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?
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