Examination of Witnesses (Questions 440-459)
10 NOVEMBER 2004
MS ANNE
OWERS, MR
DAVID SINGLETON,
MR BILL
MASSAM, MR
DAVID SHERLOCK
AND MS
JEN WALTERS
Q440 Jonathan Shaw: You said that in
terms of inspections, you look at the prisons holistically, every
part of them, but the Prison Service, do you look at education
across the piece? It feels like it is very much sort of piecemeal
where you have one prison and then another prison, but actually
what I and the Committee would be interested to hear is whether
the inspectorates have an overview.
Ms Owers: I think you are right,
that the process of inspecting prisons does mean that you get
an holistic view of a particular institution. Putting it all together
into a picture of what is happening in the system is more difficult
and we do not do a great deal of that, although that has happened.
Ofsted recently, for example, has done two thematics looking at
learning and skills, one about girls in education and one about
learning and skills, which have been very helpful. My remit, certainly
as it is at present, does not extend to inspecting the Prison
Service, so I cannot easily within my statutory remit go beyond
individual prisons to the central parts of the prison system.
ALI, I think, and Ofsted can more readily do that.
Q441 Jonathan Shaw: Is that a discussion
you have had either with the Director General of Prisons or the
Home Secretary?
Ms Owers: It is a discussion that
has been going on for quite a considerable time. There are, as
the Committee will probably know, some discussions going on at
the moment about the whole issue of inspectorates and I am not
sure, in what may be a reorganisation or may not, we are still
not sure what is going to happen what will happen about the remits
of different inspectorates.
Jonathan Shaw: Well, you say you are
not quite sure what is going to happen, but you will be part of
that process. What are you saying? What do you want to see happen?
Q442 Chairman: Are you referring to Number
Ten's Policy Unit's—
Ms Owers: Well, there have been
various proposals around criminal justice inspectorates including
Number Ten's proposals. There has been a lot of discussion about
the role of inspectorates. My view is that certainly on occasions
it would be helpful to be able to look at service-wide issues,
but I think it is important to recognise that the key role of
the Prisons Inspectorate is to report on the conditions and treatment
of those held in incarceration and I would not want that key role
to be diluted by too many other tasks that inevitably would not
be accompanied by the resources that you would need to do them
as well.
Q443 Jonathan Shaw: Can I hear from Mr
Singleton?
Mr Singleton: I think your analysis
is exactly right, if I may say so. I think there are two sorts
of questions. We ask a lot of questions about education in prisons
as elsewhere, but they fall into two categories, I think, clearly.
One is what is the quality of the education department in itself,
does it provide an adequate quality of provision, is it properly
managed, is the teaching okay and so on. The second question is
about whether it is functioning effectively as part of the service
or a system which is actually delivering what the young people
need. I think at the moment the answer to the first question is
slightly clearer than the answer to the second question. The answer
to the first question about the adequacy of the education department
has been that there has been quite a lot of progress. There are
better resources, there is more capital investment, more staff,
reinforced management and so on, but a lot more needs to be done.
In 2001, for example, we contributed to a report on basic skills
provision which described a very poor position in young offender
institutions. The Youth Justice Board has done a great deal about
that, but we would say, and we are about to say again, that not
enough has been done, but, nevertheless, there has been clear
progress which we have been able to track. On the second question,
which is essentially, are we effectively helping the young people
not to reoffend and, if so, how are we doing it, what's working
and what isn't, well, we think we are probably as far away as
ever from getting a clear answer to that and on the whole it looks
as though the fundamental difficulties about prison education
are not being overcome and they are the prior experience of the
young people themselves with very short custodial sentences, quite
often, it appears to us, not accompanied by effective support
in the community outside the custodial bit of the sentence, variation
in the priority given to education and difficulties in attracting
and retaining key staff.
Q444 Jonathan Shaw: If you were taking
a parallel with schools, for example, where a school is failing,
then Ofsted would put the school into `special measures'. Do you
go around prisons and put their education and training departments
in special measures?
Mr Singleton: Well, we do not,
but we do visit them very regularly.
Q445 Jonathan Shaw: Mr Sherlock says
he does?
Mr Sherlock: Well, we do essentially.
Q446 Jonathan Shaw: You say you do and
they do not?
Mr Sherlock: Would it be helpful
to give you some statistics?
Q447 Jonathan Shaw: We always like those!
Mr Sherlock: Last year ALI participated
in 33 inspections of prisons and young offender institutions.
In just over 60% of those, the overall education and training
provision was found to be inadequate to meet the reasonable needs
of those who were partaking of it and that is a substantially
higher proportion obviously than you would find outside the Prison
Service. Where that happened, we reinspected within 12 months.
On a pilot basis, we are also offering the services of the Provider
Development Unit, which is a unit of ALI, in order to assist them
to raise those standards. There is a lot of work being done in
order to shift the standard of education and training areas in
prisons and to upgrade them and in fact the Offender Learning
and Skills Unit has, I think, potentially a key role to play in
that, and that is certainly one of the steps forward that has
happened in the last few years with the transfer of the funding
for learning and skills to the Department for Education and Skills.
Q448 Jonathan Shaw: I am right in saying
that the Adult Learning Inspectorate and Ofsted have different
assessment frameworks and methodologies?
Mr Sherlock: No, you are not.
We all work to the Common Inspection Framework. What we have is
separate remits by age group.
Mr Massam: I just have one point
of clarification on that and I think it is an important point
really. We do not have a formal system for placing establishments
in special measures, but we do visit them on an annual basis.
There is an annual inspection programme and we do follow up the
recommendations made on an inspection the following year. ALI's
programme of visits is less frequent. They are on a three-yearly
cycle, I think, so it is slightly different in terms of emphasis.
Q449 Chairman: How many institutions
have you got? It is all right saying you visit every year, but
you have got a small number, all for the under-18s.
Mr Massam: That is right. Within
Ofsted we have responsibility for inspecting 14 young offender
institutions, male, and a changing number of female establishments.
We also inspect the secure training centres and the local authority
secure children's homes, so in total we would inspect a total
of 30 establishments a year.
Q450 Jonathan Shaw: One of the major
things that has been said time and again, and you said this to
us as well, Anne, is about changing the culture. Now, you go back
each year, keep going back, it improves a little bit, but not
significantly, but you cannot sort of slap a special measures
notice on the education and training, so if it were a school,
it is likely that the headteacher would be down the road, but
that does not happen with a governor, does it?
Ms Owers: It can do, but it is
not necessarily the solution. I think there is a structural issue
here about the levers that are there to improve education and
training in prisons both within the prison and also more generally
within the service and those are not yet sufficiently clear. The
second bit of my answer to the Chairman earlier was going to be
that I think prison governors now have a quite different job than
the one that prison governors used to have only five or ten years
ago. They are now managing some sophisticated and professional
services which they cannot directly influence, and that is true
now in their healthcare, which is now being run increasingly by
primary care trusts and, quite rightly, being professionalised,
and it is true in education with the heads of learning and skills.
Therefore, what they are now having to do is to manage almost
second-hand these properly professional, skilled services within
their prisons rather than simply being able to use the chain of
command and say, "Do this", and it gets done. That is
quite a different way of managing locally within prisons and it
also requires a more sophisticated approach from the Prison Service
generally and I do not think those things are yet in place either
nationally or locally.
Q451 Mr Gibb: So the governors do not
own the education then? You said that they did.
Ms Owers: They are responsible
for it, but they are not responsible for it in the way that traditionally
governors have been by saying to the person next down in the chain
of command, "You do it". They need to manage a contractor,
they need to negotiate with a head of learning and skills, they
will have the Offenders Learning and Skills Unit requiring things,
and, if they are a children's establishment, they will have the
Youth Justice Board requiring things. It is a much more sophisticated
management model.
Q452 Jonathan Shaw: You mentioned the
contractor. We know that Rex had the plug pulled on it all of
a sudden and we will be speaking to people about that next week.
What I would like to hear from the inspectors of prisons is your
view on what should replace Rex and how should prison education
be organised, as it once was with local colleges, so that there
is a local knowledge base as to the skills required and the labour
market that is available, or should it be done as it presently
is through the private contractors? I would like to hear the views
of all of you, please.
Mr Sherlock: I personally think
it was deeply regrettable that the Rex project was pulled. Certainly
the time it had taken had caused a great deal of damage, particularly
among civilian instructors on the training side, a number had
left and so forth. However, I suspect that most of that damage
had already been done at the point that it was withdrawn and there
was a good deal of potential, I think, from Rex to rationalise
a number of the problems which we had been finding, which both
Ofsted and ourselves had found over a number of years.
Q453 Chairman: David, in a sense you
are talking in a bit of code here. Tell us, what was Rex intended
to do?
Mr Sherlock: Rex was intended
to bring education and training together and plainly they needed
to be brought together. The two lines of contracting where prison
governors were responsible for the training side, the occupational
training, and colleges were dealing with education and never the
twain met—
Q454 Jonathan Shaw: Prison staff were
not very keen on that.
Mr Sherlock: Well, the staff never
met really. The training staff tended to be locked up in a workshop
with a group of prisoners all day and the education staff were
normally employees of a college with which they had very little
contact because it was at the other end of the country, so
you had a group of professionals who were deeply isolated both
from one another and from the professional infrastructure of which
they needed to be a part in the world outside. Now, Rex should
have dealt with a great deal of that; it should have allowed integrated
contracts to be formed for the whole of the education and training
regime and it would have allowed perhaps things to have been done
on an area basis so that rather than a single institution having
to go on its own with a limited group of skills at its disposal,
it might very well have been able to call on a much wider staff
pool, a much wider expertise on an area basis. I think there were
all kinds of possibilities with Rex which at the moment are in
abeyance and which need to be tackled again. At the moment we
are in a kind of Never-Never Land really.
Ms Walters: One of the issues
we have observed is that the responsibility for education and
training still really lies at a very local level and at the moment
we are involved in talking more with the area managers for prisons
to see how we can further that so that the responsibility can
be broadened, and the area managers are certainly very interested.
One thing that we have noted this year is the responsiveness and
the commitment of both governors and area managers in raising
standards of education and training and they are very interested
to come together.
Q455 Jonathan Shaw: You have given us
a commentary on Rex, but what is your view? What do you think
should replace the current regime?
Mr Sherlock: I think probably
some sort of area-based regime where learning and skills are seen
as an area activity, where staff can be transferred between establishments
in that area, where particular establishments specialise in particular
parts of the learning and skills regime so that, for example,
the local prisons which are, generally speaking, taking in people
for a very short time should specialise in initial assessment
rather than in training. Therefore, they do not need to have basic
skills targets to achieve as they need to be achieved on an area
basis, not on the individual establishment basis, with a proper
range of opportunities available within the area, properly staffed
with people moving between them. I think that is probably one
way forward. One of the things that I think you mentioned, Mr
Shaw, the system level, it seems to me that the system has not
been properly designed so far as the Prison Service is concerned
and that there are quite a lot of issues which heads of learning
and skills, however good they may be, however committed they may
be, however positive their governing governors might be in backing
them, cannot resolve on their own and that decisions need to be
taken about what needs to be done at an area level and about what
can only be done at a national level.
Q456 Jonathan Shaw: And what can be taken
at a prison level as well?
Mr Sherlock: Indeed, absolutely.
Q457 Jonathan Shaw: One of the complaints
from the heads of learning and skills is that they have no influence
whatsoever over the contract.
Mr Sherlock: That is right.
Q458 Jonathan Shaw: Do you think that
there should be flexibility within that contract for the heads
of learning and skills to be able to make adjustments according
to the prison population?
Mr Sherlock: Absolutely.
Q459 Jonathan Shaw: And that is achievable,
is it?
Mr Sherlock: In fact they have
quite substantial budgets now and very little choice over how
they might be spent and that does not seem very sensible.
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