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.
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