Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
30 JUNE 2004
PROFESSOR ANDREW
COYLE AND
PROFESSOR DAVID
WILSON
Q60 Mr Turner: So to whom is the contractor
responsible?
Professor Wilson: The contractor
would be responsible to the head of learning and skills, who is
part of the management structure of the prison.
Q61 Mr Turner: So why is it so offensive
that he or she should try to influence the conduct of the contract?
Professor Wilson: Because that
person will not be employing those people who are delivering prison
education directly. The employer is the contractor, which is the
college or whoever it is.
Q62 Mr Turner: In other words, she should
not be managing the employees but she should be managing the contract?
Professor Wilson: And they will
say—and this would often be a debate—"I would
like such and such to happen because we can now identify that
need." Therefore, the head of learning and skills might say
that to the education manager, who is on the ground, as it were,
in that prison, but that education manager cannot then just simply
deliver that because then they have to speak to the contractor
who employs them to have the contract renegotiated.
Q63 Mr Turner: Yes. Fair enough. Finally,
Professor Coyle, one of the great objections that comes from the
POA that they say is an obstacle to effective education is the
need to accompany prisoners. If there are not enough prison officers
they cannot get them to education. How serious is that practical
barrier in comparison with the others which have been cited like
mobility, space, lack of computer facilities, and so on?
Professor Coyle: It is a significant
local barrier. Again concentrating more on local prisons, I think
there is more flexibility probably in what are called training
prisons, but it is a significant problem in the majority of prisons
which are local prisons. If you remember, I talked earlier on
about success in prisons being absence of failure and someone
mentioned earlier on the need to bring prison officers on board
in all of these initiatives and I think the Prison Service could
have done more in recent years to bring the prison officers themselves
into these initiatives. If they are on the margins then they see
the priority as making sure that the prisoners are there for all
other activities and education is not the key activity. So if
the operations manager, or whoever is the responsible person is,
for example, short of two members of staff or if a prisoner has
to be escorted to hospital or outside for whatever reason, then
the soft area to look for is education, where the prison officer
is. That does lead, I think, to another question about the need
for prison officers to be present in every situation and some
prisons take a more flexible approach than others. It is difficult
to criticise those who take a much more rigid approach in insisting
the prison officer should be there at all times because the contractor,
the teacher, does not have any responsibility for security issues
and if anything were to go wrong then it would be the prison officer
who would be held responsible, the uniform staff rather than the
teachers. So I think you are right to focus on the role of the
prison officer in this. One way of coping with that and one way
that used to be done traditionally was to involve the prison officer
more directly in what was going on in the education unit either
through identifying particular staff who were interested or through
some other mechanism. The prison staff who were in the education
unit would be more than simply guards, they actually would have
some role to play in what was happening. Now, that is more difficult
to do when you have got the contractual arrangement because the
contribution of the prison officer is not written into the contract.
Professor Wilson: I wonder if
I could add to what Andrew was saying there, Mr Turner. One of
the things that prison educationalists would do to encourage the
prison officers to be involved with education is they would put
on classes to help the prison officer pass the senior officer's
exam. That was one key way that suddenly education could be seen
as of value because it allowed the officer to think, "Well,
yeah, if I keep going to educational they will structure me to
get through the senior officer's exam," which was the first
rung of their promotion. I was always amazed that I could never
get prison officers because the staff were not available to accompany
prisoners to classrooms, but if I said on that day when I was
being told there were no officers around that I needed eight staff
to do control and restraint training I would almost be knocked
down in the rush! So it is sometimes about the culture and the
place that education has. It is not seen as a particularly sexy
thing in some jails to be engaged with and that is very unfortunate,
it seems to me.
Mr Turner: It did seem clear at Reading
that it was prison officers who were delivering the kitchen instruction
training and also—
Chairman: There were outside contractors
there.
Mr Turner: Were there, as well?
Chairman: Yes, there were consultants,
but there were some people working within the prison as well,
yes.
Q64 Mr Turner: To what extent are prison
officers still involved in delivering training?
Professor Coyle: Again, I defer
to David on the detail, but the skill in all of this is where
the contractor is flexible enough to move outside the boundaries
or where you have, in the case of Reading, a particular member
of staff doing a particular job who is determined to be interested
and who will cross the boundaries, as it were. Where that happens,
then it is much more likely to be successful because it then becomes
seen as an integral part of what goes on in the prison rather
than as a peripheral thing, "This is education, it is different
from what prison is really about," and I suspect that has
been one of the successes of Reading, that it has brought this,
"This is what we do at Reading." Reading is proud of
this. It is proud that you are coming to see what they are doing
so they are going to make it work.
Mr Turner: Thank you very much.
Q65 Chairman: Professor Coyle, you said,
which I thought was very good advice, that we should treat this
inquiry like any other inquiry and judge the Prison Service and
education on the same criteria as we use when we look at other
things. If that is the case, I suppose what I would say to you
is that we will try to judge any institution on whether it has
a genuine commitment to be a learning environment. You were talking
about culture with Andrew. In any other organisation you look
at, if you perhaps looked at IBM and how IBM views itself as a
learning company and the way it looked at the fact that only 28%
of women worked in IBM at senior levels, and so on, and totally
changed. They banned the whole notion of part-time working, everyone,
both men and women, do flexible training and they really turned
the company around in terms of its attitude to learning. If you
applied that to a prison, how would it work? Would you not have
to change how the prison officers were trained or viewed training
of themselves? Have you got two parallel worlds, one where you
are trying to produce a learning environment for prisoners, but
what has been the progress in making a learning environment for
prison staff?
Professor Coyle: I think there
are things going on at several levels. I suggested before that
the Prison Service almost by definition could not be a learning
environment, it is a coercive environment. Having said that, the
Prison Service, I think, has made significant strides over recent
years in improving the process, which I think is the way I described
it earlier, rather than necessarily the content. The Prison Service
is a people organisation. It is about locking up 75,000 prisoners
with 40,000 staff looking after them. Therefore, successes and
failures, I think, are to be measured in terms of those human
dynamics. The key people in prisons remain uniformed prison officers.
There are more of them than anyone else for a start, but they
are also the people who unlock the prisoners in the morning and
who lock them up at night and who deal with them most times in
between, who see them at highs and lows and at weekends. They
are the key to a successfully managed prison and I think, again
using my international experience, we have one of the shortest
and most basic forms of training for prison staff of any country,
certainly in Western Europe. The initial training of prison staff
was recently within the last year or so reduced from something
like eleven weeks down to eight or nine weeks now. So we take
someone in off the street, we give them eight or nine weeks' basic
training and then we ask them to go to deal with young offenders,
to deal with high security prisoners or to deal with women, or
to deal with long-term prisoners. Now, that passes a message about
what our priorities are and what we expect of our staff. The staff,
I think, in reality deliver much more than we are entitled to
expect and one could contrast that with a number of other countries
in Western Europe where the training of prison officers equates
to the training of a nurse or a teacher, a two or three year course,
because if that is really what we want the staff to deliver then
we have to give them proper training. So while the Prison Service
has, I think, made significant improvements in the processes,
there are these basic underlying needs which do not contribute
to what you call a learning environment. Most prisons are not
learning environments.
Q66 Chairman: Why has the training period
for prison officers been reduced? Why did they do that?
Professor Coyle: Well, it is not
for me to speak for the Prison Service, but I think it is related
to what I said earlier about the Prison Service being its own
worst enemy in being able to cope over recent years. The increase
in prison numbers up to the current level of 75,000 has had a
number of consequences.
Q67 Chairman: I am taking you back. Judge
this inquiry like other inquiries. If we were looking at any other
area, pre-school, life-long learning, any other specific, further
education, and someone said to us, "Well, they've cut the
amount of training you need in this particular job," we would
be surprised to say the very least, and you are saying that for
prison officers fairly recently the decision was taken to give
less training—
Professor Coyle: From a very low
base initially, it is now less.
Q68 Chairman: From a low base it is even
less?
Professor Coyle: Yes. Chairman,
I would think that my presence here today has been thoroughly
justified if you go away with this notion. We will apply the normal
rules of engagement, as it were, and there are these underlying
issues. It is the only way the Prison Service has been able to
cope, I think.
Q69 Chairman: Prison officers would have
obviously threatened to strike or do something dramatic if they
had their training cut. Was there a big row about this?
Professor Coyle: Not at all, not
that I am aware of; I do not know what went on behind the scenes.
Of course, when one talks about cutting back—and David mentioned
what is called control and restraint training, which is training
to help teach prison officers how to restrain a violent prisoner—the
elements which will have been cut back in the basic training will
have been the sort of work that we have been talking about today.
They will not have cut back in the control and restraint and the
security side of the training.
Q70 Chairman: So when they advertise
for prison officers what basic qualifications do they ask for?
Professor Wilson: It is five GCSEs
now. It is similar to the Scottish system and it is local recruitment.
If it is helpful, I used to be head of prison officer training
and also head of the C&R schools and I was made head of prison
officer training to implement changes to the basic training programme
as a result of the escapes from Whitemoor and Parkhurst and that
training and that training course, therefore, was redeveloped
so as to reflect the particular pressures that were being placed
externally on the Prison Service at that time. Therefore the training
course that was developed implemented Learmont and Woodcock. It
therefore concentrated on security, security, security, and in
the same way that Andrew has been reflecting that it has been
reduced, that is in a sense to reflect the external pressures
that have been placed on the Prison Service at a time of expansion
where prison officer numbers are needed. Could I say, Chairman,
I slightly disagree for the first time with Andrew Coyle because
he was saying the key person is the prison officer. I think the
key person in prisons is the prisoner because prisons are only
governed with the consent of the prisoners. There are never enough
prison officers, there are never enough prison governors to actually
cope with prisoners if they withdraw their consent, and by and
large prisoners overwhelmingly give their consent to be governed
because they see the exercise of power that prison officers and
prison governors have as being legitimate and one of the ways
that it is legitimised is through the provision of things like
education, facilities to worship, and so forth. If prisoners withdraw
their consent, as we found at Strangeways, it is because they
no longer believe the power that is being exercised over them
to be fair, to be reasonable, to be legitimate.
Q71 Chairman: That is very interesting,
David. I am not undermining the answer in any way, but could we
maintain just on the training of prison officers at the moment
because I am still trying to get this notion. You are in charge
of prison officer training?
Professor Wilson: I left the Prison
Service in 1997, so—
Q72 Chairman: But if we are going to
produce a learning environment in prisons, it just seems to me
that how you educate and train all the staff in the prison is
pretty vital, is it not?
Professor Wilson: I am not disagreeing
with that, and to create the learning environment that you started
with when you were discussing that, one of the things I immediately
noted down, Chairman, was "external and internal audiences".
So the prison officer is one of the internal audiences in relation
to creating this learning environment. You encourage them to believe
that what they are doing has some kind of positive force for good;
it can change. By the way they approach prisoners they can change
what that prisoner will be like when he or she leaves the jail.
A learning environment, therefore, has a variety of internal audiences,
not just the prison officer but the prisoners themselves. The
other key issue is the external audience that resists prisons
from being seen as a learning environment because some of those
external audiences do not want prisons to be a learning environment,
they want them to be rather cruel and coercive and a short, sharp
shock and lock them up and throw away the key. You have heard
Andrew several times, supported by myself, saying there are some
people like us who do not want prisons to be characterised as
a learning environment just in case people start saying, "Well,
we should send more people there rather than keep them in the
community because if we send them to jail they can get a good
vocational training and they can get an Open University degree."
Q73 Chairman: I take that point, but
let us come back to the quality of the prison officer training.
During their career as prison officers is their progression in
the job dependent upon further skills, increasing skills, developing
their skills? How is that done?
Professor Wilson: In terms of
promotion from the basic grade to the senior officer grade, they
have to pass a written exam and then go through a board or an
assessment centre. So there are two hurdles they have to overcome.
Both of us have sat on promotion boards, I imagine, ad nauseam
at one point in our careers and prison officers would get asked
a range of questions to test their knowledge about various issues
related to their management of prisoners within a total institution.
Prison education might feature in that, but it would often be
about very technical things in relation to what to do if there
was a suicide, what to do in terms of escorting a prisoner to
court, what to do in a hostage situation. The officer would progress
through his or her career by being able to demonstrate a competence,
certainly at the time that I was in the Prison Service, by their
knowledge of security procedures.
Q74 Chairman: Could we turn to a couple
of practicalities before I call Jeff into the next section. It
is all right being reasonably vague about this, but you say if
someone goes into the workshop and works he gets paid four times
as much as the person going into education.
Professor Wilson: He can be.
Q75 Chairman: How much do prisoners get
paid?
Professor Wilson: A good average
figure would be £8 per week.
Q76 Chairman: So how much do they get
if they are doing education?
Professor Wilson: No, that is
if they are doing education. If they go into the workshop, depending
on the prison, depending on the workshop, they might be able to
earn up to four times as much.
Q77 Chairman: Why?
Professor Wilson: Because often
the specific workshop—Transco is not a good example but
it would be interesting to ask how much they were getting paid—is
a contract and therefore the prison can pay more than exists in
their pay budget to people who go into that particular workshop.
Q78 Chairman: When you say "workshop"
that is not a training environment, it is actually turning out
something?
Professor Wilson: It could be
nuts and bolts.
Q79 Mr Pollard: Mailbags?
Professor Wilson: Well, it is
not mailbags any more, but it could be nuts and bolts. I have
got some examples somewhere in my notes.
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