Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360-379)
27 OCTOBER 2004
MS JULIET
LYON, PROFESSOR
AUGUSTIN JOHN,
MR TOM
ROBSON, MR
PAUL O'DONNELL
AND MR
JOHN BRENCHLEY
Q360 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the KPIs
and KPTs relevant to education and training, is there a standard
model across the country? Does each prison, and each region even,
submit the same qualifications to meet their KPTs?
Ms Lyon: There is the overall
target for basic skills qualifications, which has been set nationally,
then there are regional plans drawn up. I know they are drawn
up by the regional managers, but whether they are drawn up with
education bods as well, I would hope that they are but I do not
know that. Your point about skewing, I think, is an important
one. If you take an example of the governor who set up Lancaster
Farms, he said, "I want to train my young men to know how
to use complaints systems properly, and my complaints are going
to go up and that's not going to be so very good and I'm going
to have to discuss this with the area manager who won't like it.
In effect, these young men need to know how to negotiate their
way through a system and represent themselves properly."
That means you need a governor who is prepared to stand out against
things and not mind if his complaints shoot up because of that
good work done.
Q361 Mr Chaytor: From the Prison Reform
Trust's point of view, are you satisfied that the KPIs and KPTs
relevant to education and training are the right ones? You have
had some criticism of the way in which the figures are calculated
but in terms of the broad headings, or the specific sub-headings,
are you happy that those are perfect?
Ms Lyon: I think probably it is
quite early days, actually. I would expect them to be more sophisticated
and better targeted once the DfES takeover of education has bedded
down and people have had a chance to look at it more thoroughly.
It is not a very sophisticated system at the moment.
Q362 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the OCR's
contribution, what proportion of the total work of prison education
does the OCR accredit? Do you have a monopoly, or a virtual monopoly,
or is there competition with other awarding bodies?
Mr Brenchley: That is a bit difficult
because we would not know necessarily what all the other bodies
are doing. What we do know is that we are dominant in terms of
education provision, that is to say, what is run in the education
department, but that other awarding bodies are equally dominant
in respect of workshop provision, for example, in manufacturing
or in PE awards or in industrial cleaning or catering, or qualifications
like those, where there are a number of reputable specialist bodies.
Q363 Mr Chaytor: In terms of basic skills
you are dominant, but you do not have a monopoly necessarily?
Mr Brenchley: Yes. Of the 41,000
basic skills, I think I have got the figure right, which Juliet
mentioned earlier on, something like 23,000 are OCR's.
Q364 Mr Chaytor: Whose are the others?
Mr Brenchley: I could surmise
it might be City and Guilds, it might be an organisation called
ASSET, and so on. They tend to trickle off after that.
Q365 Mr Chaytor: Is it up to each individual
prison governor or head of learning and skills to determine which
awarding body is used?
Mr Brenchley: Yes, absolutely.
One point I wanted to mention about the parity of KPTs was that
the same value is attached to a full level one CLAIT certificate,
which takes a fair amount of time to achieve, as is attached to,
for example, food-handling or manual-handling, health and safety
type qualifications, which can be done in between four and eight
hours. There is definitely room for a more precise calibration
of the KPT structure.
Q366 Mr Chaytor: If someone wanted to
pursue this issue of double counting of individual prisoners,
in terms of their contribution to KPTs, it would be possible to
interrogate the database of OCR or Asset or City and Guilds, would
it not? If someone really had to pursue this, it would be possible,
would it, to check the relationship between the global totals
which the individual prisons are putting forward and the records
of the awarding bodies to see if there was any double counting?
Secondly, on this issue, how would one find out whether people
are submitted for Level 1 qualifications who are already well
in advance of Level 1, because presumably this is a temptation
for individual prisons to do as well, is it not?
Mr Brenchley: It depends on whether
they already have that Level 1 achievement. I think the simple
answer to your question about tracking an individual prisoner
is that if that prisoner shows up with a different candidate number
from a different centre there would be no reason for OCR to be
alerted to the fact that potentially it was the same individual.
That should not happen, because the records that I am told go
from one prison to another when a prisoner moves are supposed
to be precise enough about achievement, I think it is called the
"green file", or something, that is transferred, but
it struck me that there is a very significant improvement which
could be made to ensure that this did not happen in the future.
That would be an effective electronic database, preferably by
achieved units, of the achievements of individual prisoners, and
that could be transferred electronically so you were not worried
about this phenomenon of throwing a large brown envelope in the
back of a van just as it goes out of the door. That way, you could
be much more confident that the experience of a prisoner who is
being churned around the system is consistent and coherent and
that what they have managed to achieve in one prison, even possibly
down to the level of a single unit, is being carried forward to
accumulate to a full qualification somewhere else. At the moment,
although a lot of establishments are assiduous about how they
manage this process, just moving a lot of paper around the system
is bound to be a faulty process and it would be far better if
it were tracked electronically.
Q367 Mr Chaytor: The charges which OCR
make for accreditation are exactly the same presumably as they
are to any other part of the education world, there is no differential
charging for prisons?
Mr Brenchley: Yes.
Q368 Mr Chaytor: It must be a significant
factor for individual governors in the managing of their budgets,
as it is for a teacher, as to how much they spend on awarding
bodies. Is that an issue? Do you sense that there is some resistance
in individual prisons to doing more education and training simply
because of the cost of accreditation?
Mr Brenchley: No. The cost of
the qualification is a tiny proportion of the expenditure, and
I am thinking of not only the demands of having a tutor on the
premises but the demands of Tom's members and moving them around,
and so on. The cost of the qualification is a very small part
of that and we are not aware that it is causing any impediment,
that actually any prisons are reluctant to put prisoners through
qualifications because of the cost.
Q369 Mr Chaytor: Other than the establishment
of the electronic transfer of student records, funder records,
is there any other single improvement to the system of accreditation
or of measurement of success of the system that you could suggest?
Mr Brenchley: It is essential
that the qualifications which a prisoner gains in prison are reputable
outside, that they are not sector-specific. The reason for that
is, clearly, they must have credibility elsewhere and they must
be on a par with the sorts of achievements gained by people outside,
and the National Qualifications Framework is the best proxy we
have for that at the moment. If a qualification is on the National
Qualifications Framework then it gives some kind of parity. That
is the first thing. The second thing I will mention briefly is
about units. If qualifications operate in units then it is possible
to accumulate them even in different prisons on a known structure.
All those concerned know that it is one unit of a five-unit qualification,
or whatever it is. The third area I would wish to push is the
availability of qualifications across the whole prison, not just
within the education department. Certainly there are one or two
examples I have been able to see so far where prisons have been
able to develop qualification structures which have involved members
of the Prison Officers' Association or members of other uniformed
staff, or whoever. They have been able to change the culture,
which goes right back to the Chairman's very first question, and
almost convert a prison into an organisation which is there as
much for learning and rehabilitation as it is for a punitive purpose.
That enables, I think, the individual prisoner then to see himself,
or herself, in a different light.
Q370 Chairman: Where has that happened?
Mr Brenchley: The best example
I quoted you was Manchester, with that entry level in Manchester.
Q371 Chairman: How do you set up qualifications
which are appealing to the staff?
Mr Brenchley: It is the evangelists
within the prisons, actually. There is no standard pattern. Again,
I hear somebody say, like the head of that learning workshop,
"It's just the way we work here."
Q372 Chairman: It is luck; it is the
individual, is it not?
Mr Brenchley: It is luck. I think
it is a mindset, a mindset at different levels. The Head of Learning
and Skills at Reading, which I know the Committee visited not
long ago, said to me, "Perhaps I'm just lucky here,"
so he used your word, in that he can talk to a governor in a particular
way, he has got facilities there. My guess is that probably, and
I was there on Monday of this week, they have come on even since
you visited them, in terms of the quality of information technology,
and so on.
Q373 Chairman: You have been in this
business for a long time, as OCR, you are the preferred provider
of qualifications. Even the little charity that we had giving
evidence last week, the Shannon Trust, has built up a relationship
with the Prison Officers' Association and in prisons, and the
Toe by Toe thing is really making a difference, I know it is only
small. What has the OCR been doing and why do you not have an
arrangement with the Prison Officers' Association going back years,
where you have to take prison officer education and qualifications
seriously, in a meaningful way? What have you been doing all these
years?
Mr Brenchley: We have had a history,
which I am not sure I am fully aware of, in terms of previously
running custodial care qualifications and suchlike, but really
it is only in the last 18 months to two years that we have identified
specific requirements which operate in the prison sector. Prison
education departments, or whoever, were simply centres, in our
language, they were simply organisations which ran various qualifications,
whose staff might attend training, which we would visit for quality
assurance purposes. It is probably in the last two years or so
that the intelligence which has come back, initially to me, in
the first instance, on standard, routine quality assurance visits
to prisons, has shown that there are particular sector constraints
and requirements which OCR, as an organisation, must address.
Q374 Chairman: You have been in this
business for years. You are the examination board of Oxford and
Cambridge and the Royal Society of Arts, it is that combination,
is it not?
Mr Brenchley: That is right.
Q375 Chairman: Basically, you have seen
this as a nice little earner for all these years. Is it not strange
that two of the best-endowed universities in the country see providing
this to prisons and prisoners as a nice little earner, whereas
surely long ago you should have said, "Come on, what can
we do as a partnership to do something more positive"?
Mr Brenchley: I think we are just
about getting to that stage. You will gather that the issue has
only recently come through because of the quality of the reports
we have had back from prisons and the opportunity to look at them
and think "There is a sector here which needs specific support."
That is why, for example, we run network meetings which enable
the practitioners from the prisons, the heads of learning and
skills and the education managers, to share practice with one
another in a way which seems not to have been available before.
In a sense, we are there with the education practitioners and
really it is the experience we have gained in those meetings and
those discussions and visits which is opening up for us a view
that prison officers, who previously would not have been, as it
were, part of the sector that we would have had to address, actually
have a part to play. I think we are very early on that road, at
the moment.
Q376 Chairman: Has Oxford or Cambridge
ever thought of twinning with a prison?
Mr Brenchley: It is an interesting
thought. The short answer would be no, but I am not going to walk
out of here and not take note of that point.
Q377 Chairman: Tom, you would be a bit
worried perhaps if you had got a couple of academics from Oxford
coming in and running the prison, would you?
Mr Robson: I think I said earlier
that, from a prison officer's perspective, we need to pitch our
level at a realistic level, and I do not think Oxford and Cambridge
is realistic to us.
Q378 Chairman: I am sorry to correct
you there, Tom. There is a fine tradition of external education
and life and learning coming out of both those universities with
appropriate courses for part-time learners, so there is a potential
for real partnership there?
Mr Robson: I understand that and
we do not want to be rivals with education, we need to integrate
together. I was going to go on to say that the quality of man
who is in prison who has got a decent educational standard, I
think, has enough self-esteem to be able to find out for themselves
where the opportunities lie within prison and make use of that,
where it is available. I think that we need to pitch our time,
as prison officers, to try to help those who are less able to
push themselves forward, people who have lacked confidence, who
are ashamed of the fact that they cannot read and write, and they
are the people that my members generally are needed to be involved
with. That was what my statement was about regarding academics.
Q379 Chairman: Professor John, it has
always interested me that there are about the same number of higher
education institutions as prisons, you could do almost a one-for-one
twinning. If might be pretty good if we are trying to get a culture
of education imbued into a prison, it would not be a bad idea
to have a twinning arrangement, would it?
Professor John: I think you are
quite right and it could piggy-back on the Government's Widening
Participation agenda, for example, there is no reason why it should
not, in my view, so that the whole thing could come full circle.
The last question I think which Mr Chaytor asked resonates with
something you said earlier, Chairman, the question you asked about
added value. It seems to me that the efficacy or appropriateness
of these targets and key performance indicators needs to be tested,
there needs to be the most rigorous evaluation of how all of that
is working, in order that one could look at the range of competences
people are acquiring which relate to what employers ought to be
looking for right now, and I believe that universities could assist
greatly in that. The idea of twinning, I think, is a persuasive
one, and it may well be that, at the very least, a relationship
between outreach and extramural departments, where those still
exist, and the Prison Officers' Association, if no other part
of the system, would be particularly advantageous.
Ms Lyon: There is a precedent,
a bit of a one, in relation to Goldsmiths College, and I think
it is Dover Young Offender Institution, which was brokered originally
by UNLOCK, the National Association of Ex-Offenders.
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