Examination of Witness (Questions 504-519)
10 NOVEMBER 2004
MR MICHAEL
NEWELL
Q504 Chairman: Welcome to the Committee;
you have been very patient. I hope you understand. We have overrun
a bit but that should not stop us giving you plenty of time to
answer some of our questions. I gave Anne Owers a chance to say
a few opening words. Is there anything you would like to say to
the Committee to get us started or do you want to go straight
to questions?
Mr Newell: I would like to open
by saying that from a governor's perspective education, in the
list of areas, is the one that most governors feel that they have
least control of as the system has changed over the variety of
aspects of running a prison and their regimes. I think it is moving
in the right direction. There is a huge transition problem at
the moment which means that we have not got the clarity of what
we want from education and we have effectively not got the resources
and the will to make it happen.
Q505 Chairman: Thank you for that. You
are a very distinguished governor with a remarkable record in
the work that you have done with the Prison Governors Association.
I was surprised to see that you trained as a chemical engineer
originally.
Mr Newell: Yes. All learning and
skills are valuable.
Q506 Chairman: Absolutely. Can I open
by saying that the thing that comes through and astonishes us
is that if you were running any other enterprise, commercial or
public, to get the sort of staff turnover you have at governor
level is amazing. How do you run an establishment where the average
length of stay of a governor is 15 months? How do you do that
effectively if you have got such turmoil, if you take it that
the men and women you are managing have a 60% drop-out rate within
two years? How do you run an organisation with that amount of
instability?
Mr Newell: One of the difficulties
is that there is a difference between the amount of instability
which is being created by history; in other words, the way that
we went about recruitment and standards of our staff over the
years, and the failure to look now to introducing stability. Governors
move very frequently because we allow them to move very frequently.
It is as simple as that. We do not career manage any of our staff
now, so there are no governors where they know what they are doing
next. Basically what they do is read adverts, and if they see
something that they think is better a week after they have taken
on a job and responsibility they go and apply for it. That is
why we have this chaos almost in the movement of governors, simply
because we make no attempt to control it and we think that that
is good for equal opportunities. We feel that that is appropriate
for a modern approach to our staff, but unfortunately it has this
catastrophic effect on the management of institutions.
Q507 Chairman: What about the turnover
in prison officers, the men and women who work for you?
Mr Newell: That is very variable.
That is geographical. That is about where the job of a prison
officer stands in the pecking order of the particular community
or region. For example, in my part of the world the turnover of
prison officers is quite low, in the north east. There are a lot
of people with backgrounds in shipbuilding and mining and when
those industries collapsed they moved into more stable employment
as they saw it. If you take London, it is a very competitive market
and there is a very high turnover. That would also be reflected
in other parts of the country. Milton Keynes, which I understand
has virtually zero unemployment, has great difficulties in recruiting
for that very reason. A lot depends on how it is seen in relation
to other job opportunities in that area. It is not a picture that
is the same throughout the country.
Q508 Chairman: The witness that gave
evidence last week said that by and large the starting rate for
a prison officer was about £22,000 with no formal qualifications
and a six-week training period. That is about the starting salary
for a fully qualified teacher. That is a remarkable salary level
for someone with very few qualifications, is it not?
Mr Newell: Yes, it is. I do not
know where the starting salary of £22,000 is. I assume that
is in London with London weighting arrangements on or additional
payments because the starting salary for a new entrant prison
officer is round about £16,000 out in the regions without
any additions.
Q509 Mr Turner: My first question, Mr
Newell, is about your institution and the rest will be addressed
to your Association. How many prisoners in your prison cannot
read and how long does it take you to teach one to do so?
Mr Newell: It is not easy to answer
it in those terms. The number of prisoners who can read and write
to adequate standards within my establishment is very similar
to the number in any other establishment which is receiving direct
from the courts, and that puts it at round about the 60% figure
where there are difficulties at Level 1 or 2. In relation to how
long it takes to teach them and how we rectify the problem, as
was given in earlier evidence, as a local prison people are generally
moving on from us. We have a lot of starters but very few completers
in the process, although we do meet all our targets for the number
of basic skills that we deliver at Level 1 and Level 2. It is
impossible to say how long it takes. There is a large number of
things that we could do better, both in my institution and nationally,
to ensure that we get a handle on the process.
Q510 Mr Turner: But you must have some
idea as a manager how many hours you need to put a prisoner in
front of an instructor on average.
Mr Newell: No. I do not think
an educationalist would take that viewpoint. I think it is a very
dangerous approach to suggest that there is a certain level of
saturation necessary, that it is an indoctrination process. What
we do know with all the prisoners in custody is that they have
been failed in the community by the system and that the learning
strategies that have been employed have not worked. As I said,
we are dealing with a very damaged group and we have to be a great
deal more inventive about how we engage them. How long does it
take? The key question is, how long does it take to engage that
prisoner in believing that education is positive and helpful and
will do a number of things for them in their lives? For example,
we often use PE as that approach. You will get someone who will
work effectively with PE and then will want to move on and take
a certificate but the barrier to the certificate, of course, is
that their ability to read and write is not of the necessary standard.
By engaging them in that way they see a purpose to the education
which they take to support it. I think it would be wholly wrong
of us simply to say, "It takes six hours". How long
does it take to train a prison officer is a more interesting question
which we may come back to.
Q511 Mr Turner: Why do 20% of prisoners
arrive late for education?
Mr Newell: I think that this is
a really important issue that has to be tackled across the service.
A great deal of it has to do with the way that we have already
signed up to contracts and who is interested. Quite simply, we
signed a contract for teaching hours. That is a very bad way to
sign a contract because, from the contractor's point of view,
as long as they are not the people responsible for the fact that
there was a reduction in teaching hours they have fulfilled their
contract. They do not have any outcome; they therefore do not
have any interest, and I mean that not in the way of saying that
teachers generally do not care. They do not have any interest
in whether anybody turns up to classes today and certainly what
time they turn up to them. Equally, when you look at it in prison
management terms, we have not been able to be absolutely clear
about raising the profile of education within prisons. It was
mentioned earlier that there was an issue about security and its
balance. When you listen to the messages that come centrally from
the Prison Service then education does not get into its appropriate
place. I think if you asked any member of staff they do not know
who leads education in the Prison Service. There is no champion.
Q512 Mr Turner: This does bring on my
next question, which is, who are you personally responsible to
for your prisoners' learning?
Mr Newell: I am responsible to
my area manager, my director, in the same way as I am for everything
that takes place in the establishment.
Q513 Mr Turner: You would expect a higher
level of engagement in your success or otherwise in achieving
that learning from your area manager and your director?
Mr Newell: Yes. I would expect
someone to be asking me for a plan. The interesting thing is that
I have a whole series of business plans, action plans, strategic
plans, everything that you could possibly think of for every aspect
of the development of my prison except education.
Q514 Mr Turner: And that is the responsibility
of the Prison Service, that you are not asked for that. Is it
your responsibility that you have not done one?
Mr Newell: I think it is my responsibility
that I have not done one in the way that perhaps you are thinking.
What I have is that I know what I want from prison education but
I have no mechanism for doing it.
Q515 Mr Turner: Why is that, because
you have got instructors who work to you and you have got a contractor
who is supposed to deliver a service for your prison? Why can
you not manage them?
Mr Newell: First of all, in terms
of the contractor and the service, it is not let by me, none of
the measures within that contract is set by me, none of the mechanisms.
They are all set by central contract negotiation. In many cases
the original contracting process produced for prison governors
education providers that they had never heard of.
Q516 Mr Turner: But it is not unusual
to have to manage something which you did not design?
Mr Newell: Indeed. In fact, you
get very good at it in the Prison Service. There are some real
difficulties about trying to manage the way that this contract
has moved around over the last four or five years. First, let
us go back to 1999. 1999-2000 was the change period. Prior to
that time the governor had a total budget and they had a budget
for education and they had a provider. They moved money around.
If I wanted to improve education I would find some funds. I would
come to some arrangement with my contractor and I would change
education and it was as simple as that.
Q517 Chairman: Or you could abolish it.
We went to an Isle of Wight prison and the new governor came and
he said, "Get rid of it all".
Mr Newell: Exactly, and obviously
that is not desirable. In my time as Governor of Hull I did the
opposite in putting an awful lot of additional money at that time
into education, and I was able to do that; I had the freedom to
do that. When the money moved to the Department for Education
and Skills and then subsequently now on through Learning and Skills
Councils, that ability was lost. At the moment I am trying to
get a very large amount of money at Durham because I started a
number of years ago on my plan. My plan was to create additional
facilities—accommodation. That has been delivered. My part
of the plan has been delivered. I could technically put 240 people
a day into education services but I have a contract that provides
me with 90. I have created the facilities but I do not have the
mechanism now to lever the additional funds that can match the
need for prisoners. Previously I would have been working on the
funding stream at the same time as working on the accommodation
stream, so it is not easy to manage. As I say, we need the ability
to add to it the necessary strands. We have talked about how damaged
these individuals are, how poorly they have been served perhaps
in previous attempts at education. We have single providers with
single approaches and single skills. We want multi-providers,
we want a contract which allows to us call off services as we
require them for the individual that we identify. When you look
at funding streams out in the community now it is quite interesting.
I can go and get some specialist funding for dyslexia because
that is how the funding stream takes place outside, but I cannot
add that into the system because the contract deals with a single
provider and they would have to sub-contract and get that from
that funding stream. It is hugely complex. It needs simplifying
and there needs to be more control back at local level to meet
local need. We have to find a way of doing that. It is working
exceptionally well with PCTs and it is interesting how the energy
for that has gone in, how the very simplistic approach of having
a health needs analysis, a mental health needs analysis, looking
at the standards, looking at what we do in the NHS and then moving
to deliver those, has worked exceptionally well, and there is
no energy in education.
Q518 Mr Turner: Presumably they have
exactly the same problems with innate churn and delivering them
to the right place at the right time. Perhaps you could—not
now—let us know why PCTs work and why education does not.
Mr Newell: Yes.
Q519 Helen Jones: We have heard quite
a bit of evidence about the impact of staffing problems on the
ability to deliver education, with prisoners sometimes arriving
late, problems with overcrowding in prisons and so on. Can you
tell the Committee what in your view the impact of staffing problems
is on the ability to deliver a proper prisoner education? Do you
have any suggestions for how we might improve matters? The second
one is more difficult than the first, I admit.
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