Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320-339)

27 OCTOBER 2004

MS JULIET LYON, PROFESSOR AUGUSTIN JOHN, MR TOM ROBSON, MR PAUL O'DONNELL AND MR JOHN BRENCHLEY

  Q320 Chairman: Can I welcome our witnesses this morning and say, to Paul O'Donnell and John Brenchley, Tom Robson, Juliet Lyon and Professor Augustin John, we are very grateful that you could spend time with us this morning and the Select Committee depends a great deal on the quality of the evidence that is given to the Committee. Tom, I have to express a view that we are very disappointed that, even after some considerable time of notice, we did not have confirmation of who was coming from the Prison Officers' Association until very late and I wonder why that was?

  Mr Robson: I will apologise on behalf of the Association for that. It was brought to my attention through a contact of mine that this was taking place and I volunteered my services, if you like. It was at a late stage and I can only simply apologise for that. I think there is a possibility that documentation had gone astray somewhere down the line.

  Q321 Chairman: From our side, we do not think that is true. Who is your President, is it President or Chairman?

  Mr Robson: The General Secretary is Mr Brian Caton.

  Q322 Chairman: And Colin Moses?

  Mr Robson: Colin is the national Chairman.

  Q323 Chairman: Normally, our Select Committee expects the most senior officers of any organisation we invite to be here. Will you tell them that we expect them to come at an early date, set by this Committee, and if they do not come I will send someone to bring them? I do not appreciate people treating a select committee inquiry lightly. This is the first and most important look at prison education that has ever been done because it has only ever been in our remit for the 18 months. We take it very seriously and we expect the POA particularly to take it seriously.

  Mr Robson: I think what I can say certainly, on behalf of the Prison Officers' Association, is that prison officers and the Prison Officers' Association in particular certainly do take the education of our charges very seriously indeed.

  Q324 Chairman: Tom, I am sure that is right, but I hope the message will get home that we expect to see them very soon?

  Mr Robson: Yes, certainly it will.

  Q325 Chairman: Thank you. Because we have got five witnesses, we cannot ask all of you to give an introductory word, but I am going to be terribly cavalier about this and ask Juliet to say something to get us going? I will give everyone individually a chance as we proceed.

  Ms Lyon: As you know the Prison Reform Trust conducted an inquiry into prisoners' education from the prisoners' perspective, which was published last October, and that was our first thorough-going look at prisoner education. I was very pleased to be able to be part of that because some years previously I conducted a study for the Home Office which was about young offenders, called "Tell Them So They Listen". It was Research Study 201 for the Home Office. In that case we were asking young offenders about their career paths into crime, through prison and their hopes and fears about resettlement. It was interesting then, and it emerged very clearly from this more recent study that prisoners saw education as a kind of oasis, an important place in which things would happen, in which they would be treated differently, quite often, from how they felt they were treated in the rest of the prison, and where they would gain things, skills and qualifications, which would help them in terms of going straight, maybe finding work that would be more appropriate, etc, etc. It was a valued thing in pretty much of a desert, in terms of what else was on offer. I think what is disappointing, in terms of key things which emerge from our study, is that, despite this valued place, recognised as such, and despite a huge injection of cash from DfES and a takeover of responsibility for education, which really is to be welcomed, we are still seeing a situation where education is pretty patchy, where prisoners do not always get to classes, where courses are curtailed or cut short by their moving around the system under the pressure of overcrowding. Officials refer to this as "the churn", the movement of prisoners from one gaol to another, so you get a situation where people cannot always complete things, where people are virtually queuing up for scarce places and courses they particularly want to do. It seems, to me anyway, as if it is pretty early days for prison education, in terms of it reaching to as many people as it could, and should, do and providing the kinds of benefits which clearly it can. It is curtailed by the pressures on the system, to some extent, and by historic accident of things like the variation in amounts of money that are given to different education departments in different prisons. I cannot see a rationale for why Wandsworth would have £450 per head for prisoner education and Leicester would have, I would need to check but I think it is, about £1,800 per prisoner, per head. It is these discrepancies in terms of allocated budget which need to be looked at.

  Q326 Chairman: That is a very good opener. Professor John, what is your view? You are a distinguished academic. What we are picking up, and we were in Helsinki and Oslo recently, only the week before last, looking at some of the prisons there, as we see more prisons, what comes home to the Committee, I think, I think we agree on this, is how do you insert a culture of education into a prison, how do you change the culture? We did not come back starry-eyed, that they have all the answers; they were struggling to impose a culture of education and training on a prison system. Do you think that is the serious challenge?

  Professor John: I think the picture in the UK over the years reflects the patchiness that you were describing and it was not a very basic issue of what prisons are for. In the Foreword to the report, "Time to Learn", which I wrote, I made the point that if there is a prioritisation of the knowledge-based economy then education reforms should touch every part of the system, including prisons, for the simple reason that, as the statistics show, more than 50% of people in the secure state have had very poor education, certainly poor educational qualifications. The number of young people in YOIs (Youth Offender Institutions) who have either had interrupted schooling or have been excluded from school and had their education further curtailed by being in a secure state does not bode well for what the Government intends, in terms of having a more educated and knowledgeable workforce. It seems to me therefore that there must be issues around education in prisons as an entitlement, and an entitlement which can be delivered through structural organisation so that it does not become a lottery, it does not become a question of chance, it does not have to compete with other things, but, as part of a sentencing plan and indeed in relation to people who are on remand similarly, opportunities are created such that education cannot be interrupted, and where people have been out of education they could have their needs assessed and met.

  Q327 Chairman: Thank you for that. Tom, one thing which leaps off the page in the evidence we have been given so far is again getting back to how you change the atmosphere in a prison, in terms of being very positive about education and training. What do you think about what has been coming up time and time again, that there is a much greater financial incentive to do rather boring work in prison rather than get an education? Do you think that differential is defensible? Why do you think that still exists?

  Mr Robson: I think that we are in the situation where budgets are very important but I think that people are more important, contact between people, and I think that prison officers ought to be put in the educational link. They spend 24 hours a day with their charges, especially in youth custody, and prison officers themselves should be utilised to give skills to the inmates in their charge. I think that should be the way of the future. If you look back in time at the Borstal system, prison officers were very much utilised in the education system at that time, and I think, sadly, we are being taken out of the link, and most prison officers want to do positive work with inmates. Also, I think we are missing a big opportunity to use what I term mentoring, and that is to use inmates themselves to mentor other inmates and teach skills to them. I think that sometimes we aim too high and maybe we ought to aim a little lower and try to deal with basic educational needs in prison. I see prison officers teaching prisoners how to fill in, for instance, housing applications, various licensing applications and things of that nature, which is very basic but I believe very, very necessary information to give to people in prisons. I think the opportunity has been lost.

  Q328 Chairman: That is very interesting. What is your view then of prison officers generally, the POA position on the fact that, when we were in Scandinavia, not that they have all the answers but their training period for prison officers is a year, a year's training? The evidence which this Committee has had is that it is a very, very short period of training in the UK and it has been cut, there is less training than there used to be. Somebody said that it has been cut from 11 weeks down to six or eight weeks, is that right?

  Mr Robson: If a prison officer receives any training in today's Prison Service they are very lucky indeed, once they have got through the initial training, that is.

  Q329 Chairman: For how long is the initial training?

  Mr Robson: The initial training is seven weeks. We are talking here about people who have got a very big impact on people's lives. The mandatory training which took place for prison officers throughout their career has now been abolished and it is down to each individual governor in prison establishments as to how they utilise their budget and, out of their budget, what they put towards the training of prison officers. There has never been an element of prison officers' training that would give the skill to impart skill to others, if that makes sense to you. I think that is a man-management skill, an interpersonal skill, which one would pick up during the course of doing prison officers' work day in and day out.

  Chairman: That is most interesting. We will come back to that a little bit later. Let us look at the suitability of educational opportunities for prisoners.

  Q330 Paul Holmes: Looking generally at education, there is a general issue across the board, not least in prisons, that the Government is saying it wants certain things on education, it will put money into certain areas and it will set targets to make sure they get it. FE colleges, for example, are saying that they are being pushed into basic skills and level two but anything above that has to be paid for by the student or the employer. It seems to me there is a slightly parallel situation in prisons, in that there is a huge emphasis now on basic skills. Half the prisoners lack basic skills in writing, and so forth, but therefore half of them do not. Is there a danger that, by emphasising basic skills, by having key performance targets which are based around that, they are neglecting at least half the prison population?

  Mr Brenchley: The figures show that there is a very high percentage of people in prison who do not have that level of basic skill. However, even a majority probably of the ones who have exceeded that level have not proceeded far beyond it, so it is not exactly an either/or situation. For me, unless you can get to the first level through basic skills at, say, level one up to level two, which we can talk about later if that is pertinent, the opportunity for you to proceed into employment or to further your life chances in any other way is seriously reduced and in some cases totally reduced. Therefore, my argument would be, if you have not got the basic platform you have not got anything to spring off from.

  Professor John: I think, as in schooling, there needs to be a concern about responding to people's needs and identifying those needs adequately. One can understand the concentration on the acquisition of basic skills. However, there are many people across the spectrum who would have had advanced training or education programmes interrupted by being put in custody, and really it is a matter of building upon where people are at the point of entry into the secure state. The issue then of how one assesses their educational needs and builds that into the delivery of a sentencing plan is critical here.

  Q331 Paul Holmes: We have visited four English prisons so far as part of the inquiry and we have got the same sorts of mixed messages from prisoners and prison officers and educationalists that we talked to there. Some of them are saying there is not enough chance for people to go beyond basic skills, to do a university degree, etc, partly because they cannot access the Internet, and that type of thing, but the vast majority of people were saying that it was the basic skills they needed. If you want to provide the whole range, and perhaps there are 20% of prisoners who want much higher than basic skills, can we do that and is there enough money in the system? Is it just a question of funding or is it a matter of the attitude within the system?

  Ms Lyon: I think there is a tendency to go with the lowest common multiple, that is a good one, and you have drawn attention to the use of target-driven education and I do think that is problematic. In the interviews that we did for "Time to Learn" there were 153 prisoners involved and of those around half felt that they were not being stretched, they were not able to access educational opportunities that were at the level they were, which was beyond the basic level. Certainly in an ideal world one would want to tailor education to individuals, and I think that is a hard thing to ask of a public service which is struggling to cope with the day-to-day processing of people around an overcrowded system. It does mean, as a result, I think, that the combination of targets set and the pressure on the system needs good delivery on the basic skills. Interestingly, there is not much pick-up, as far as I can see, of learning difficulties or learning disabilities. If you look at the work which is being done on mental health, that is in very stark contrast to the lack of work on learning difficulties and learning disabilities within the prison population. Although you have got the basic skills, you are not picking up people, for example, who have spent time in special education, or who have been statemented, and so forth. At the other end of the spectrum there are people way beyond that, often very frustrated, feeling that all they do is go through a series of hoops of continuous assessment. Assessment seems to have been very well developed. Delivery of a response to those assessments seems to be lagging behind.

  Mr Brenchley: The other point which relates to that is length of sentence. The education people at Holloway tell me the average stay there is 22 days and that includes an initial assessment. There is precious little time then to do anything by way of getting anybody through an education programme, particularly by the time you have sorted out all those issues which have to be addressed on induction, including assessment but also including orientating the individual to a regime they are going to spend their life in for a period of time. A lot of this relates to length of sentence and my understanding of the sector is that there are different solutions in different establishments depending on the length of stay, and therefore whether it is possible to build an effective individual learning plan with an individual or just rake them in, do a test or two and let them out again.

  Q332 Paul Holmes: There is a tension there between basic skills provision and higher levels of education provision. Is there also a tension though, because I think, traditionally, some prison education was seen as being therapeutic, particularly for prisoners who were in there for longer sentences? What we saw in one of the prisons we visited was an art class, where clearly the whole emphasis was personal satisfaction and therapy rather than education as such. Is that side of prison education being squeezed out now, because everybody has to help the prison governor meet KP targets?

  Ms Lyon: It would be very disappointing if it were. Fifty-six per cent of the prison population now are serving four years or more. You have got, on the one hand, these people spinning through the system, very short periods of stay, Lancaster Farms Young Offenders Institution, average length of stay for sentenced young men 11 days. That has got one of the best education units that I have seen, in terms of actual physical plant, in the country, but clearly it cannot make much use of its facilities given that move through. You have got that group and then you have got this other group of people, because sentence lengths have increased markedly over the last ten years, who are getting this four years or more, a very substantial part of the prison population. For those people, clearly one has to pay tremendous attention to a period of years when they could really make amazing use of education. I can give you an anecdote. We have just had a Masters student placed with us at the Prison Reform Trust and the reason that we agreed to take him on for a year's placement was because he had this just amazing story to tell. He had spent years in prison, as a young offender and then as a young adult, and he said, "When I was in my cell reading Zola" and we were all completely flabbergasted at this notion, it did not sound very usual, "I thought, why shouldn't I read this in French?" and he learned French. He did that because the chaplain in that gaol and the head of education in that gaol formed a rapport with him and supported him to learn French. He went on to do a French degree, slept rough in Paris in order to do that part of the placement because he had no money. A person who had really been lifted out of a situation by education and by his attachment to it and those individuals who had helped him and it was just an extraordinary story. I doubt it is the only story of that kind. Education seems to be one of the few areas in prison life which really can reach somebody and give them something which will change them markedly.

  Mr Robson: I am interested in what was said about the inmate reading Zola. There are a lot of inmates who do a lot of good work, what you might term homework, in their cells, and that is a constant, because education from time to time is interrupted for reasons of security or lack of staff, etc, etc, and the governor has to make a decision as to what facility he has to trim, and quite often, in fact, it is education. There are charities which work alongside prison governors and indeed the Prison Officers' Association to provide in-cell work. Those of you who read The Independent might have noted that there was a quite good article in yesterday's Independent about fine cell work, which hardened prisoners are taking in their cells, making fine quilts and fine artwork as a therapeutic perhaps rather than educational facility. Again, I think that therapy is part of education, and very important. At least if someone is spending a lot of time in a cell then that time can be utilised usefully rather than the present trend of watching cartoon shows on the television.

  Q333 Paul Holmes: My last question carries on this theme and it is about the tension between basic skills and higher skills and therapeutic education. The Chief Inspector of Prisons has said that the key performance targets lead to a focus on numbers of prisoners achieving qualifications rather than on meeting the needs of individuals. A constituent of mine who currently is serving a sentence of about seven years, I think, has got an argument going on. He wants to use the education in prison, he is very good at ceramics and he wants to use his computer skills to write poetry, but the prison is saying, "You've got to get CLAITs level so-and-so, you've got to get skills," so that is leading to certain problems. Who guides a prisoner into what is the most suitable form of education, and are the KPTs stopping a lot of that and saying, "No, you've got to do this short course because it helps us tick our KPT box"?

  Mr Brenchley: Certainly KPTs direct what happens in prisons, there are no two ways about that, and my source for that is the various education officers and heads of learning and skills that I have spoken to, something like 20 of them in the last fortnight. Often, achievement of a KPT, even if it is fairly mechanical, through the initial education process, then triggers life-changing experience and achievement. One example for us would be that there has just been announced a winner for OCR's Recognising Achievement awards, of which we have about 20 spread right across the whole spectrum, who is a prisoner in a prison in Wiltshire, who started off on basic skills and has now worked his way through a Firm Start qualification, which is the basic understanding which enables you to set up your own business, which you can do even if presenting yourself to an employer turns out to be unsatisfactory when you leave. That would just be an example of where the initial level of achievement then enables achievement at higher levels and enables an element of self-realisation in the individual which can have the rehabilitative and resettlement effect, and it is considered much more strongly by heads of learning and skills and various support agencies they work with outside the prison. I quote that as one example. The other example I wanted to quote really was, that kind of life-changing experience can be created within the education department but it can be created in all other environments within the prison. One I wanted to quote was HMP Manchester, which I visited recently, where one of the major driving forces is actually the chap who runs the industry workshops, which include a range of, for example, commercial selling contracts for other prisons, where they do an entry level three in manufacturing, which involves an element of research. Interestingly, in the light of what you were saying just now, the one area where they have difficulty achieving that qualification within a prison environment is the area which requires them to research what is going on in the broader world, which they could do by Internet and they are doing by having visitors from local industry, and so on, liaising with them and discussing employability opportunities. It is not just education-driven, clearly it is driven by the other areas within the prison, in this case particularly an individual instructor in the workshop, and also by the physical education instructors, who are able to do similar things in a different environment, and so on and so on. For me, the good news is the way in which other sectors within prisons are developing an understanding of how prisoners can be enabled to achieve and feel more confident about contributing to that process.

  Q334 Paul Holmes: You have got shining examples there, where you have got the prisoner learning French so he can read Zola in the original, but are they not the tip of the iceberg? Are not the majority of prisoners either not taking part because they do not want to, or because there is not the space, or the prison officers can move the education classes, or they have been excluded as a punishment because they are seen as being difficult?

  Mr Brenchley: Yes, they are the tip of the iceberg. I was talking to a group of four education managers and heads of learning and skills in the North recently and the education manager from Leeds Prison. I was saying, "Give me examples of life-changing experiences that individuals have had in prisons," and they quoted me Ali who had come into the country and could not speak English and now is running his own hairdressing business, and all the other examples. I could see the education manager from Leeds just sort of bridling a bit at this and he said, "John, it isn't the individual cases, it's all of them." That was the crucial message he wanted to get across to me. What he was saying was that every single one who is enabled to achieve and is able, what is more, to progress through the levels, in relation to the dichotomy you raised earlier, is saving the country money, it is saving individuals across the country grief, and so on. There really are high stakes being played for when they take somebody on the first rung of the ladder and enable them to climb it.

  Q335 Chairman: The evidence is that it is still reaching only a very small proportion of the prison population, even those who are on long sentences?

  Mr Brenchley: Yes; agreed. We would love there to be more and we would love them to be able to achieve better than they do now in all the environments of the prison, not just within education, which is doing its bit towards that.

  Professor John: It seems to me that in order for that progress not to be interrupted there must be a system whereby the learning which is taking place, or which begins in one institution, can be recorded. In one of the recommendations we make in "Time to Learn", we argue for the sort of learning passport which can follow the prisoner to wherever, indicating what they have done, whether that was based on an assessment or not and what could be built upon. Since the degree of movement across the secure state is a given, I would have thought that positive story could only be sustained if indeed such an arrangement were in place so that there could be continuity, wherever people may end up, from where they were before.

  Q336 Chairman: What can be done to reduce the churn then? Is this inevitable? The picture which comes over from the evidence you have given so far and the evidence we have taken and the visits we have been on is this highly mobile state of the prison estate and mobility in every case. We can come to this a bit later but the number of prison officers who are recruited and then drop out within two years, the average stay of a prison governor in the job in one place is very, very short. Whether you have got prisoners whizzing round the system, you have got staff whizzing round the system, it is a wonder anything can be accomplished in a management system where everything moves. Is it inevitable, or can we do something to change that?

  Ms Lyon: From the Prison Reform Trust perspective, one solution clearly would be "Let's build more prisons," put forward variously. In fact, in the last ten years, another 13 prisons have been built and nine of them are overcrowded already. It is hard to see that as a solution. I think the solution has got to be in looking at groups within the prison population to work out whether they actually need to be there, and there is some cross-over there with groups which are not getting access to education. If you look at the remand population so a large group of prisoners, at any one time they represent around 12,000 prisoners, but over the years 58,000 people enter prison on remand. Of those, a fifth are acquitted when they get to court, more than half do not go on to serve anything other than a community penalty, so arguably they need not have been incarcerated in the first place. There are parts of the system which are particularly messy; remand probably is one of the messiest because it involves so many different sectors—courts, CPS, police, probation, prison, etc—and there are breaks at every point in the system. We have just produced a report called "Lacking Conviction" which is about women on remand, which has shown clearly the way in which the system is failing at different points. The messiness, I think, makes it hard to address, but if one were to address the overuse of remand, if one were to remove people who have severe mental health problems and put them into health treatment settings, rather than prison settings, it would be possible gradually I think to pull down numbers, along with a Government commitment to rebalance the system, and have more effective community penalties for people who have committed comparatively minor offences. If one can get to the position where prison is genuinely a place of absolute last resort, for serious and violent offenders only, then work can go into making it a place of excellent last resort. I do have some fears. I think it is an unintended consequence of reform that, because we have failed in this country to reserve prison as that place of last resort when improvements are made, whether it is in health, drug treatment or education, there is a slight danger, more than slight in some parts of the country, of the courts making decisions about disposal. It is tempting to think, "Ah, those things have improved, better education, some health treatment and detox," and then there is a lack of that in the outside community and other disposals, then to use prison for that purpose, which of course is not what it was intended to be used for. I am sorry to give you a kind of global answer, but I do think that one cannot look at this without seeing it in that wider context.

  Chairman: That is most useful. We will come back to some of the more global questions about drug addiction in relation to the difficulties later.

  Q337 Mr Gibb: I am interested in Mr Robson's views on a lot of things. Would you share the view of the Prison Reform Trust that the answer to this continual movement is to release more prisoners, or is it the POA's view that we should build more prisons? Have you been lobbying for more prison-building?

  Mr Robson: I think certainly the big problem facing all of us is the issue of overcrowding. It seems that various solutions have been tried, one being the tagging and early release of a certain amount of the population. How you look at the figures depends, I suppose, on how successful it has been. I do not think it has been terribly successful. It would seem to me that if you can tag someone who has already been committed to prison we should be able to tag someone rather than remand them into custody. I think that is something which may well be looked at, to try to keep down the population on remand, which, as Julia said, is very heavy indeed. If that cannot be found as a solution then the only solution that the Prison Officers' Association can put forward is a properly-sized prison estate to hold the size of the population that we seem to have and is ever-increasing. There was one other point made and that was about governors who seem to spend not a long time in charge of establishments, and that is something which has concerned the Prison Officers' Association for many, many years. Quite simply, governors are recruited nationally and the promotion structure is such that they need to move up and down the country in order to attain the highest level of employment, and that is understandable. However, there are levels of management below governor which could be more stable within the Prison Service and I think that the whole promotion structure would need to be looked at in order to achieve that.

  Q338 Mr Gibb: What is your understanding of the percentage of prisoners who cannot read when they enter? We have heard about a very good assessment system.

  Mr Robson: I did have some figures regarding that. We are talking about people with interrupted education, and the like, being something like 47%. I would question that figure as maybe being too low, but the Prison Officers' Association has not got the means to be able to survey that ourselves. From the experience of prison officers, the incidence of people who have got a very, very basic or below basic education is extremely high.

  Q339 Mr Gibb: What about reading, in particular?

  Mr Robson: In particular, with reading, the basic skills, numeracy and reading.


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2005
Prepared 4 April 2005