with
their time.
Q31 Mr Gibb: But there are 70,000 other
prisoners. I am just trying to work out how we deal with this
reading problem. Should it become compulsory for all prisoners?
Professor Wilson: No, no, and
it was very nice of Lord Archer to suggest that as well, but actually
if we treat this seriously what we have got to say is you cannot
force people to become educated, you actually have to offer them
the opportunity to do so and you have to make that opportunity
the same as the opportunities they might have if they were to
engage in bricklaying or painting and decorating, but if you pay
up to four times more for them to go on to bricklaying than you
would to get them to learn to read and write then they are going
to choose the former, not the latter.
Q32 Mr Gibb: So you recommend that that
should be equalised?
Professor Wilson: I think the
pay system would be one of the things I would really ask this
Committee to look at.
Q33 Mr Gibb: Very good. Finally, could
you just tell us something about the specialist nature of teaching
adults to read in a prison. Give me a typical way that it is done.
Professor Wilson: The best example
at the moment again for the Committee is to look at something
which is peer-led. The Shannon Trust has a wonderful system called
Toe by Toe, in which it trains prisoners to teach other prisoners
how to read and write. That was set up by Christopher Morgan and
Tom Shannon, who is a life sentence prisoner, and they had a correspondence
with each other and out of that correspondence grew the Shannon
Trust and out of the Shannon Trust has grown Toe by Toe. So the
first thing is to actually counteract the culture that Mr Pollard
was talking about where education is denigrated, it is at the
bottom of the hierarchy, and find ways of putting it to the top
of the hierarchy. Peer systems, getting other prisoners to endorse
prison education, is certainly one way. But you asked a more specific
question, Mr Gibb, which was the specialist skills and qualities
of the prison educators. The first thing is, these are people
who understand the nature of working in a total institution. They
understand the pressures, the institutional pressures that are
brought to bear on that person who enters the classroom. They
understand that that person's experience of dealing with the classroom
environment has in the past been absolutely awful and appalling.
They understand that to teach a class is actually to teach a group
of individuals rather than trying to impart information as if
it was all the same. They have to be far more centred on the individual
needs of the prisoners who engage in prison education. Some of
the greatest unsung heroes in our criminal justice system are
some of those prison educators who dug in during the contracting
out process, often with no knowledge if they were going to be
paid at one stage. If you remember, at one stage during that process
they dug in and have kept going and they really are some of the
most extraordinary people.
Q34 Mr Pollard: Just going back to the
initial testing, I have been to dozens of prisons, but nowhere
near as many as you have dealt with, both of you, in your time,
and one of the things they said to me was there was almost a pride
in appearing thick and it was cool to appear thick and therefore
I question the initial testing, whether it is as bad as it is
being portrayed, that 75% of them reach the reading age of eleven.
Have you any comments on that and what is your experience of that?
Professor Wilson: Well, that is
true. There are some people who would say that and say that they
have deliberately flunked the test, but often in terms of the
cool masculinity, particularly in young offender institutions,
they are often appearing to say that to mask the fact that they
were not able to do the test in the first place.
Q35 Mr Pollard: A double bluff?
Professor Wilson: So there is
a double bluff going on. It is a very, very complicated set of
cultural pressures that are brought to bear on the initial assessment.
However, one of the things in the initial assessment you should
look at is the number of people who have degrees who are asked
to do that initial assessment just to make sure the prison reaches
its target. I think is was the former Chief Inspector of Prisons
who uncovered that at Ford Prison.
Professor Coyle: If I could return
to the other question. The Prison Service has made, I think, tremendous
strides both in terms of testing and in terms of trying to deal
with the lack of basic skills, but I think it would be important
for your Committee to remember the context of all of this. We
have gone from a situation where twelve years ago there were about
43,000 prisoners to the one today where there are 75,000 prisoners
with some increase in resources but not a proportionate increase
in resources. I think the Prison Service has not done itself great
favours by masking the pressures it has been under. The Prison
Service has taken pride and the Prisons Board has taken pride
in being able to cope and I do not think that has done itself
and I am not sure it has done society many favours. The reality
of life in prisons, and we are talking primarily about the 70,000,
those who are in the local prisons, who are there for a short
period, who are churning over (the phrase which the Director General
uses is "the churn of prisoners"), who are not only
going in and out of the prison system but who are actually moving
from one prison to another so that the governor of Brixton is
phoning the headquarters each night to say, "I've got ten
prisoners coming in. I've got nowhere to put them," and he
is told, "We've got ten places in Swansea. Send them down
to Swansea," or "Send them up to Liverpool," and
so it goes round. That is the context within which both the assessment
is taking place in the local prisons and the training and I think
it is very important always to keep this at the front of one's
mind.
Q36 Jonathan Shaw: I just want to pick
up, Professor Wilson, on the fact that you were criticising a
prison in the south-west for firing the education director who
had successfully got people through university degrees, BAs and
MAs, to employ someone to do bricklaying. Everything that we have
heard is that you have got a fast turnover of prisoners, the programme
needs to be directed at these particular people, so if you were
a governor of a prison, as you have been, is that not what you
would do because the bricklaying actually incorporates the basic
skills?
Professor Wilson: No, not in that
prison. It is a training prison and therefore the reason why the
person ended up being made redundant was because there was no
target that the Government could measure him or herself against
in relation to what he was providing, whether the need was there
or not. This goes back to one of those fundamental issues of who
is it who owns the education in prison? Is it the prison and NOMS
that own the education and therefore you can force the prisoner
to do things, as Mr Gibb was suggesting, we could make it compulsory,
or is education a tool for living that becomes a tool for living
because it is owned by the prisoner? And if the prisoner owns
the education and actually he has got the basic skills and wants
to do degree level and if it is centred on his or her needs therefore
you have to look at what the need is in that particular jail at
that particular point. In the training prison that I mentioned,
the reason why he was made redundant was because actually there
is no target there at all to say, "Right, we can tick the
box that we're doing well."
Chairman: This is very interesting stuff
and we could go on in each section a great deal, but let us move
on now to the practical barriers to effective education in prisons.
Q37 Helen Jones: I was very struck, Professor
Coyle, by what you said in your opening remarks about what had
happened in the Prison Health Service because that was something
I did a lot of work on when I was first in Parliament. I think
the one thing we learned from that exercise was that the key to
getting any service right in prison was getting the staffing right
and getting the links to outside organisations right so that we
could attract good staff and staff had the opportunity to develop
and grow themselves and therefore were more likely to remain within
the service. Bearing that in mind, how do you think the contracting
out system has affected the staff recruitment to prison education?
Is there any evidence that good staff are leaving, that it is
difficult to attract staff? Is there any research on that at all?
Professor Coyle: I should say
immediately that I am not an expert in this particular field and
my knowledge is less up to date than David's about the specifics.
You are absolutely right to draw the parallel, I think, with prison
health. What I think we can see is that the commitment which we
referred to earlier is made more difficult by the present structure.
Having said that, I think one would want to pay tribute to the
staff who do work in prisons and the commitment that they have.
Many of them have stayed there through the last decade and more
when they have been through all of this organisational upheaval
because they do see it as a vocation, as something which they
want to do, but I think their commitment to that has been made
much more difficult by the contacting arrangements. The question
was asked earlier, would you turn the clock back or if you had
a blank sheet of paper, and of course prison education does not
exist in a vacuum and over the last dozen years or more education,
particularly adult education, has changed significantly and that
therefore affects the way it can be delivered locally. But I think
there is room, drawing the parallel with health, for much more
involvement, I would assume it would be through local education
and skills councils, than perhaps there has been up until now.
I am trying to make the parallel with what has happened in healthcare.
Q38 Helen Jones: Professor Wilson, have
you anything to add to that?
Professor Wilson: Well, I set
up the Forum on Prisoner Education in the year 2000 with Trish
Smith. She was the co-founder and she was the education manager
at Wandsworth and then at Brixton and she has just left. She has
decided that she is no longer prepared to put up with the constant
turmoil that seems to exist in this particular area. The turmoil,
more broadly, is in relation to the cancellation of Project Rex,
the extension of the contracts, what is going to happen now that
NOMS exists, will OLSU exist under NOMS, will there be regional
arrangements, local arrangements, national arrangements? So Trish
Smith's approach in terms of getting out of this field, one of
the most skilled of the specialists I mentioned earlier, is really
the tip of the iceberg because there are lots of people at our
talk shops who come along, who are prison educators, who say,
"I don't know if I'm going to be employed next year. I don't
know if I have any stable basis on which to bring up my family
if this is the job that I'm going to have. Is this job going to
exist? Given that's the case, why don't I just throw in the towel
and go off and work somewhere else?" So her experience, I
am afraid, is all too common. Perhaps the difference with her
is that she was able to find another job more quickly in an area
where she was living.
Q39 Helen Jones: Am I right in thinking
that as the contract only pays for hours taught, that there is
no way that there is built into the contract at the moment incentives
for staff to keep up to date with developments in their area,
to improve their own skills? As Professor Coyle said, rightly,
education is changing very rapidly. What would you do to resolve
that problem, because if we do not resolve it prison education
is likely to get further and further behind the education we offer
elsewhere, is it not?
Professor Wilson: You are right.
The premise of your question is absolutely right. People, colleges
and contractors are paid on the basis of the numbers of hours
taught, but the good contactors recognise that they have got to
encourage their staff to develop and will invest time and money
in allowing that to happen, and there are some very good contractors
who will do that. Strode College is an example, Matthew Boulton
College would be another example and the City College Norwich
is another example of contractors who I would say invest time
in their staff. However, the bottom line is often for the contractor,
they are paid on the basis of the numbers of hours taught. I think,
therefore, more broadly it goes back again to some of the questions
placed earlier about the value that we have in people who teach
in the specialist environment, and therefore that broadens out
again to people being prepared to say that this is worthy of our
attention and we should reward people who do this accordingly.
The Forum has just set up for the first time ever an award for
prison educationalists. Since 1908 there has been no specialist
recognition of the work that they do. We have just set up a journal
of offender education because we are trying to encourage people
to engage with this vehicle, and we are a pressure group and a
charity.
2 Also see Ev 24. Back
3
Also see Ev 24.
Back
| 
