Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340-359)
27 OCTOBER 2004
MS JULIET
LYON, PROFESSOR
AUGUSTIN JOHN,
MR TOM
ROBSON, MR
PAUL O'DONNELL
AND MR
JOHN BRENCHLEY
Q340 Mr Gibb: Forty-seven per cent do
not have those skills, is that right?
Mr Robson: Yes.
Q341 Mr Gibb: What percentage do not
have those skills when they leave prison?
Mr Robson: Again, I have not got
any figure for that, but various incentives have been taken, not
only within our education departments. For instance, it is no
use having exceptional facilities for education when, because
of inappropriate staffing, or whatever, they are not always fully
operational. Again, I would turn to charitable organisations which
are making use of prisoners' time in cells where they are teaching
those basic skills. There is the Shannon Trust, Toe by Toe and
others. I think that they are very useful, but unfortunately I
cannot give you figures. I do not know whether any of my colleagues
might be able to.
Q342 Mr Gibb: The representative body
of the prison officers in this country does not know how successful
your reading teaching is in prison, is that what you are telling
me?
Mr Robson: We have no established
way of being able to produce those figures.
Q343 Mr Gibb: Why not?
Mr Robson: We have not got the
resources. We rely on the Home Office and the Prison Service to
produce those kinds of figures.
Q344 Mr Gibb: Is not that rather uncaring,
that you do not give a damn really about how successful your teaching
of reading is, in prison?
Mr Robson: That might be an opinion
that you have, but I can assure you that the Prison Officers'
Association does give a damn and prison officers also give a damn.
They work day in and day out trying to improve the lives of people
who are sent to us.
Q345 Mr Gibb: How do I know that though?
Mr Robson: I know that because
I have worked in this operation for 20-plus years. You would know
that, I assume, by speaking to people such as myself and my colleagues
in this forum, who will tell you that is a fact.
Mr Gibb: If you do not have facts about
the proportion of prisoners that leave unable to read, what is
your—
Chairman: Nick, I understand your line
of questioning but even I, as Chair, would suggest that if anyone
should know those figures it should be the Government or the Prison
Service.
Q346 Mr Gibb: Surely we can ask them
too. I think people who work in prisons ought to know as well.
Do you have a feel for the proportion of prisoners who leave unable
to read? Sometimes does it go down?
Mr Robson: I think that we have
tried every which way. I think that our educationalists have tried,
I think prison officers have tried and prison governors have tried.
I could not sit here and say that we have had a magnificent impact
but what I think I can say is that we have had a significant impact.
There are many stories such as the anecdotal ones told by colleagues
that I could relate to you, but I could not give you statistics.
Q347 Mr Gibb: What about Juliet, do you
have a feel for what proportion of prisoners leave prison unable
to read?
Ms Lyon: I know how many achieve
basic skills, which I am sure you know too, because the Prison
Service published in its Annual Report that the numbers achieved
were 89,200 key work skills awards, which was nearly double the
Prison Service target, and 41,300 basic skills awards. What is
not quite so clear, and it is difficult, and this is partly the
tangle of having KPIs which have to be met, is that there are
figures given for the number who go into work, which we have challenged
because they appear to relate more to people who have got job
interviews set up for them rather than people who are known to
go into employment. The calculation of how many are leaving prison
with a qualification and going into work is not necessarily quite
what it seems. We know essentially how many have interviews are
established for them rather than how many go into work.
Q348 Mr Gibb: In your experience of the
Prison Service, is it your fear that, that 47% who enter, that
goes down to, what, 25% when they leave who cannot read, or would
you say it stays at round about 47%?
Ms Lyon: To be honest, really
I do not know. Given the length, as we said earlier on, the very
short stays of half the population who are flying through so fast,
logically very few of them are going to be able to change their
literacy level in that period of time, or indeed in the series
of short hits, because obviously very many of them are back in
again for another short sentence. We know the reconviction rate
averages out at 59%. If you look at the young offenders, the 18s
to 20s, that goes up to almost three-quarters, 71%, at the moment,
half of whom are going to be back in prison, so you are getting
a series of short, interrupted periods in gaol where they might
get an injection of education each time. In the current system,
they might go right back to stage one.
Q349 Mr Gibb: As custodians of the taxpayers'
money, how do we assess the effectiveness of basic teaching in
prison if we do not have any figures for the leavers?
Ms Lyon: It has always amazed
me that there are very few outcomes that you can actually check
in a measurable way. One of the things about the movement of governors,
to which the Chairman referred earlier on, is that it cannot increase
your morale if you do not have any ability to determine whether
your institution is succeeding. There is not any "per prison"
set of figures for outcomes, so you do not know whether your prisoners
leave and are less likely to reoffend than somebody else in a
comparable gaol somewhere else in the country. That is partly
because prisoners are moving around the system and partly because
the nature of the record-keeping at the moment does not actually
allow you to have that information. You will get a ballpark figure
for age bands in the prison population but you will not get it
tied to an establishment, so you will not know, as a governor,
whether you are running a successful establishment, you will not
know as head of learning and skills necessarily the kinds of outcomes
which would help you feel that you were doing a decent job.
Q350 Chairman: I am thinking of the parallel
of added value. Those colleges and schools that were very angry,
in terms of GCSE and O level results, where they were finding
it difficult to show the wonderful added value that they brought
to students who came in, say, at 11 and did wonderfully well although
they did not reach the high scores in five GCSEs A to C, and so
on, is there the possibility of having an added value score for
a prison so that you can get a healthy evaluation?
Professor John: I suppose it would
be difficult to construct one. The lessons from schooling, I think,
are pertinent here, in the sense that a measure of someone's progress
might take account of the development of other social competences
apart from academic learning as such, or the acquisition of literacy
and numeracy skills, so that the individual might perform better
as a social individual as a result of the quality of the mentoring
they received from education staff, from other prisoners, from
prison officers, so that their social competence is enhanced.
There are ways of measuring that, in terms of a "before and
after" scenario. Indeed, one of the recommendations we make
in the "Time to Learn" report is that key performance
indicators for education and training should be based on the progression
of individual prisoner learners and not on absolute performance
as measured by exam results. I think the key issue here is how
are these performance indicators going to be constructed? I take
the point behind your question, surely it must be sensible for
prisoners to know that the progress they make on all other indicators
or indices is acknowledged because it goes to the issue of their
overall social competence.
Q351 Chairman: Would it be sensible then
to pay a prisoner as much to get an education as to do routine
work in the workshops?
Professor John: That again is
one of the things we have noted. There should be an incentive
for prisoners to access education and to see progress with an
education plan being as important for them, in terms of their
own incapacity, as for other things that they might want to do.
Some prisoners, as you know, are having to juggle, or indeed give
up, the opportunity to earn if they want to pursue education programmes,
because of the way in which the whole thing is organised, and
I think that element of it needs to be removed.
Ms Lyon: What we found in the
study was, one issue was about the financial incentive, and people
have said to us, "Well, you know, outside in society people
make a choice; if they want to go into further education it's
going to cost them and they're going to have to lose other opportunities
in order to pay for that one, or to gain access to that one".
I do not think it is a relevant comparison, in that choice is
not an issue in a prison really and money is not either, except
that what little money you can earn, and it is just a few pounds,
of course has an incredibly high value because that is all you
have for your phone cards or whatever small things you are going
to get from the prison canteen. We are not talking large sums
of money. I think differential rewards for different sorts of
work, particularly some of the more mundane workshop work, is
a positive disincentive and it should be removed. I cannot see
a justification for it. The other commodity that matters, and
"Time to Learn" picked that up very clearly, was time,
time out of cell, and levels of purposeful activity in a prison
estate. For the last eight years the Prison Service has not been
able to make its own KPI of a minimum of 24 hours a week purposeful
activity per prisoner. In fact, in the last ten years, the increase
in purposeful activity amounts to round about ten minutes per
prisoner per day, that is the level of increase, which I think
is a very stark way of thinking about what this influx of numbers
has done. There has been a fantastic injection of hours of education,
other opportunities, training, put into the Prison Service but
it has been mopped up by the numbers, so the actual overall movement
is fractional. I think, if you are making choices, as prisoners
interviewed in "Time to Learn" found, between queuing
up to make a phone call, getting a shower, going to the gym, going
to worship, any of these sorts of things, if you are having to
balance these sorts of things with trying to find a bit of time
for education, that again is another disincentive.
Q352 Mr Chaytor: I want to ask about
key performance targets and ask first of all what the difference
is between KPT and KPI, or are the terms interchangeable?
Mr Robson: As far as I am aware,
there is no difference at all between a KPT and a KPI, it is simply
different terminology.
Q353 Mr Chaytor: How are the key performance
targets established? Presumably there is a global total established
by the Home Office which is fed down into the regional offices
of the Home Office which are then distributed to individual prisons.
Do individual governors have some discretion over this or is a
target simply imposed on them?
Mr Brenchley: If I can answer
that, on the basis of the recent conversations. I understand there
are something like 43 key performance targets across the prison
as a whole, of which a small number relate to the provision of
education in its broadest sense. Those are split into skills for
life, which are basic skills, in common parlance, and work skills,
which have a definition of what kinds of qualifications are eligible
to be counted towards these work skills. The good news, I suppose,
going through the figures, is that prisons are doing extremely
well and hitting those targets, but whether or not they were the
right size in the first place, of course, is anyone's guess at
the moment. I understand the process by which it works is a break
down from national level, this is simply in terms of the two education
targets, at regional level and then further down to institutional
level, based on factors of which heads of learning and skills
are not aware, necessarily, but they are something to do with
the size of the prison and the number of prisoners going through.
Certainly there is an element of opaqueness around the decision-making
at the individual institutional level, as far as the feedback
we have from the sector is concerned.
Q354 Mr Chaytor: There is an issue around
the sense of ownership of the individual prisons of these targets
and the relevance of the targets to the size of each prison?
Mr Brenchley: My understanding
is that they are not negotiated, they are simply provided, and
the prison does its best to meet them. As I say, that is the intelligence
I have, through the sector.
Q355 Mr Chaytor: Therefore, the consequence
of that is, what does that say about the appropriateness of the
targets and the way in which each prison can select qualifications
to hit the targets?
Mr Brenchley: If I can quote you
an example from HMP Styal, in Cheshire, one of their arguments
is that they have a number of repeat visitors, therefore somebody
will get a key performance target at a particular level, a Level
1 or a Level 2, or whatever, and will achieve it and everybody
is very pleased. They go away, they come back again, there are
no key performance targets for them to attempt subsequently, so
somehow they are less of a priority for a programme than they
would have been had they been more able to contribute to a key
performance target. There is definitely a skewing effect there.
Q356 Mr Chaytor: Do you think it is the
case that, given this phenomenon of churn and all this transfer
of prisoners, presumably a prisoner can go to Styal, do their
Level 1 qualification and contribute to the key performance target
and then be shifted down to Holloway and do exactly the same again
and count as a KPT for Holloway? Does that happen and, if so,
how frequently?
Mr Brenchley: I guess it could,
because they might not even show up on any of the awarding bodies'
records as the same person, for example, there would not be necessarily
any reason. I know that one of the issues which affects a number
of heads of learning and skills in particular is that somebody
can do the bulk of their learning programme in one prison, they
can be bumped off to another prison, they can pass the initial
test at a particular level because they have done all the work
somewhere else and it is the receiving prison which gets the credit
for the KPT. I do not want to suggest that there is furore around
the sector about all that, but certainly there is a kind of quiet
resentment that one prison has done all the work and another has
got the KPT.
Q357 Mr Chaytor: It is fairly clear that
this Stalinist, top-down approach to KPTs is wide open to manipulation
and abuse, is it not? Would that be a fair comment? If I were
running a prison, on the evidence of our visits and the evidence
we have had here, I could think of at least 15 ways of manipulating
the system to the advantage of my prison which was not necessarily
in the interests of prisoners.
Mr Brenchley: I think there is
no doubt that pragmatism comes into play then and realism comes
into play, and that is certainly the feedback we get from individual
heads of learning and skills in particular, and then they say
how they hope, within that pragmatic environment, to be able to
respond to the needs of individual learners. At the moment it
is a relatively new regime, it is a relatively new phenomenon,
and I think they are still working it out in some way.
Ms Lyon: Just a clarification.
There are 19 KPIs set by the Prison Service and then the KPTs
are refinements of those KPIs so that they are more detailed.
Q358 Mr Chaytor: The KPIs are the broader-brush
headings?
Ms Lyon: Yes. The Service sets
those in the business plan.
Q359 Mr Chaytor: There are 43 KPTs?
Ms Lyon: I think so. I have not
got the figures, but there are 19 KPIs set and they are agreed
and they are top-down, they are set centrally, but there are calibrations,
as I understand it. There has been some shifting of targets done,
based on acknowledging that particular groups would find it particularly
hard. A clear example of that would be levels of assaults, for
example, that you would expect because of a more volatile population
in the young offender group, that you would have a higher assault
rate in a young offender institution. Consequently, the expectations
have been tailored to match that, to some extent, rather than
requiring it to match adult prison.
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