Examination of Witnesses (Questions 93-99)
15 SEPTEMBER 2004
PROFESSOR ROD
MORGAN AND
MR ROBERT
NEWMAN
Q93 Chairman: May I welcome our witnesses
today, Professor Rod Morgan and Robert Newman, both from the Youth
Justice Board. Professor Morgan and I go back quite a long way
in one way or another, so it is very nice to have you here.
Professor Morgan: Thank you very
much.
Q94 Chairman: We have, as you know, set
a course on a proper review of prison education and training.
It is relatively uncharted territory for this committee because,
as you will be aware, it was not in our remit until fairly recently
when the Department for Education and Skills took over responsibility
for prison education. We got off to a good start and we have visited
four prisons now, three on the Isle of Wight, and Reading, and
we are about, in two weeks' time, to go to Finland and Norway
to look at some of their establishments and to talk to some of
their people, so we are taking this inquiry very seriously, but
we do need the help of the sort of expertise that you represent,
so this is really a fact-finding morning. Perhaps I could ask
you, Professor Morgan, would you like to say anything to start
us off or do you want to go straight into questions?
Professor Morgan: Well, I wonder,
Chairman, whether you would find it helpful if I made a very brief
statement setting out the role and responsibilities of the Youth
Justice Board, so you can put subsequent statements and questions
into some sort of context.
Q95 Chairman: Yes, that would be very
helpful.
Professor Morgan: Well, I am the
Chairman of the Board and I have been so since April of this year
and Robert Newman is the Head of Education and Training within
the Youth Justice Board which employs approximately 180-185 people,
a proportion of whom are responsible for monitoring the delivery
of services in both the closed estate and in the 155 youth offending
teams in England and Wales. Under the powers of the 1998 Act,
which created the Youth Justice Board, the Youth Justice Board
is responsible for commissioning and purchasing the places that
the courts implicitly require through their individual sentencing
decisions, so we commission full custodial services and we pay
for them. We work very closely with the Offenders' Skills and
Learning Unit in the Department for Education and Skills over
the provision of education within that framework. We have three
providers for all juveniles that the courts currently place in
custody: the Prison Service, which caters for 15- to 17-year-old
males and 17-year-old girls; private contractors, who provide
secure training centres of which there are now four; and the local
authority secure homes. We currently use 15 young offender institutions,
14 of which are run by the Prison Service and one is our contracted-out
establishment at Ashfield near Bristol. We have four secure training
centres which provide, together with the local authority secure
homes, 15 of whom we currently contract with, about 500 places,
so the position is roughly this: that there are something of the
order of 2,800 juveniles in custody at any one time at the moment
and about 500 of them are in the local authority secure homes
or the four STCs, and the remainder, that is the overwhelming
majority, are within the 15 YOIs—
Q96 Chairman: Sorry, 15?
Professor Morgan: Young offender
institutions.
Q97 Chairman: This is unfamiliar territory
and so the acronyms are difficult.
Professor Morgan: I understand
and I will try and take care so that I do not bombard you with
acronyms from the criminal justice field with which I am fairly
familiar, but I have to beg your forgiveness in advance that you
may use acronyms from the educational field in which you are all
expert and with which I would probably be less familiar. Therefore,
if I try and summarise what I have just said, we are talking really
about three roles: the Youth Justice Board, of which I act as
Chair, which sets and monitors standards and commissions and purchases
places; the Offenders' Learning and Skills Unit in the Department
for Education and Skills with whom we work very closely and who
assist us to monitor what is delivered in the custodial establishments;
and the Prison Service who provide the bulk of the places about
which I suspect we are going to be talking today. We have a service-level
agreement with the Prison Service which is renegotiated annually
and which goes into the detail as to what we want by way of education
and training. We currently spend approximately £16 million
per annum on that provision and the bulk of that money comes from
the Department for Education and Skills. Is that helpful just
to set the scene?
Chairman: It is very helpful.
Q98 Paul Holmes: You said £16 million?
Professor Morgan: Yes, £16
million.
Q99 Chairman: Well, that is a good description
of the Board and what it does and what it is responsible for.
How do you evaluate the sort of quality of the product, what it
has delivered to young offenders in our country? Are you happy
with the quality of provision? Do you go to international conferences
and brag that we are the leading innovators, that we are better
than the Scandinavians or the Dutch? Is that what you say at international
conferences or do we have some weaknesses and deficiencies? What
is your evaluation of the quality of what we provide?
Professor Morgan: Let me start
and say at a general level that when we took over these responsibilities
we recognised that much more needed to be done to meet the often
profound needs of young offenders in custody, the overwhelming
majority of whom we know from a good deal of research now have
literacy and numeracy levels of attainment well below their chronological
age. The overwhelming majority of them do not meet the sort of
standard which is judged necessary for basic employment in the
community. We inherited a situation which needed substantial improvement
and that was part of the purchaser/provider split, that was part
of the rationale for having that split and involving us, so we
have invested fairly heavily in trying to improve the facilities
in custodial establishments, the staffing and also the amount
of education and training that is provided. We think there is
a long way to go, but we have made, and this is reflected in the
inspection reports of the Prisons Inspectorate who, together with
Ofsted, look at what is provided annually, so if you study those
reports, you will see that we have made, a great deal of progress,
but what is currently being provided is not up to the standard
that we think it should be. Delivery is patchy and we need to
establish a more consistent delivery of provision and to some
extent it needs changing. We provide in the current service-level
agreement with the Prison Service that every child in a Prison
Service establishment should get 25 hours of education or training
per week. That is divided roughly one-third, one-third, one-third
between basic literacy and numeracy skills acquisition, one-third
more technical vocational training, and I will come back to that,
if I may, and one-third sort of arts-based and citizenship-type
components. Now, one has to be frank that a very high proportion
of young offenders in YOIs, young offender institutions, are not
exactly turned on by the classroom. Their experience of it has
been one of failure, humiliation and rejection. We know that a
very high proportion of young offenders whom the courts send to
custody have been either officially or unofficially excluded from
school and I, going round all the institutions, talk to young
offenders, as you will do, and their experience typically, in
my experience and it is reflected in the data, is that they have
not been attending school for one reason or another and quite
often for prolonged periods, so trying to motivate them to try
to get them to acquire basic literacy and numeracy skills is a
challenge. They do not like the classroom; it is not something
that they associate themselves with. We think that just putting
them in classrooms, therefore, is of itself not sufficient, that
it is not likely to work, so it is part of what we ask to be provided,
but what we are very keen for is that they gain motivation and
one of the ways of doing this is that they start to engage in
activities which they enjoy, which they find fun, which, if they
are on vocational training, offer the prospect of some employment
in the community which is essential and having gained some motivation,
you then smuggle in the basic skills on the back of the motivation.
We have evolved various techniques, various schemes that we can
describe to you to try and achieve that end, but we need to do
more of it. Once they have started to do something that they are
interested in, which they think could be useful and they want
to continue doing, you smuggle in the message that if they are
really going to have any prospect of a job in that field, they
have got to have some basic qualifications and they have got to
be able to read a training manual, they have got to draw up a
plan which will involve some figures, so they have got to be numerate
and literate, so it is a combination punch really. We have got
a lot more to do in this regard because we inherited a set of
facilities and arrangements which fell far short of what we are
now seeking to provide. Is that helpful?
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