Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)

15 SEPTEMBER 2004

PROFESSOR ROD MORGAN AND MR ROBERT NEWMAN

  Q120 Jonathan Shaw: So they were bored at the weekends?

  Professor Morgan: No, but it was fun and why was it fun? Because suddenly they had realised that learning was pleasurable and exciting because they had one-to-one provision. Within this establishment where we have a very high staff to inmate ratio, the motivational barrier, which I referred to earlier, had been crossed. Now, that is extremely encouraging, but we have got a hell of a long way to go before we can achieve that within the YOIs where units are much larger, where the staffing ratio is different and where the facilities are often much more meagre, so we can talk about global figures, but frankly, when you are trying to motivate kids and you are trying to get vocational training programmes inside under which you can sponsor, you are trying to change a culture as well as improve facilities, et cetera, and it is difficult to put pounds, shillings and pence on it.

  Q121 Mr Gibb: I am interested that you talk about the majority of people falling below the level of literacy that is needed for employment, but can you be more precise about that? What proportion cannot read and do not reach Level 3?

  Professor Morgan: Well, the CBI of course says that you should have five passes at GCSE. If you could take that sort of standard, the general figure that is bandied about is 80%. We actually calculate it slightly more finely and we think that it is 77%, almost 80%, in the case of the older adolescents that we are talking about, the 16- and 17-year-olds, and when you are looking at slightly younger ones, it is a bit lower, about 66%, so somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters or four-fifths fall below any standard that you might want to apply about employability.

  Q122 Mr Gibb: So that is a problem about not having five GCSEs at all of any sort?

  Professor Morgan: Yes.

  Q123 Mr Gibb: Do you have any idea about the reading standards?

  Professor Morgan: Yes, 50% have literacy or numeracy scores six years below their chronological age, which is a very substantial deficit.

  Q124 Mr Gibb: Do you test them when they arrive in an institution?

  Professor Morgan: Yes, this is a multi-stage process. When a child is going to come before the youth court, the youth offending team does a general needs risk assessment which is called an "ASSET" and that is a universal tool used throughout the country and that covers everything, so it says something a bit about the involvement in education and attainment, but it is quite superficial because it covers everything. That ASSET form should go to a custodial establishment if the court commits the person to custody and it should be received fairly quickly, although there is a slight gap there. Now, if there is any evidence of special educational need, there is then a full assessment within the institution, so it is a sort of multi-stage process and there is a more detailed educational assessment within the custodial establishment which is on top of the ASSET which will have been undertaken preparatory to a report to the court.

  Q125 Mr Gibb: I wonder if Mr Newman can tell us a little bit more about this PLUS literacy and numeracy strategy that you are planning.

  Mr Newman: Yes, it is now about two and a half years into its evolution, so it is not just something we are planning, but it is under constant development and it is now actually out in young offender institutions, in the other sectors of the secure estate and also we are now rolling it out into community settings. If I can tell you a little bit about the rationale for PLUS, the sort of youngsters we have in the youth justice system tend to be those that have not benefited from the gains that were made through the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy which has improved levels of attainment, particularly in the primary sector. They are also too young really to have benefited from the Adult Basic Skills Strategy, so they fall between those two government strategies, if you like. When we undertook some research into this about three years ago, it was clear that there was a gap which needed to be filled and we commissioned PLUS as a method of filling that gap. PLUS provides a framework for literacy and numeracy which is delivered through a raft of special learning materials to young people which are appealing, engaging and it is not Janet and John for 16-year-olds, but it is very much pitched at their idiom and, going back to Professor Morgan's point, it is deliverable through other methods, so deliverable by stealth, if you like. PLUS has a resource base for learners and it also has a resource base for practitioners because one of the things we discovered when we piloted PLUS originally was that there is a huge skills deficit amongst teaching practitioners around literacy and numeracy, so we could not assume that all the teachers we had working in the youth justice system were equipped to deliver good-quality literacy and numeracy programmes, so PLUS tackles that factor as well. There is a third element of PLUS which is what we call "enrichment activity". Enrichment activity is something that supplements the core curriculum and again provides good, engaging activity through which you can deliver some literacy and numeracy learning. We have joined up with the Arts Council and the Adult Basic Skills Strategy in the DfES to develop and roll out PLUS, so it is tripartite funding and it is providing a very useful resource where teachers previously felt they did not have the tools to do the job.

  Q126 Mr Gibb: You talk about 50% having numeracy and literacy skills below their chronological age. Can I assume from that that those 50% have a reading level of less than Level 3 in terms of how it is assessed at age 11?

  Mr Newman: If you took a 17-year-old in a YOI, then you could assume that they had a reading age of 11.

  Q127 Mr Gibb: But a reading age of 11 could be Level 4 or it could be Level 3. What I am trying to assess is how many of your people are below literacy and just cannot read?

  Mr Newman: It is likely that something over 50% could be functionally illiterate.

  Q128 Mr Gibb: That is a very useful figure to have, so they need really to go back to basics in terms of learning to read?

  Mr Newman: Yes.

  Q129 Mr Gibb: How do you do that? What is the methodology for doing that?

  Mr Newman: Well, first of all, you have to find out something about their learning profile because everybody learns in different ways and we have undertaken some research to look at the sort of learning profiles that there are amongst this group. I think it has always been assumed that youngsters who have not attained very well were learners who preferred to learn through practical activity and that is borne out to some extent, but not exclusively so. I think we have a range of different learning styles amongst the profile, so it is important to find out what it is for that individual young person that actually turns them on and makes the learning most effective. Once you have found that out, it is a question really of setting some very clear objectives that permeate the whole curriculum and what we have introduced is a system of individual learning planning into young offender institutions which give practitioners, if you like, a framework for each young person. The individual learning plan then becomes part of the sentence plan and it will determine the sort of courses that these youngsters go on and the sort of level at which the literacy and numeracy input is pitched, and provided the teachers have got adequate resources, such as PLUS, then they can deliver that to the young people.

  Q130 Mr Gibb: I wonder if it is possible, because it is getting terribly technical, for a note to be prepared specifically on the literacy, what these different profiles are, how the courses then are adapted to each of the profiles and some detail of the courses that are used to teach the people who are functionally illiterate and how they are taught to read.

  Mr Newman: Yes, we can do that.

  Professor Morgan: Yes, we would be very happy to do that. [1]

  Q131 Valerie Davey: I just have a very quick question to ask. How many of these youngsters are dyslexic?

  Mr Newman: That is a very difficult question to answer because—

  Q132 Valerie Davey: I am not asking for the exact number, but as a percentage on average how many youngsters would you reckon are dyslexic?

  Mr Newman: My reluctance to answer is that within the practitioner field, there is a wide variety of interpretations of dyslexia. We are doing some work with the British Dyslexia Association who are doing some work at one young offender institution to try to nail this down. Different practitioners have different views on whether dyslexia exists or not and it is not something that there is a consensus on, I am afraid.

  Q133 Valerie Davey: That is what I was told in my LEA 20 years ago, that we could not define dyslexia. The world has moved on and I am really sorry that prison education for young people has not moved on because there are now, to my knowledge, very clear ways of testing and I would have thought that it was a given that that ought to be part of that process. I recognise that there are still people arguing the case all round, but surely some definitive situation ought to be reached by now so that young people are given the benefit of knowing whether or not they have a need for support as a dyslexic learner.

  Mr Newman: Well, under PLUS we have commissioned a strand of work to try and understand a bit more fully these issues and to arrive at a position on dyslexia, but as we stand at this moment I would not like to say one way or the other. We can assume that a proportion of that 50% have dyslexia, but I cannot say at this moment what that percentage is.

  Q134 Valerie Davey: Again in the note that you have been asked for, could we just have something about the background to that which will help me and others understand why there is still a remaining debate going on at this level? [2]

  Mr Newman: I think, to be fair, that debate continues within the teaching profession as a whole. This is not something that simply is not resolved within offender education.

  Valerie Davey: Well, I beg to differ on that; I think we have moved on.

  Q135 Paul Holmes: The Youth Justice Board carried out an audit into education and training in young offender institutes and you found that, compared to local authority secure units or secure training centres, education simply was not a core feature of young offender institutes. Now, you have already touched on one or two examples of the barriers to shifting that, to getting the young offender institutes to rethink what they are doing and one of those barriers, you said, was the lack of suitable classrooms and the limitations on the monitors and things like that. What are the other sort of systematic barriers to trying to reorientate the focus of young offender institutes?

  Professor Morgan: We have referred to population churn and transfers and short sentences and we have referred to staffing, skills shortages, the high turnover of staff, we have a problem of absenteeism amongst staff in this field also and there is a problem about information transfer. I referred to the ASSET process and whether or not the ASSET includes information, for example, about special educational needs, but a lot of these kids have not been attending school sometimes for long periods, so whether or not they have been assessed as in need, whether or not they have been statemented, et cetera, sometimes that information is not available at the point that the ASSET is prepared, the court report is prepared and whatever information we have got is transferred to the institution, so there are undoubtedly some children with special educational needs who have been dealt with within the school setting where we do not have all the documentation, we do not have the history and we are not able to transfer it. There is now a SENCO, which is one acronym I have learnt, in every young offender institution.

  Q136 Chairman: What is a SENCO?

  Professor Morgan: A special educational needs co-ordinator. I am sorry, I just assumed that that was part of the language here. There is now a SENCO in every young offender institution, so we try and pick up, but quite often the background information about the educational history, the pattern of exclusion, official or unofficial, is not there or is not there soon enough for us to get on to the case or for the staff locally to get on to the case as quickly as possible.

  Q137 Paul Holmes: What about, for example, management structures or attitudes? We have visited four adult prisons and we were told there by people that an awful lot depended on the governor of the individual prison and we were even given the horror story of one governor who came in and said, "I'm closing down the whole education department", and when he moved to the mainland he did the same there. Are there any barriers of that kind whereby one young offender institute might be very good on this because the governor/manager is interested and another one might not?

  Professor Morgan: This is always an issue and as you visit, as I hope you will, some young offender institutions, you will no doubt hear of precisely that same sort of story. Our view is that children in any institution should be cared for by staff who are trained and recruited to work with children. Now, we have a bit of a problem in that we inherited an arrangement whereby basically the Prison Service was almost a monopoly provider, as you can see, and that is going to remain to be the case, so we are working in close co-operation with them. Our view is that all staff in a young offender institution taking juveniles should be trained to deal with children and by the end of the year we hope we will have achieved that, but it will be fairly fundamental training. We would like all the governors who are allocated to want to be in that sort of institution and with a background of working with young people and wishing to take forward. That is usually the case, but it is not always the case, so sometimes there are some dips in perhaps commitment. There is very uneven provision, as we have said, in relation to resources, and the commissioning process in which we engage with the Prison Service is a long and convoluted one and we are moving by 2006, or we hope to move, to a position whereby the commissioning process is done regionally with the Skills and Learning Council so that what we envisage is that we will hand the money to the Skills and Learning Council who presumably will allocate it to the regions who will allocate it to the institutions so that provision is more mainstreamed. However, at the moment the commissioning process has been pretty convoluted with the Prison Service, so there is uneven resourcing and that is something which we have tried to address, but we have to work with the way in which, for example, the budgeting process is handled within the Prison Service and although they are moving now to devolved budgets for governors, it has not always been like that, so the provision actually getting through to the ground level has not been always even.

  Q138 Paul Holmes: Partly on the budgetary issue, again when we visited the adult prisons we had a lot of people commenting that the contracting process was not at all helpful in providing any sort of consistency in providing educational needs and your audit touched on the same issue and said that the contracting regime created difficulties. Can you elaborate on that?

  Professor Morgan: Well, I have said generally that what happens is that we deal with the Prison Service centrally, we have a new service-level agreement annually which changes, which is why incidentally this may come up from other witnesses before you, and this is why the detail of what we commissioned under the education and training head is in the service-level agreement, which incidentally we are very happy to be made public, except for the financial provisions within it, and it is in the service-level agreement rather than the Prison Service Order relating to juveniles because that is a more long-lasting document, whereas the service-level agreement is more a product of an iterative developmental process, so it changes every year. They then hand the money to the procurement department who, in turn, then allocate to institutions and we have to work alongside the budgeting arrangements within the Prison Service, but it does mean that, as far as one can see, what is provided actually within institutions is not necessarily proportionate to need and that is true in terms of the facilities and the buildings we have inherited and it is partly to do with the resources as well and that is why we are moving to a different model.

  Q139 Paul Holmes: What about the problems of the lack of clarity in the sort of strategic overview of management because we have got the Youth Justice Board saying, "We should be doing this", but then you have got the confusion between the DfES role with the Offenders' Learning and Skills Unit and the Prison Service and then there is a different body again with a different emphasis. Is there any way round this or is it just something we have to live with?

  Mr Newman: I think there is no doubt that there are probably more fingers in this pie than we would want ideally and Professor Morgan has outlined the reasons why. You may be aware that Ministers have agreed to reform offender learning and that process is now under way and I think it will lead to a more streamlined management chain of command and a more streamlined contracting process and we are supporting that. We are working with the DfES to develop that to make sure that the gains that we have made in the juvenile sector are consolidated through that change process and that change process, I think, has been designated over two years, so I think the end point is September 2006 for new contracting arrangements to be in place across the board.

  Paul Holmes: Again on the funding, your audit showed an absolutely stark contrast to the amount of money going into education in different institutions. As much was being spent on educating the 300 inmates at local authority secure units as was going on 2,900 in the young offender institutions. That is a massive differential. Is that being redressed now over the next year or two, so will that total level up or is it going to remain a significant imbalance?


1   Ev 46 Back

2   Ev 46 Back


 
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