Examination of Witness (Questions 540-557)
10 NOVEMBER 2004
MR MICHAEL
NEWELL
Q540 Mr Chaytor: But there will be some
grade E managers who are on the senior management teams in certain
prisons?
Mr Newell: Yes.
Q541 Mr Chaytor: On your slimmed down
management team who then has the responsibility for regimes?
Mr Newell: The Director of Regimes.
Q542 Mr Chaytor: So the head of learning
and skills is directly accountable to the Director of Regimes?
Mr Newell: Yes.
Q543 Mr Chaytor: What do you think is
the picture generally with the role of the heads of learning and
skills? Are they making an impact and do you think this is a positive
development or is it a token gesture?
Mr Newell: No; I think they have
made a real impact. It is a very important move. I think when
we moved to contracting in the early stages one of the difficulties
was that there was no specialist adviser on the governor's team
any more. Effectively your head of education was working for the
contractor and that is not an ideal situation to have, so you
need some specialist on your team helping to develop and assess
and analyse and do your own self-audit of standards, which eventually
ALI will come and see you about, and we were satisfactory, I might
add, in Durham. I am sure you have checked that. I think they
have made a real contribution. I would like to see that continue.
I would not like to see it threatened by any of the arrangements.
What is disappearing and what has become less certain is the structure
of both of them now in that there was a whole series of area learning
and skills advisers and there was to some extent you might say
a management structure in that they had people to go to. It has
now become unclear what their relationship into the LSCs is and
we need to clarify that.
Q544 Mr Chaytor: What you are saying
is that the fact that the heads of learning and skills are fairly
low in the pecking order in your management team is not the totality
of the problem. The problem is in the Home Office structure in
that at the area manager level and above there is no strong strategic
direction about making prisons secure learning centres?
Mr Newell: Yes. I do not think
there is a strategic direction but I think that the move to the
local skills councils can expose local advisers so that they can
become the conduit, if we are not careful, to improving or not
improving education within any particular establishment. You have
to say that we do not know yet—the jury is still out—on
where LSCs stand with prison education in their pecking order.
As I say, there have been tremendous improvements in health through
PCTs. It has been hard work to get it up the agenda on local health,
and that has taken place by a mass of meetings and goodwill and
commitment on my side and by the Chief Executive of the PCT. I
do not see anything resembling that taking place in education.
Q545 Mr Chaytor: Through the LSCs?
Mr Newell: Yes.
Q546 Mr Chaytor: But this is part of
the problem, is it not, because you are saying there is no strategic
direction through the area board and the Home Office; you are
saying that in the individual establishments not all heads of
learning and skills are on the senior management team, and you
are saying that in the Learning and Skills Councils there is no
evidence that they are going to take it seriously, so we have
got a fragmentation three ways?
Mr Newell: Yes.
Q547 Mr Chaytor: And in none of the three
key forums is there anyone who has got the power or the clout
to move this up the agenda?
Mr Newell: That is the difficulty
about who is going to break some of the logjams or the different
interpretations which will take place in different parts of the
country within departments. For me there is no doubt: prison education
is improving. The underlying message is that it is getting better;
we are doing more, there are more opportunities and there are
more connections with the community. It is quite a positive message
and I would like to think that a lot of what is happening is the
transitional phase but, to use a good old prison term, it does
need gripping and gripping quite quickly.
Q548 Mr Chaytor: Finally, on the question
of your staff, there is no minimum qualification that people need
to apply for a job in a prison, and if they apply and they are
appointed they get a seven-week training scheme and then they
are a qualified prison officer?
Mr Newell: Yes.
Q549 Mr Chaytor: After that does your
prison provide any updated training for its officers? What are
the opportunities for professional development for the typical
prison officer?
Mr Newell: I think they are quite
poor. Let me go back to the start of that. Not only do we not
require qualifications. You will have noted that money is being
provided for basic skills for staff in that there is a recognition
that within those targets up to 2,000 staff could be funded to
Level 2 skills. That shows some of the pace. In terms of additional
training, most prisons have development programmes for their staff.
They are often overtaken by skill training which is necessary
for the job, and as people move around within jobs locally within
prison, there will be substantial training that will go with that
and will eat into the amount of their training time. Most individuals
are expected to follow up personal development which the service
will often fund but it is not good.
Q550 Mr Chaytor: That training also is
largely directed to improving their skills in respect of the traditional
functions of the secure functions of the prison rather than the
training and education functions of the prison?
Mr Newell: Yes, indeed.
Q551 Mr Pollard: You have mentioned several
times, Michael, about having a champion for education. You are
a very senior and experienced governor. You are also President
of the Association. Why can you not be that champion? Why can
you not set by example, as David was saying earlier on, by having
somebody on your board whose direct responsibility is education?
You are that man.
Mr Newell: I think that is slightly
unfair. I do champion a number of things when I have the opportunity.
There are so many things to champion. We need to share some of
them out. One of the things that I do a lot of championing for
is mental health in prisons and the inappropriate use of prisons
for mental health. It is not a role that I am going to take on.
I think it is a Prison Service responsibility, jointly, obviously,
with the DfES. In terms of my own structure and whether I decide
to put a head of learning and skills on my senior management team
or not, I am not certain about the token gestures that go with
that. If I were to say that it is showing leadership by putting
that person on my senior management team, that is a long way away
from my definition of leadership. My education inside gets an
enormous amount of support in moving towards better education
within Durham and I do not think that my individual learning and
skills adviser's position would be enhanced by being on the SMT
and then me taking no interest in it, which is the other side
of the coin.
Q552 Chairman: Who is in charge of the
quality of the work that your prisoners do in the workshops? Who
decides what contracts you get with outside providers and who
is the entrepreneur in your prison?
Mr Newell: It is effectively a
principal officer and a senior officer in industries that are
doing that. Yes, it is going out and engaging with the local community
and seeing what we can get. We have done some things and we have
been able to make progress but, as I am sure you will be aware,
we do not have an industrial strategy within the Prison Service
other than one which seems to be backward-looking, which is to
move to internal consumption, but that means bringing back sewing
machines rather than getting rid of sewing machines. One of my
proud achievements at Durham was to get rid of sewing machines
in the workshops because it seems to me that that is not going
to help gain jobs on release.
Q553 Chairman: What about pay? Why do
people get more pay to do routine work than to do education and
training?
Mr Newell: They do not in my place.
We have changed the pay system so that education is a flat rate
job just the same as the workshop is a flat rate job. The only
additions on those payments are related to performance, so you
might say we have performance-related pay for our prisoners. A
lot of it has been around because of piecework shops. A lot of
it has been around again in old structures. Education historically
sat there and no-one knows how to get additional funding into
their total pay budget for prisoners, so they do not know how
to make up the gap. There are lots of reasons but I think that
there are a number of things that we could do. I was very impressed
in America a number of years ago in the federal system about how
they made sure that all their jobs had educational qualifications
to them, so that every prisoner who came in who felt they were
of a low standard went on to education; they did not have any
option because there was not anything else available. We do not
seem to grasp the nettle well enough about is education compulsory
or is it voluntary? What we need to do is make sure that guidance
workers do guide. I have prisoners who come into custody time
and time again who end up as the dreaded wing cleaner who avoids
the education system and we give them a job and we let them opt
out. We need to think about our incentive structures for education
a great deal more without getting into compulsory, but if you
do not have anywhere else to go, compulsory, coercion, they are
quite close together. We need to do something about that and we
need to get better facilities; we need to get a more diverse approach
to delivery of education. Talk and chalk in 2004 for people who
did not think much of talk and chalk ten years ago when they were
going through the school system is not a way forward.
Q554 Jonathan Shaw: You heard earlier
from the inspectors that they favour this area based contracting
system. Is that something that your organisation supports?
Mr Newell: We would be quite happy
with an area based contracting approach. We were quite happy with
NOMS trying to move the National Federation of Management Services
to an area structure, a regional structure effectively, and we
wanted everything to be coterminous in that approach with the
government offices of region, constabularies, etc, and in a way
that if we could do that with education then, wherever the National
Offender Management Service is going to go for the future, at
least we will have put in place something which is not going to
run contrary to it. Because we do not have grand plans in some
of these areas one of the dangers is that we end up doing something
which we then have to damn well untangle at a later date. Regional
contracting would not be a bad idea and certainly would give us
the opportunity in some of the specialist areas to have more of
a call-off approach so that those who have got particular learning
disabilities we were able to respond to far more easily.
Q555 Chairman: How many prison areas
are there?
Mr Newell: There are 13 Prison
Service areas. There are nine regions plus Wales, and there are
42 Probation Services and 42 Chief Constables. We have to go some
way to get that right.
Q556 Chairman: Do you have a close relationship
with Durham University?
Mr Newell: Reasonable.
Q557 Chairman: Do you see Ken Coleman
reasonably frequently?
Mr Newell: Yes. We have a reasonable
relationship but the education we need they do not advertise that
they are the experts in.
Chairman: Thank you very much. It has
been a very useful session for us.
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