Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 660-679)

17 NOVEMBER 2004

MR PHIL WHEATLEY, MR MARTIN NAREY AND MS SUSAN PEMBER OBE

  Q660 Chairman: When will the new contract range have been put in place?

  Ms Pember: We are evidencing work from the prototypes to see if we can have a different type of contract arrangement and we will look at which one is most appropriate and that is what we will run out in 2006.

  Q661 Chairman: Where are the prototypes being rolled out?

  Ms Pember: The prototypes are being rolled out in the North East, North West and the South West.

  Chairman: We must press on with education provision.

  Q662 Valerie Davey: In Bristol at the moment, we are just having the assessment of a scheme for targeting prolific offenders and, in that case, probation, police and the prison have come together, magnificently I believe, to target the 20% of offenders who are causing 80% of the crime and, in that way, really homing in on individual prisoners. I would extrapolate perhaps from the conversation but, in health, we are looking at individuals, so whether they are diabetic or whether they have a drugs problem or whatever, and perhaps in education we should be doing that more to look at whether a younger or older person is still dyslexic and has all those problems or whether they have very special needs. My first question is to Susan: in that first assessment, do you actually have people sufficiently qualified across the whole country to be doing an assessment at the level and in the depth that is necessary?

  Ms Pember: That is one of our goals. We have trained up people right across the country now to do early screening in order that they can identify straightaway if somebody has a literacy or numeracy problem. Then we have instituted something that we call a diagnostic assessment to see how severe their problem is and, from that, you can lead off a pathway to see whether they are dyslexic or they have some other form of specific learning difficulty. Our goal is to make sure that there are people trained up in each of the services or they can signpost to somebody who can do that for them and, once we have that individual diagnostic assessment of the individual, it transfers with them and we have an individual learning plan that goes with them and exactly what you were talking about with the joint project between probation and the police, we would want the learning and skills council to be in that from day one in order that we can actually help that individual and that is the learning plan that goes with them.

  Q663 Valerie Davey: So, under the new contracts, whenever they are finally let, that initial assessment would be a crucial element of it.

  Ms Pember: Yes.

  Q664 Valerie Davey: Secondly, the facility to follow through for those individuals to meet their special needs where they are seen.

  Ms Pember: Yes.

  Q665 Valerie Davey: Martin mentioned the additional funding which has come into the system which you are obviously pleased about. How have you prioritised the spending of that money within the education development?

  Mr Narey: When the money began to arrive in 1998, we agreed with ministers an educational strategy for prisons with an emphasis on basic skills and essentially we put almost all the new money into basic skills provision and we redirected some of the money which had been spent elsewhere on education also into basic skills because the primary mover on this—and I do not know whether you have seen the survey—is Alan Wells of the Basic Skills Agency who was very much a friend and supporter to us in that period told us that, from a survey carried out by the Basic Skills Agency, the overwhelming problem in the prison population was that two thirds of them were essentially ineligible for about 97% of jobs advertised in job centres. So, we do other things as well, as I mentioned at the beginning—sometimes people believe that we do nothing and that is not the case—but, overwhelmingly, we concentrate on the barriers to employability, so basic skills primarily.

  Q666 Valerie Davey: Is the money that we are talking about all revenue or is there a capital element or is that separate?

  Mr Narey: The figures I reported to you for adult offenders were entirely resource money. There has been also significant capital investment in the establishment of facilities for children. Most of them have had, for example, new educational blocks and we had a lot of money from the capital investment fund to improve education facilities in some adult prisons as well

  Q667 Valerie Davey: Is the revenue—and let us concentrate on the revenue—leading to more prisoners getting education or is it leading to the depth of quality which some prisoners on basic skills really need? What is happening? Where is it going?

  Mr Narey: It is leading to both as demonstrated by the statistics which I quoted you. There are very many more individuals in education: 39% of prisoners at the moment have some sort of participation in education. I would estimate that, five or seven years ago, that would have been in single figures. Also, the depth of education is much more. Before I did Phil's job, before I became Director General, I was responsible for education on the Prisons Board and, in 1997-98 when I looked at education, I found that we had hardly any outputs at all in terms of making any effect on individuals. There were still quite a few people in education but most of that education was largely recreational and, in terms of doing anything to change their life chances, there were hardly any. We now have these huge amount of progress and very significant levels of qualification in prison.

  Q668 Valerie Davey: One of the ways that would take this forward massively would be if prisoners could use the Internet. We did find in Norway that, for the first time, they had found a way of screening in order that it was educational provision by the network. Are we going to be able to develop through the Internet levels in attainments of education which would obviously take this forward amazingly for many, many prisoners?

  Mr Narey: The short answer to that is "yes". We are already giving prisoners access to the Internet in some establishments. We are being very, very careful. Both Phil and I will have truncated careers if we have individuals in prison who are getting access to paedophilia and matters such as that and also have truncated careers if victims are finding themselves being contacted through the net. So, we are taking it very carefully. A number of establishments have already done this and work which we are doing in partnership with the DfES I am confident will open up access to limited sites in a controlled way. I can tell you that the Home Secretary will want to be very convinced that we can be absolutely sure that the firewalls and everything that we can put in can work. If anyone has had the experience that I have of a 15-year old at home, you will notice how people can get round things unless you are really sophisticated and we must be very, very careful.

  Q669 Chairman: There is good international experience now in the United States, Norway and other places that is showing that it can be done.

  Mr Narey: Indeed and we have not been ignoring it. Until very recently, with Learn Direct, we used the Learn Direct Intranet, CD-based learning, and that has been of variable success but I think it is accepted that we need to go further though I just want to be absolutely sure and Phil and I will want to convince the Home Secretary that this is not going to cause public embarrassment.

  Valerie Davey: I am sure this Committee would endorse everything you have said provided we know that there is also at the same time exploration of what will be for many people in the future, I am sure, something of very great value.

  Q670 Mr Chaytor: Just returning to the question of the emphasis on basic skills training, one of the Government's new policies for adult skills as a whole is the Level 2 entitlement which will give free tuition for Level 2 courses for all adults who do not have it. What are the implications of that for prisoner education? Will offenders both within prisons and on release be eligible for Level 2 entitlement and what are the implications for your budgets if the whole budget has been skewed towards basic skills training over the last few years?

  Ms Pember: The Level 2 has been piloted in two geographical areas of the learning skills council as we speak and it is an expectation that it will be rolled out next year and that is exactly what the new service has to cover especially for those who are going to serve their sentence in the community because they will be entitled to free Level 2 training and that is the funding that Martin was saying that offenders need to get access to. So, yes, there will be a priority group there. For the work that we have been doing on basic skills, we have been getting ready for the launch of the Level 2 entitlement because if you are an individual who has luggage of the past about school, you actually do not really want to do basic skills. We have had to do a great deal of persuasion nationally in prisons and outside of prisons for people to take the basic skills tuition up but they do actually want to get Level 2 qualification. So, the work that we have been doing is to secure materials that embed literacy and numeracy in the level 2 activity in order that it is cost effective because you are doing the two at once. However, it does mean more training for the individuals who are actually teaching this activity and that is the work that we have to do for the future.

  Q671 Chairman: That is one of the problems though, is it not? I know that you are very highly respected people in this field and we are learning a great deal from this, but what worries me about some of the answers we are getting is that they do not really square with the rest of the evidence we have had. You have read some of the transcripts presumably. Some of the evidence we have been given from real prisons, governors in prisons and people working in prisons, say that the situation is much less coherent and less satisfactory than you seem to be suggesting and they say they are really struggling. One of the things they are struggling with is in regard to the quality of competencies available to them in a prison. I think, Martin, it was you who cut down the training period for a prison officer to something like six or seven weeks. In the Scandinavian countries we visited, it is a year. You have a churn of prison officers which is horrific.

  Mr Narey: No, we certainly do not, Chairman.

  Q672 Chairman: Just wait a minute. That is what we hear. There is low-level qualification amongst prison officers themselves. So, to be able to train them up to be part of a learning environment seems to be challenging. Secondly, the people running the workshops are much lower educated then we would hope they would be. Thirdly, even the teachers themselves have pretty rusty skills that need upgrading. That is what we are hearing. The three of you seem to be saying, "Chairman and Committee, come on, don't believe all those voices, everything is all right." Is that not what you are saying?

  Mr Narey: Chairman, the reason I made the opening statement that I did was because I did spend last night reading some of the transcripts and some of them frankly horrified me. I thought they were misleading.

  Q673 Chairman: And even your friends.

  Mr Narey: I do not mind saying publicly that I was horrified by what one of them, someone who I greatly admire, Mike Newell, the Governor of Durham, who has been a friend of mine for 20 years, had to say and I think he is quite wrong. I would simply urge you to speak to as many governors as possible. I am delighted that you are going to visit a prison and I would urge you to call governors at random. Governors are committed to this and they have a grip on this. We could not possibly be producing the qualifications that we are if this were not being taken seriously.

  Q674 Chairman: Martin, come back to that one thing: do you really think that six/seven weeks of training for a prison officer is enough, with no qualifications?

  Mr Narey: This is Mr Wheatley's business now. I am not backing out and I will happily come back to it but I should let Phil speak to this.

  Mr Wheatley: It is actually eight weeks of training; it used to be 11 weeks of training. The part of training we removed was primarily the fitness training because we used to do lots of PE with staff and drill which we seemed at one point to think was good for prison officers. Actually, because we are recruiting people following a fitness test, we know they are fit and we do not need to make them super fit just in training, it does not make any sense, and we thought that the drill added nothing to the learning and we were able to take those things out and leave the real training of a prison officer intact without reducing any of that training. It is eight weeks of training; it is not as long as they do in Scandinavia but it gives prison officers the basics of training to take out in order that they can begin to do their job and a great deal of the learning is intended to be done on the job. It is part of the probation period and further training is done with prison officers. On average, we are doing about six days of training per member of staff and we keep on trying to improve the skills of our staff.

  Q675 Chairman: There are those who have said to us, "Look, they are having a short training period and they never get any more training except training in restraint".

  Mr Wheatley: That simply is not true. You are right, they do get training in restraint and it is very important that they do, actually.

  Q676 Chairman: But nothing else?

  Mr Wheatley: They get training in suicide, they get training in diversity, they get training for specific jobs for staff. If they go into reception and into observation and classification work, they get trained for that. This is not to say that every prison officer is spending most of their time in training but there is further training for staff and there has to be to make the prisons work. Similarly, when somebody says there is a high resignation rate, actually, there is a 2.2% resignation rate for reasons other than retirement in prison officers. That is tremendously low. It is a problem to me sometimes that actually the rate at which staff churn, to use that phrase again, is very low which makes coping with any budget reductions difficult because actually staff do not leave in very large numbers. So, the idea that we have an enormous churn of prison officers, heaven knows where that came from but it is not reality. It has been—and I have the figures in front of me—round about 2.2% since March 2002 which is where my figures go back to. It has been as low as 2.1% and no higher than 2.2%, which is what it currently is.

  Q677 Chairman: That is very interesting compared to the other information we have been given.

  Mr Wheatley: I suspect that you have not been told the truth.

  Chairman: We will now move on to key performance targets.

  Q678 Paul Holmes: In a way, it is carrying on from the theme we have just been talking about regarding the possible gaps between perception and reality between the official figures and what is actually going on. People would say that performance targets can be very useful for driving up performance and for measuring success and people would also say that there can be quite a false image of what is happening as well. As somebody who was a teacher for a long time, I can give you chapter and verse on how schools manipulate information in order that they hit the targets and I was speaking to somebody yesterday who works in the Accident & Emergency Department at my local hospital who was complaining about the very distorting effect of the four hour waiting list target on A&E provision. I think there is a set of examples like that from the Prison Service. We have heard a great deal from Phil and Martin regarding the success rates they have. They are getting more prisoners into education through basic skills etcetera, etcetera. The Prison Reform Trust has said that the achievement of targets in basic skills masks very significant shortcomings and the opportunities for learning available to all prisoners across the board. How do you reconcile that?

  Mr Narey: I read the evidence from Juliet Lyon and I am afraid that I think it was partial. She did not tell you about the numbers of students doing Open University work; she did not tell you the number of people doing distance learning funded through the Prison Education Trust which we fund in the first place; she did not mention people on day release. It is simply not the case that this is only basic skills. It is primarily basic skills because it is the greatest challenge we face but there is a great deal of other education as well. I do not know if any of you ever get to see the annual Koestler event launched recently at Wormwood Scrubs to which I went a few weeks ago. That is just a representation of what prisoners are achieving in the arts. We have 20 writer-in-residence schemes. There is a great deal more than basic skills. It is true and we are not ashamed to say that basic skills remains a priority because that is the best possible way that we might reduce criminality.

  Q679 Paul Holmes: Is it still reaching the majority. I think Phil was saying earlier on that there is no problem about prisoners getting access to education, there is no problem about them being able to earn more money for phone cards by doing work rather than undergoing education and yet we have been told, both in the prisons we visited and by evidence we have been given, that there are actually big barriers to prisoners. The money factor is a big barrier because, if it is the only source of money for cigarettes and phone cards, they will go and do the work, as boring and repetitive as it is, that pays them slightly more. We have heard that a number of prisoners cannot get access to education courses because there are not the spaces for them. Martin, you yourself said that about 35% are in education which means that 65% are not.

  Mr Wheatley: I certainly would not claim that every prisoner who wants to have education will have as much education as they would like to have. What we have is much greater resources than we used to have, primarily targeted on basic skills, which we are trying to make sure that we use to maximum effect. We are certainly well short of resourcing for every prisoner who wanted to do education and many do for the reasons I set out earlier and they are not bad reasons, prisoners want to improve themselves in prison. If we set out to achieve that, that would cost the country a great deal more money and, at the moment, that is not being allocated to us in that way. I think trying to hit a standard in which we met absolutely the express needs of every prisoner would be quite difficult to defend. There will be some prisoners who have basic skills problems who are not motivated to attack those problems as I think we have brought out already and you have to be motivated to attack those problems. We are filling the educational places for which we have funding for people who have skills deficits with which we are managing to deal. I am not trying to say that this is perfection but I am saying that we are using the resources to good effect to do what we are meant to be doing and the results show that 60,000 basic skills qualifications this year will be a substantial improvement on the previous year. It is pretty good going. It is a large percentage of the Government's overall target. I think we are using the resources to good effect, not that governors are not finding the role difficult as they cope with lots of pressures on them and not that prisoners are getting everything that they want because they are not.


 
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