Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400-417)
27 OCTOBER 2004
MS JULIET
LYON, PROFESSOR
AUGUSTIN JOHN,
MR TOM
ROBSON, MR
PAUL O'DONNELL
AND MR
JOHN BRENCHLEY
Q400 Chairman: Tom, can I push you on
this. Can we have some detail? I was getting off the train last
night and I saw a poster which said "Why don't you teach?
Minimum 22k." What do you get to start as a prison officer?
Mr Robson: It is difficult to
tell you actually. I might have to write to you with those figures.
[2]
Q401 Chairman: Give me
a ballpark for a prison officer's starting salary?
Mr Robson: The starting rate in
London for a prison officer is round about the figure you have
just quoted, £22,000.
Q402 Chairman: What is the minimum qualification
for that?
Mr Robson: The minimum qualification
is simply the university of life. There is no minimum qualification
to be a prison officer. They sit tests, a written test, a practical
test, and go into the Prison Service. There is no standard qualification.
Q403 Chairman: Once they start, we know
there is a 60% drop-out rate within the first two years. You do
not have to have any qualifications to be able to start and you
get a reasonable salary but you do not have training after that
period. You do not have a very long period of training, you said
seven weeks, did you not?
Mr Robson: Yes, but of course
you are in a 12-month probationary period, as you would understand,
and that is a pretty intensive situation. I came into the Prison
Service from an engineering background and people come from all
sorts of backgrounds these days, some people with very, very good
and high qualifications become prison officers, but it is a difficult
environment to work in. I think it is a difficult profession to
take up and you work with difficult people. I think the drop-out
rate is sometimes to do with the fact that there are quite a lot
of rival industries that pay similar wages, but also I think the
drop-out rate is often because it is, I was going to say, an acquired
taste, but I think it is a difficult job to work your way into.
Q404 Chairman: It sounds like being a
politician, Tom. Do you see what I am driving at? I am very interested
in management. If I were looking at the Prison Service and any
other organisation I know, if you want to keep men and women and
motivate them and retain them you have to have good, stable management
and management that cares about the development of the staff,
and that nearly always means upgrading, training, performance
review, training out of the business and in the business. It just
seems to me that what has been explained to us by other people
is that not enough investment is put into training and getting
the best out of this talented workforce you have got. If you do
not try to get the best out of them you do not get that link with
doing other than turnkey, you do not get that as much as you would
like. Is that not true?
Mr Robson: I have a feeling that
we have been there during the course of today's discussions. The
biggest problem within the Prison Service, other than drugs, and
I know this is not a forum to discuss drugs, is the overcrowding.
Not only has the prison department had to dispense with mandatory
training, as I explained to you before, and it is very much down
to the quality of a local governor as to how much of his budget
he can spare, also it is down to the fact that there is not the
time in the day to pay to the training of prison officers. It
is a very, very busy profession to be in at this moment in time,
it is very difficult indeed.
Q405 Valerie Davey: Professor John, having
heard this conversation about the needs of the Prison Service,
what do you think ought to be the main contribution that we should
be commenting on, as a Committee, in terms of prison staff? We
are talking at the moment about prison staff. What should we do
and what should we recommend?
Professor John: I think that is
multifaceted, really. To continue from where Tom left off, it
seems to me that the conditions have got to be created wherein
prison staff could have an investment made in them so that they
could acquire the capacity to assist offenders and aid the rehabilitation
process. The kind of custodial management which is taking place
just now, for all the reasons that Tom has given, in my view militates
against that. That relates partly to the whole business of contracting
that we were just discussing. Up to 1989, when I became Director
of Education in Hackney, I was in charge of the education provision
in the five London prisons as an Assistant Education Officer in
the ILEA. We were able to have a coherent approach to prison education
and indeed to working with prison officers in those establishments
and, to a very large extent, the programme that we introduced
supported the development of those prison officers. It was idiosyncratic
in the sense that it did depend very much on the disposition of
the individual prison governor; nevertheless, the way in which
the whole thing was organised made that possible. The current
contracting arrangements, in my view, do not assist that necessarily
and the expertise of further education colleges and education
facilitators in the post-16 sector cannot always be drawn upon,
again for reasons of contract and cost and the differential levels
of pay that people who work in the Prison Service have, as distinct
from those who work in colleges, and so on. Therefore, the extent
to which prison officers can be facilitated in their own development
such that they are not just turning keys but are able to contribute
to the development of prisoners is really very limited. One has
got to do something about overcrowding. There has got to be a
link between the contracts of prison officers, as part of the
contract that they receive there should be some element of their
staff development, so that, while they may not have expertise
in particular areas of education provision or delivery, they should
have some general competences in terms of facilitating people's
development.
Q406 Valerie Davey: Within that, would
you also say identifying the needs of prisoners, particularly
in terms of education, and that is the context? I know that what
Tom said earlier means that many prison officers want to help
the individual but if they have not got the training to identify
those needs then they are unable to be as helpful as they might
be. It is that aspect. It is not just the delivery, which perhaps
further education colleges or the specifically designated education
team can offer, but it is that identification of what the needs
are?
Professor John: That is again
a pretty complex and, I would say, specialist area too. It is
right that prison officers, given the degree of interface they
have with prisoners, should be able to take part in that, but
then they would need to be trained to do that, yes.
Q407 Valerie Davey: Thank you. Could
I ask Juliet very specifically because of an answer to a question
earlier; you said that we were not doing well when there were
specific education needs identified. Could you tell us first of
all who is actually assessing and identifying these needs, and
I am particularly interested, I will tell you now, in dyslexia,
and, secondly, what are we or are we not doing about meeting those
specific education needs, which do not even tally in terms of
the basic need, essentially, or initially?
Ms Lyon: There has been very little
work done on this. I would say that to start with. We have begun
to try to find out what is known already. There has been a study
in Scotland, of which I will submit details so that the Committee
can be informed by that study, but there is not a comprehensive
picture of how many people in the prison population have specific
learning difficulties. We know roughly how many had disrupted
education because the Social Exclusion Unit did that piece of
work in its report on preventing reoffending. There is no comparable
work, say, in the mental health area, which I said earlier on.
I have never seen a figure, for example, which tells you that
in the prison population there are X percentage of people who
have been statemented, which I know is not a fantastic measure
but it is a measure of their need, whereas I do know the percentage
who have been in care as children. I just do not think it is an
area that people have bothered to look at in the way that it should
be looked at.
Q408 Valerie Davey: Should it not be
a target to identify, in fact, the specific education needs of
prisoners and then you would have some basis on which to judge
outcome, you would have some basis on which to judge the delivery
of the needs of those prisoners in terms of their education?
Ms Lyon: It would have to be a
different target. There is already a requirement to assess, but
I think we are talking about something more specialist, as Gus
said, than just simply a quick assessment, and I think antecedents
would be important, so finding out from business whether they
had paid any attention to educational deficits or learning disabilities
would all be part of that. A person who is rather good on this
is Dr Sue Bailey, who works in the Manchester area and has picked
up various learning disabilities by looking intensely at a small
group of young offenders, and also physical impairments, such
as deafness, which had not been picked up previously, which clearly
are impeding people's ability to learn while they are in gaol.
Q409 Paul Holmes: Can I return to explore
a little further some of the comments which were made earlier.
I think Juliet said that prison officers were getting worried
that they would become just turnkeys, they would put people in
the cell and lock the door, unlock the door and all the other
bits. The interesting bits and the bits where you got more involved
with the prisoners would go to somebody else, like the Education
Service. Tom commented, right at the start I think, that it was
a shame that back in the old days, in the Borstals, for example,
which I think Tom started working in, the prison officers were
quite closely involved with the prisoners and now that is becoming
less and less so. How important is it that the prison officers
should be people who are closely involved in delivering education,
given that they get only six weeks' training to be a prison officer,
whereas somebody involved in teaching, for example, has one to
four years' training just to be a teacher?
Mr Robson: I think it is very
important, for a couple of reasons. Prison officers, by the way,
are people with vast experience of life. In general, they are
people in their late twenties who are employed as prison officers.
They build up a rapport with prisoners every day of their working
lives, they get to know the prisoners very well and the prisoners
get to know them. I think that is perhaps the number one issue,
that there is trust built up. The downside is that if there are
any nasties to be done to a prisoner, if there is any punishment
to be handed out or restraints to be applied, then obviously it
is the prison officers who have to do that as well. In general,
they do build up trust and a working relationship with prisoners,
which I think is probably more vital than any other relationship
anywhere else in the Prison Service, other than perhaps the camaraderie
between the staff themselves. I think that is very important,
it is something which bears fruit in a lot of ways. We do various
offender programmes that prison officers are involved with, particularly
the sex offenders treatment programme, which is a very stressful
situation for prison officers to be in, and that is coped with.
I think that trust and working relationship, the man management
and the support situation is something that is being leached away,
if you like, and not being utilised by anyone at all. A lot more
thought needs to go into that. Prison officers are individuals,
and there will be obviously some prison officers who would not
give a brass farthing for educating prisoners, the vast majority
want interesting work and they want to try to make prisoners better
people. Frequently, simply by spending five minutes of their time
with a young man, or a young lady, can give huge dividends, and
that, to me, is part of the education of a young man or a young
lady.
Professor John: I do not think
that what Mr Holmes is asking for, or indeed what Tom is suggesting,
could be achieved within the timeframe that is set typically for
training prison officers. One of the concerns that I and many
of my colleagues have is to do with the awareness that prison
officers develop of issues to do with equality and diversity.
As someone who has been involved in training on the implementation
of the Race Relations Amendment Act, for example, there are major
issues in terms of how prison officers are equipped to understand
and grow their awareness of issues to do with gender subordination,
to do with race discrimination and other aspects of equality legislation
which are simply skimmed over, in my experience, in the training
that prison officers have. If we are saying that this is a service
which deals with the whole core community and the whole population
of multi-ethnic Britain then it seems to me that the kind of interface
we wish prison officers to have with prisoners sensitively, given
the overrepresentative number, for example, of black people in
the secure state, must mean a greater concentration, a greater
amount of time spent equipping prison officers with those kinds
of skills.
Ms Lyon: I want to address, in
principle, what the CRE is telling us. They are saying to us that
there are more black young men going to prison now than there
are entering university, which I think is an awful thing to know.
That is just an extraordinary fact. If that is the case, there
is not any room for complacency because we are in danger of losing
a generation of very important young people.
Q410 Chairman: What is the percentage
of ethnic minority officers in the POA?
Mr Robson: The percentage is very
small. I cannot give you the actual percentage. I could write
to you and give you that. [3]I
would have to say that it is very small, with the exception of
Pentonville, I think, which has got the biggest percentage of
black or ethnic minority prison officers in the Prison Service.
There have been various attempts to try to recruit into that particular
area and there are difficulties in doing so. In some cultures,
it does not appear to be made an attractive job, although a lot
of time and effort have been put into that.
Q411 Chairman: Can you
tell me, Tom, for those who do not know this, if you are a prison
officer is there a career path into management, into becoming
a governor?
Mr Robson: Yes, there is.
Q412 Chairman: That is a career path
which is fairly normal?
Mr Robson: Yes. I have to say
again, it is more the exception than the rule now that someone
makes it to Governor of Wormwood Scrubs from a basic grade prison
officer, but it can be done, yes, and it is welcome.
Ms Lyon: The current Director
General of the Prison Service took that route through to the post
he has now, which I think is an important model for the Service.
I did want to say just a little bit more about the management
issues and the training of prison staff and again to echo what
Gus said. We have become increasingly concerned about the low
priority ascribed to training prison officers, whether it is basic
entry level or whether it is people coming in at direct entry,
or people managing for the first time. At one point the college
had, I think it was called, Managing for the First Time or Governing
for the First Time; that course has been discontinued. Efforts
to train governors and support governors was something done at
the Tavistock Clinic some while ago. As far as I know, that has
fallen apart now. There is not even as much attention paid as
there had been to supporting and training people at every grade
entry level or promotion change in the Service. That just does
not seem sensible, because obviously you need to enable people
to manage, which is going to be different from working as an officer.
That effort to look after others and attend to their development
has got to feed into thinking about prisoners and their development.
I do not think you can dissociate the two.
Q413 Chairman: It sounds a rather old-fashioned
management structure in the prison because, if we are hearing
evidence today that there is this instability as governors move
on, where is the concept that there is a management team which
a governor leads, and that stays with it even though the governor
moves on? That is a model we are familiar with in the private
and public sectors, but does that not happen in prisons?
Ms Lyon: There is more of an emphasis
on SMT, the senior management team, than there used to be, I think,
but there is a similar level of turnover there, because a large
number of that SMT will consist of the fast-track junior governor
grades who are doing just that, fast-tracking.
Mr Robson: My point would be that
quite often the governor has no control over who his management
are and who they consist of, because everyone is striving to better
themselves within the Prison Service and quite often they have
to leave that establishment and go to another to do that, so the
governor has no control.
Q414 Jeff Ennis: We have focused already
on the issue of overcrowding in prisons as being a stumbling block,
to some extent, in making progress on improving academic achievement,
educational achievement, in prisons. Overcrowding is cited, obviously,
as one of the main reasons that we have prisoner churn. I think
the statistics you gave us, from the PRT, were that currently
there are about 17,000 prisoners sharing in cells designed for
one, and the issue of prisoner churn affects primarily Category
B prisoners. If we cannot overcome this problem of overcrowding
in the short term, I wonder whether we ought to be considering
looking towards some form of standardised curriculum within the
prisons, primarily because of this major stumbling-block. Have
any of you got any views on that?
Mr Brenchley: In a sense, there
is a standardised curriculum because it is determined by KPTs
plus whatever the prison can provide and that will vary from place
to place. There is a core, that we are aware of, of basic skills,
key skills, CLAIT, basic IT qualifications, there are others available
as well, and then there is a sort of tail of other qualifications.
The concern which was expressed earlier on about the broadening
of the range of experiences which can be made available to prisoners
certainly applies in those contexts, because they are very much
determined by whatever a prison has been able to set up. For example,
in Reading now, they have got a new catering kitchen. I have never
seen or heard of anything like that in a prison, maybe that is
my limited experience, and it looks to me to be to a pretty good
industrial standard. Somebody who has done their work there can
go out somewhere else. I do not know whether there should be catering
kitchens everywhere else, but certainly there should be something
which has that level of industry-standard facility and training
potential in it. I suppose really it goes back to what was said
before about the management team. I was quite keen to come in
on that because there is now a crucial combination of people in
post, with a governor and a head of learning and skills, which
I think is just about the greatest innovation in around 20 years
in the prison sector, in terms of opening it up as a learning
and skills environment, and people like the prison workshop managers
I have met, and so on. If that group of people have got their
act together and are able to affect the culture, going right back
to the beginning of the discussion, then I think there is a prospect
for a prison starting to affect Tom's members or starting to affect
other staff there in a way which does start to ramp up the sense
of the organisation as being a learning environment. For me, it
is partly about equipment but it is driven very much by that group
of crucial people in managerial positions who form a management
team, and they can make it happen or they can kill it dead, depending
on the chemistry between them.
Mr Robson: I would support a curriculum
if it did not debar people from entering that curriculum at particular
points and at particular levels, if it did not debar charitable
organisations, for instance, to be able to come in and do decent
work. As long as it was all-embracing I would support that. The
second thing is what John says about the industrial kitchen. Again,
that is nothing new. Someone mentioned earlier prison officer
PEIs, doing vocational work with prisoners, giving qualifications
in various levels of PE, which they are qualified to do. It is
not many years ago when, in our prison kitchens, in our prison
workshops and, in fact, to maintain our prisons, prison officers
were the people who did that, as specialist grade prison officers.
They would take groups of prisoners with them while they were
doing that work and they would have qualifications themselves
to be able to teach prisoners to NVQ standard, for instance, in
the kitchens and in the workshops. That policy has been reversed
for prison maintenance to be done by private individuals, or by,
if you like, not prison officer grades, who do not actually take
prisoners, supervise and teach, and I believe that skill and that
facility has been lost. It is something that we would urge this
Committee to have a look at, please.
Q415 Jeff Ennis: Every set of witnesses
we have had so far that has given evidence, including you people
today, has focused on the need to establish some form of electronic
tracking system of record of achievement, which I think is definitely
going to be one of the recommendations we come out with. I was
intrigued with what you said earlier, Professor John, about the
concept of a passport that prisoners would take with them when
they moved from one establishment to another. Do you see that
learning passport as supplementary to the electronic transfer
of information, or would that form the basis of this system?
Professor John: I would see it
very much as being integrated within it. It seems to me that there
must be ownership of that instrument by the learners themselves.
In addition to it being a management tool passed around the system
electronically, the individual learner must have access to it
in some form, I would suspect it would be mainly hard copy, in
order that they could celebrate their achievements as well as
have an indication as to how it tallies with whatever individual
learning plan or sentencing plan they may have had.
Ms Lyon: There is a precedent
for that at Wandsworth. We were working alongside the St Giles
Trust in Wandsworth Prison and they are training prisoners to
be housing advisers and they are getting NVQ qualifications in
housing advice. We introduced a system of prisoner passports there,
which has been picked up in one or two of the women's prisons,
I understand, but it is not a system yet in the whole Prison Service.
Q416 Chairman: It has been an extremely
good session and the Committee has valued your evidence a great
deal. Is there anything that any of you would like to say that
you think we have missed? You have the usual offer, of course,
that we would like to remain in communication with you, and if
you are on the tube or the bus or driving, or wherever you are
going, and you think "I wish I'd said that to the Committee,"
do e-mail us, write to us, phone us, but is there anything of
a burning nature that you need to tell us now?
Mr Brenchley: Two points, if I
might, Chairman, because they have not naturally slotted into
the conversation earlier on. The first one is that I know in your
journey around Scandinavia you discovered Internet access being
used quite widely.
Q417 Chairman: Yes, in Norway.
Mr Brenchley: My understanding
is that there are means of making this happen electronically,
there are one or two people who have explained to me how it might
work and I did not understand a word, but they know these things.
I would not want to leave the room without having used the word
"Internet", for research, and so on. The second one
was about the interface with the Resettlement and Probation Services.
I think the infrastructure of the Service at the moment does mean
that it is possible to envisage continuity in the learning experience
of a prisoner who is leaving prison through some of these other
organisations, in a way which probably they would not have been
able to before. For me, education in prison, in a sense, is just
part of the story, because it is education back into whatever
they do afterwards, which is going to consolidate it and put the
lid on it. From that point of view, I hope that the Committee
is entertaining the sorts of continuity back into resettlement
that will enable prisoners to change their lives in that way.
Chairman: It is interesting where different
sessions lead. I would like to have spent a little bit more time
on the relationship with drugs, the full package of after pursuit
and care, and a lot of other things. We did not get everything
today. As I say, it has been high quality evidence. Tom, I was
cross with the POA when we started, but that is not to undervalue
your evidence, which has been first-class and we have very much
enjoyed your performance. But do tell your Chairman and Chief
Executive that we want them here and we will ask them soon. Thank
you very much for your attendance.
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