Examination of Witness (Questions 520-539)
10 NOVEMBER 2004
MR MICHAEL
NEWELL
Q520 Mr Newell: We have to go back to
the way that we deliver our staff for duties and activities within
our prisons. We still run some very old systems. The attendance
systems of prison officers are based on a 1987 agreement, Bulletin
8. It is wholly inflexible. Some of our prisons have begun to
move to systems of self-rostering but they still do it against
a background of a 17-year old agreement which is not fit for purpose.
When we look at the availability and needs of our staff, high
security prisons as an example, which obviously I have been governor
of for a number of years, getting staff on duty, getting them
through search procedures, getting them ready for the start of
the day probably can take, from first to last person, half an
hour out of the day. That has knock-on effects. Everything is
late in that process, but we have been too ambitious in what we
have said, so we have a core day for delivery which does not match
the reality of life. What we have are systems which do not allow
us to deliver, plus, if you take the point of where is the priority
in daily life within a prison, where is the profile of education,
how have we raised it, it is almost seen as flexible. If we are
15 minutes late, fine, we are 15 minutes late. We have to do more
about that in managerial accountability but we have to be able
to devise a way to get our staff on attendance in a way that allows
us to ensure that it is better delivered. Until we do that I think
we will be up against a situation where the hours of instructors,
the hours of teachers, the tradition of the Prison Service, all
move against how we would like to deliver education in the modern
day.
Q521 Helen Jones: Does that also relate
to the way in which we train prison officers? You will have heard
us talking before about the fact that there is a seven-week training
period for prison officers which seems to us incredibly short
for the job that they are being asked to do, which is a very difficult
and stressful job in many ways. Do you think that the training
prison officers get enables them to support education effectively
or even to understand the value of it within the system?
Mr Newell: The short answer to
that is no. I have been one who has constantly, on behalf of the
Association, raised our concerns about prison officer training,
which has been moving backwards for a number of years.
Q522 Chairman: Who moved it backwards?
Mr Newell: As an individual it
was the belief of the previous Director General that some of the
matters in training were not appropriate and that there was too
much time spent on a residential basis which was therefore deterring
people from joining the service who may not be able to attend
for lengthy residential periods. It was never anywhere near the
levels that we would expect, so the issue of where education gets
a mention even in current training, I do not know but I would
guess is not in there at all. There is no explanation, and you
are quite right that until we make people understand some of the
components of prison regimes and what we are trying to do from
the very first day that they join we are unlikely to improve.
Q523 Helen Jones: Is there any in-service
training which encourages prison officers to help offenders take
up educational opportunities? Does that exist at all that you
know of?
Mr Newell: First of all, there
are some qualifications that people can take to assist. Without
knowing the exact numbers, there are quite a number of staff in
the service who have taken those. They effectively train to be
the equivalent of, I guess, what we would call classroom assistants
or learning supporters. Each establishment will have its approach
to education where it will try and involve some uniformed staff
in education provision. For example, it may run an education block
where it provides to that education block different officers every
day who really are not interested in the task. Equally, it may
provide them from a core who are there, who are interested in
the learners, who do have some background training, who do feel
part of an education team and are actually there to help build
education and relate that back to wing. There are different approaches
by different governors. Training is lengthy. The standards are
going up. I am sure we will talk about reqs but the plight of
instructors is very serious now because of the standards.
Q524 Chairman: Tell us a bit more about
standards. The plight is—?
Mr Newell: If we are going to
do the sensible thing, which I think is to bring education and
training and skills and using our workshops all under one umbrella,
however we deliver that through contract, the vast majority of
the staff who are on Prison Service books are a very long way
away from the training requirements that would be necessary from
the education point of view to deliver those.
Q525 Helen Jones: If we could recommend
one thing that would help officers to engage more in prisoner
education what would it be?
Mr Newell: I would have to think
about that. Certainly we need to get something in training. There
needs to be an awareness, but I believe there needs to be a champion.
I know who is responsible for education in the Prison Service
but I am not certain that many other people do.
Helen Jones: If you have any further
thoughts on that perhaps you could let us know later on.
Q526 Chairman: Can I just push you on
that? Your learning and skills manager, is he or she on your management
team?
Mr Newell: No.
Q527 Chairman: Why not?
Mr Newell: I have a very small
senior management board of six people.
Q528 Chairman: You are complaining about
prioritising education and you have not even got this person on
your senior management team?
Mr Newell: I am not quite certain
if I have got the proper connections to monitor whether where
people sit, which is really an ethos issue in those terms, is
relevant. The reason that I have a senior management board of
six people is that I previously had a senior management team of
14 people with direct reports, including chaplain, psychologist,
educationalists, etc, and that was not working. They were not
getting the attention and we were not getting the strategic overview
and loads of people were coming to meetings who were totally bored
by nine-tenths of the content of those meetings, so we have adopted
something which is based on two operational directors. It is a
very small team but they are then the next direct links. My Director
of Regimes obviously takes on that matter on my behalf.
Q529 Mr Chaytor: Who is responsible for
education in the Prison Service? You said you knew the name of
this person but no-one else does.
Mr Newell: It is Peter Renge.
In Prison Board terms that is where it lies.
Q530 Jeff Ennis: I am fascinated by the
process undergone to decide which prisoner transfers from one
prison to another and the fact that Anne Owers pointed out that
education comes very low down the priority list in terms of deciding
whether one prisoner should go to which prison or whatever. What
are your views on that?
Mr Newell: We are always chasing
numbers; that is the difficulty. Whilst we have got a lull in
population at the moment it has been for a very long time simply
a case of moving prisoners into any available slot. Therefore,
on the list of things which would make someone available for transfer
or prevent them going education comes quite low down. If you have
to send 15 to the only 15 places in the country then obviously
they must meet the security category and they must meet some health
issues and so on.
Q531 Jeff Ennis: Is there a need to re-categorise
education further up the list in terms of transfers?
Mr Newell: Ideally, of course,
what you want is to get some of those population pressures off
and ensure that they remain off. We are going through a period
where we have some gap. What we do not know is whether that is
going to remain that way. I think that where people are on clearly
identified courses most governors do hold them, for example, if
they are doing some particular 12-week course, and obviously if
we are doing something in cognitive skills training or if we are
doing something which is a PE course or an education course which
has a start and finish. The problem is, obviously, that where
we are dealing with basic learning and skills there is no start
and finish to it. We put someone on education. They may have been
with us six weeks and doing fantastically well but they come up
for transfer. We have to look at that, but I would add that medical
holds, as PCTs have taken over in the service, are getting larger
in simple terms.
Q532 Jeff Ennis: In your submission in
paragraphs 25-27 you refer to the problems with aftercare, a consistent
approach to aftercare, which is the other line of questions I
pursued with Anne Owers. I floated the idea of an inspectorate
for aftercare. Do you think that is a goer and how would that
be managed to bring in some consistency of approach?
Mr Newell: The National Offender
Management Service, of course, is intended to provide exactly
that so that when the prisoner is released into the community
we are following the same plan handled by the same offender manager.
Whether we are going to get there and when we are going to get
there is a little more difficult to predict with the difficulties
that there have been with the National Offender Management Service
plans this year. There is no doubt that we do an awful lot of
good work in prisons, not just on education but on drugs as well
where there is a risk when people are released into the community.
What we should be doing is that when we contract education we
should be contracting for the release element of it. That should
be all part of the same contract. It seems to me absolutely pointless
to say that we do not have that continuity of care and the responsibility
remains with the organisation which is contracted in prison. That
is one of the things that we would also like to see in drugs.
Q533 Mr Chaytor: Mr Newell, the impression
that most of the Members of the Committee have from all the evidence
sessions and all the visits we have made is of a service that
is completely fragmented and chaotic with lack of leadership,
lack of accountability and where largely under-qualified staff
are forever sticking their fingers in the hole of the dyke. Is
that fair comment?
Mr Newell: It is not far off fair
comment. We make far too many excuses.
Q534 Mr Chaytor: We have had prisons
for a long time. Prisons are not new institutions. Education and
training in prison is not a new activity. How has this been allowed
to continue decade after decade? It seems to be only now that
there is some interest in this and some investment going into
it.
Mr Newell: Generally we have been
at the bottom of that pile for investment. We have seen over the
years prison education do its own thing to varying standards and
no-one has really been too bothered. When we moved to being taken
over by the DfES we had a real problem. The real problem is that
if we really do want to impose standards, if we do want to say
something about the appalling facilities in which we are conducting
education and the failure to have trained and prepared our staff,
there is a huge bill on it. The consequence of anything where
there is a huge bill is that you have not liked to take it on
in the way that you publish and lead a whole change of service
action plan. What is happening with the PCTs may be mirrored by
the Learning and Skills Councils; I do not know. It is certainly
nowhere near as advanced. We do make excuses but the consequence
of tackling this is that we have to spend some money.
Q535 Chairman: There has been substantial
money put into prison education in the last number of years.
Mr Newell: There has been a substantial
amount of money put in the last few years, undoubtedly. In fact,
both education and drugs and cognitive programmes have seen investment
sustained now for several years. However, what is not clear is
what level we are trying to fund for. In other words, we are not
clear about what the future standards are that we are aiming to
and what the funding gap is. There is lots of money going in but
there probably needs to be substantially more.
Q536 Mr Chaytor: Accepting your point
earlier that a lot of the governor's direct power and control
of budgets has shifted to PCTs and the LSCs, at the end of the
day the prison governor is crucial in determining the ethos of
the prison. What proportion of governors in English prisons today
attach the highest priority to education and training in the ethos
that they are trying to create?
Mr Newell: Probably those who
are in juvenile establishments, working to contracts with the
Youth Justice Board. The next level up would be those within young
offender establishments, the over-18s.
Q537 Mr Chaytor: And the mainstream adult
prisons?
Mr Newell: In the mainstream adult
prisons most governors on the whole are driven by what their area
manager is shouting the loudest about: the targets. Let us get
real. That is what happens. I am not going to stand up in my establishment
and say that we really have to do something about education when
actually my area manager says, "You really have to do something
about security".
Q538 Mr Chaytor: Can we come back to
this question of this post of heads of learning and skills? In
your submission you say that these people are management grade
E, so this is uniform across the country?
Mr Newell: Yes.
Q539 Mr Chaytor: Presumably there are
five management grades, are there, A to E?
Mr Newell: No; F covers our grades
as well.
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