Examination of Witnesses (Questions 900-919)
8 FEBRUARY 2005
MS ANNE
LOVEDAY, MR
DAYO ADEAGBO,
MS JANE
BIRCH, MR
VIC PMOEROY,
MR PETER
BLUNT AND
MS FIONA
DUNSDON
Q900 Chairman: There is a controversy
in British Columbia—and I will pass on to the rest of the
Committee in a moment—and there seemed to be two schools
of thought: one that wanted a broad, diverse range of education
provision and then there was another voice more from the non-educationalist,
from the prison administrators, that they wanted courses that
actually equip people to confront the problems that had got them
into prison in the first place—containment of violent behaviour,
addressing addiction, and a series of programmes. I certainly
came away from the experience of those prisons seeing quite a
big divide between addressing particular problems that a prisoner
has as against a broad range of education. Does that debate go
on here as well?
Ms Dunsdon: Yes, I think it does.
I think the way round that is having an individual learning plan
that is linked to the sentence plan that actually works properly.
I think that one of our greatest failings is the inability for
prisoners to take planning from one institution to the next. From
the administrative point of view, we work with not even 20th century
but 19th century administrative procedures and there can be a
potential clash. However, there does not need to be because both
things dovetail together with proper planning.
Mr Blunt: It is very rare that
you will find inmates with a single problem, they have got a multiplicity
of problems, so it is the assessment to find out what the issues
are and then an individual learning plan and sentence plan to
address all of them. In a prison in my own patch where we had
an inspection only a couple of weeks ago, the accommodation there
in a big local prison for 600 only enables 12% of the population
to access education, so there are other issues. It is not about
what we would like them to have; it is what it is possible for
them to have both in terms of funding and more and more now in
prisons, in terms of lack of accommodation. It is not just the
lack of accommodation in its totality, it is lack of accommodation
fit for purpose and certainly in all the practical skills there
is very little accommodation in education units left now because
when KPTs came in, as has already been said, a lot of the wider
curriculum was jettisoned and with that you lost the specialist
rooms.
Q901 Mr Greenway: We ought to put on
the record what we discovered this morning.
Ms Loveday: I think the model
here is completely different to what Fiona said but we have to
keep in mind that Fiona's is an adult male prison and we have
a mix of children and young offenders, and I think our model is
something to be copied, but it is not cheap, it is very expensive.
We have something like 31 hours of purposeful activity a week,
which includes education, training, the gym, life and social skills,
and addressing that offending behaviour. It is a complete holistic
mix of everything that they need. Just to defend literacy and
numeracy, what we have found is that if you put some people on
to practical courses, you are able to support them very, very
well with literacy and numeracy. Levi Smith, whom you have just
met, did not attend formal education classes. He got his literacy
and numeracy accreditation through support in the workshops. I
am all for raising standards in literacy and numeracy and I think
it is fantastic but you do not have to do it that way. Yes, you
do have to have special classes for people like foreign nationals
but there is a different way and there are different models around
that complement everything that you have been discussing here.
Mr Adeagbo: Just to confirm what
has been said, I have been to an adult prison and I have worked
at Pentonville so I share some of what you are saying but here
it is considerably different. For the juveniles we have been very
lucky to have funding from the Youth Justice Board and what we
have got is what you are talking about, whole areas of education
and learning. We even have evening classes and Saturday classes.
This is resource led. It is also training led. Some of our teachers
have had to retrain and some of the challenges there are still
to be looked at in terms of professional development of teachers.
Those areas will enable us to teach basic skills in a way that
should be done which is as skills for life, integrating it, embedding
it, and making sure it has a purpose for the learner not just
in a discrete way and that way it does not put them off, instead
it enhances them and they can benefit from that.
Ms Dunsdon: Can I just say I think
the profile for young people in prison is slightly different from
adults. With ours the part-time provision is what has come down
from the prison board as being ideal and it does allow for offending
behaviour work in the other half of the day. It is not as if people
are sitting festering in their cells for the other half of the
day. They are doing active courses like that.
Mr Pomeroy: Can I say from another
angle that at HMP The Verne we have a selection of things but
we also have a selection of perverse incentives. Quite often the
provision is led by those perverse incentives. For example, if
you attend an offending behaviour programme you are likely to
get released early. If you attend education then that does not
affect it so much. If I were a prisoner I would be going for the
best option to get out first not what is my best option to change
me. The other perverse incentive is pay and the fact is if you
work in a kitchen you are going to get favoured food or favoured
hours. Those incentives work against the individual's needs. What
happens is the prisoner is going for his wants and totally ignoring
his needs. Coupled with that is the perverse incentive for the
establishment that we still have to run the ship, feed the prisoners,
clean the prison, and so that drives against it as well and you
have got to get that balance right. The other thing that works
against us in a way is a bit jargonistic, I know, but it is the
parity of esteem between education and vocationalism. I think
education is what underpins vocationalism. Certainly something
that stimulated me in life was work and education became meaningful
to me. What we deliver in prison with Soskice and Finegold is
a low skill equilibrium for prisoners on release. We give them
low skills so they will get low pay when they are released.
Q902 Chairman: What was that?
Mr Pomerey: Research done by Soskice
and Finegold that said Britain was trapped in a low skill equilibrium
which is low skill/low pay and if we are to succeed with prisoners
we have to move to a medium skilled/medium pay which gets them
out of the benefit trap. The only way you get people out of the
benefit trap is to give them the ability to earn above the benefit,
which is at level three.
Ms Loveday: One of the really
interesting things that has happened—and this is exactly
what Vic is saying—you have all heard of Business in the
Community and we are building up very strong links with that and
although it is very small here because of our churn we have already
got people going to Cisco, which is next door to us, to do cookery.
We have got people out there that have got jobs in pubs doing
cookery. We have got an arrangement with Kwik-Fit coming on so
they can go and learn their tyre Kwik-Fit bit with the prospect
of possibly going to take an apprenticeship on release. Reading
have the Transco thing.
Q903 Chairman: Have you not got a sister
programme to that? They have got Transco and fitters?
Ms Loveday: We have got a Ford
motor mechanics workshop.
Q904 Chairman: It is the same sort of
programme, is it not?
Ms Loveday: Yes.
Q905 Chairman: How successful is that?
Ms Loveday: Not that successful
but not because there is no will there, but simply because we
have a 35,000 a year turnover here. We are only talking ever in
any of these things about one or two guys. On that point it is
successful, we do our very best, but we do sometimes transfer
people into Reading so they can go on the Transco course.
Q906 Paul Holmes: We were told this morning
that Ford has pulled out of it here now because you have only
got people very short term and they cannot get the continuation.
Ms Loveday: Ford has backed it.
They gave us a KA but ReMIT, which was a training arm of Ford
and is now a national training company in its own right, are in
here and they were funded by the Learning and Skills Council who
withdrew the funding because we could not show that the guys would
definitely go on to somewhere else to do an apprenticeship. However,
I have written right up to Martin Narey and I have heard that
I am going to get my funding back. We do short courses.
Q907 Paul Holmes: Vic talked about the
problem of low skills and we need medium and higher skills but
that requires a longer course. You have got a majority of prisoners
even in the adult prisons who are there for a relatively short
period of time so they cannot complete on the course. You have
talked a bit about trying to ensure that when they are out of
prison they can carry on the course but is not one obstacle to
that the fact that in England we move people around prisons so
much, often away from their home area? How do you get the continuity
between prison and college, for example?
Mr Pomeroy: What we are doing
currently is prototyping apprenticeships which means that the
Learning and Skills Council is breaking the rules about the age
of apprentices, about apprenticeships being in prison and not
just outside. The frameworks are there in the community but we
do not have access to them in prison. We will have 30 apprenticeships
in wood machining in industry. We will take people to The Verne.
If they are long-termers they will probably get transferred to
Leyhill so we will link that course to Leyhill so that we can
anticipate at the beginning of the sentence that they will be
released to Leyhill, they can then continue the course at Leyhill
and then get released which means they can then go into the industry
within the area and continue that apprenticeship. The beauty about
the framework is that in prisons we have artificial frameworks
that do not match to outside. If we have a formal apprenticeship
that is recognised by industry (because the issue outside is the
employers do not recognise in prison what we do)—and if
we do a formal apprenticeship in prison which is the same framework
as they accept outside and we progress it to the next prison where
possible and then into the community, then the employer will link
into that.
Q908 Paul Holmes: When you said "where
possible" if a prisoner from Parkhurst is going to somewhere
in the North of England, is it always or usually or not very often
possible to carry that apprenticeship through?
Mr Pomeroy: What you would have
to do is target those particular prisons to take that particular
learning journey so we are looking at a particular group that
would normally come to The Verne and go on to Leyhill because
you can track it and prisoners will go on that journey through
the prisons.
Q909 Paul Holmes: When we were on the
Isle of Wight in the three prisons there we got the impression
that it all seemed to be much more random than that and you could
not plan where the prisoners were coming from and where they were
going to and you could not plan through the system at all in that
way.
Ms Dunsdon: I think the reality
is that it is far more random because we are not planning sufficiently.
The individual learning plan and sentence plan is still not good
enough.
Ms Loveday: I think the population
explosion has a lot to answer for. An example in here is that
if there are 20 guys coming up to court that we know are coming
in here we have to get rid of 20. However good our individual
learning planning is and what we had planned for those guys, they
have to go where there is space.
Chairman: This is wonderful evidence
you are giving but we have a verbatim reporter and she is going
to mix your names up. It is not a seminar, it is formal evidence
and I would not want you to be misquoted.
Q910 Mr Chaytor: I was just going to
pick up Anne's point about you having to get rid of 20 people.
Where do they then go? If these 20 are not on remand here but
they have got sentences here they can be shifted mid-sentence
to somewhere else?
Ms Loveday: They can be shifted
anywhere. The worst scenario was about a year and a half ago when
we were shipping them from here up to Castington, which is next
door to Scotland.
Q911 Mr Chaytor: From the point of view
of the Service as a whole why is it not more efficient to send
the ones who are newly sentenced to the prisons that have the
vacancies.
Ms Loveday: I think the whole
idea of putting people into prisons like this is we are local
to London so that we serve the London area and try to keep them
as close to their families. People have already asked that question
and I think that is being discussed by the Youth Justice Board
and Juvenile Group whether it is efficient to do that.
Q912 Jonathan Shaw: And whether it promotes
a child's welfare?
Ms Dunsdon: Of course some prisoners
have to move for offending behaviour courses. We are a national
resource for sex offender treatment programmes and drug rehab
programmes, so we have prisoners from all over the country who
come to Littlehey specifically for those programmes.
Mr Adeagbo: I think there is a
need for research in this area because we have got two conflicting
issues: do you keep the young men or learners nearer home or do
you keep them away and give them stability over a period of time
where they can have re-settlement programmes and where the outcomes
might be better? Keeping them near their home may not be in their
best interests. We do not know. There is a need for serious research
into what we are doing because the turnover is really excruciating.
It is a challenge for us in teaching and learning and we have
to devise OCN ten-hour programmes to survive to give them any
meaningful outcome and accreditation. Somebody needs to do some
research.
Q913 Chairman: We did admire the British
Columbian system which had federal prisons for sentences over
two years and the local prisons for sentences that were below
two years. It seemed to introduce a stability to the system because
you had two kinds of prison experience. Can we touch on a thorny
issue (but I hope you will be as honest as you can on this) and
that is contracting the education provision outside. Some people
love it; some people hate it. There is certainly a lot of division
about it. Any comments on does it work better or would you like
to go back to having it provided in-house?
Mr Pomeroy: We are into change
which means our contract is up for renewal because the Learning
and Skills Council is taking over the contractual issues. I believe
it is beneficial. I believe it was a good move. I think it opens
up the possibility for prisoners to have access to external opportunities.
If people come in and out it stops isolation and institutionisation
of teachers. I believe with the new contracts it will make it
even more exciting by opening up financial frameworks which are
mainstream frameworks by getting into the contractors. With the
Learning and Skills Council it means that we link into their funding
methodologies. Currently—and Peter will probably tell you
in a minute—the contract is dead. We buy hours; and we cannot
buy anything but an hour. The problem with the current contract
is we buy an hour of education. If I want to deliver individual
needs I have got to seek to get a teacher to deliver those hours.
Under the funding methodology of the Learning and Skills Council
we can pull down additional funding to support each individual
learner. I think it is an exciting period of change.
Q914 Chairman: To push you on this, again
when we were in other countries, Norway in particular, what they
were trying to get is normalisation so that if somebody was in
prison they would have the Feltham Technical College providing
it so if someone left here who was a local prisoner they could
continue uninterrupted. I know that is an ideal and your offenders
come from all over the place but is there not a charm about being
related to an institution that would be available to them when
they leave?
Mr Pomeroy: That is if the prison
serves a local area. If you take Portland, 5% of Dorset is in
prison because we have three prisons on Portland with 2,000 prisoners
and a population of 8,000 so what we have got is a local college
and if we start doing that we will skew the community to be looking
more like Australia used to. Where you have got a local prison
in London where you can divert people back to the local area it
may be beneficial but certainly if you look at where we serve
in Dorset it would not work because it would resettle a load of
offenders straight into Dorset.
Q915 Chairman: Peter, you will be in
favour because you need the money, do you not?
Mr Blunt: There is not a lot of
that about! I have been involved in prison education now for 40
years in all sorts of guises and in all of that time prison education
has never been delivered in-house. It has always been in some
way contracted out. In the early days it was very, very loosely
contracted out but it has always been provided by outside people.
I dread the thought of it going in-house because then that would
be going against what everybody wants which is normality. We want
to tie in with what the provision is outside and certainly the
quality levels that exist outside and if it went in-house it would
be so incestuous. I know having spent 25 years at Prison Service
headquarters, I thought I was up-to-date and when I left the Service
and came into a college I realised how far I was out of date.
It is as stark as that. You soon get out of touch when you are
out of mainstream.
Mr Adeagbo: Can I just say the
new dispensation is only as good as the head of learning and skills
who is contracting. It is as good as the ethos and the culture
that has been built over a period of time. We have had four years
together and we can say we are moving in the right direction.
We have got to be very careful. It is a good ideal to have four
or five contractors delivering different areas of learning and
skills provided there is back-up and support for the head of learning
and skills to make the right choices.
Q916 Chairman: Why do so many classes
here get cancelled because of lack of staff?
Mr Adeagbo: We have difficulties
with staffing. Feltham, as you know, has not really been having
a very good name.
Q917 Chairman: ESA is supposed to be
providing educational staff. Why is there an absence of teachers
in the classroom?
Mr Adeagbo: The difficulties we
have is that prison education staff are different from college
staff. They are not easily transferable. The teaching principles
here are slightly different because we are dealing with different
learners and colleges are only beginning to realise that working
with juveniles who are disaffected from schools—
Q918 Chairman: When First Bus tells me
that they cannot run 15% of the buses in my constituency because
they cannot get the drivers, I find that no excuse at all. They
are contracted to supply transportation for my constituents and
they damn well should do it. I would have thought any contractor
if it is contracted should have coverage for sickness. We should
not have a situation where teachers just because it is a prison
establishment are able not to turn up without any cover.
Mr Blunt: Can I just say how we
deal with that in the South West. We used to have a difficult
staffing issue and to a certain extent we still do in one urban
area in Bristol where there is virtually no unemployment and therefore
recruitment is difficult. We realised about three years ago with
the expansion of education, certainly in FE where the Government
was encouraging more people to stay on, we were going to have
a staffing problem three years hence and we decided to look at
three things. The first thing we did was to go into partnership
with the University of Plymouth and we advertised publicly for
people who had professional backgrounds, who were not teachers,
but who might want to consider prison education, and we put on
PGCE courses and Cert Ed courses for those people. We have been
recruiting now and well over 100 have graduated from that scheme.
So they are home grown teachers. They did their teaching practice
in all our prisons and we gave them a 30-hour prison module which
was equivalent to 20 credits for an MA course in prison management
which we are also starting at the University. That was one thing.
We have home grown a lot of our teachers throughout the South
West and they are really outstanding. You can tell when you interview
the people who have not been through that compared with the people
who have been through that. There is a world of difference in
their knowledge and their skills and their understanding. When
you think about it, it is a very big decision to take for someone
outside to apply to become a prison teacher. They do not know
what goes on behind a high wall. This is one way of easing them
into it. It is part of normal teacher training with a specialism
for prison education so if they do not like it after that they
can still go back to mainstream. That is one way.
Q919 Chairman: That is a good, flexible,
innovative way to approach the problem. Why are your contractors
not doing that sort of thing?
Ms Loveday: They are under an
action plan. I think part of the problem is with the current contracts
they do not have any teeth. We are hoping with the new contracts
that they will have teeth.
Mr Adeagbo: There are other issues.
Ms Loveday: Slightly to support
the contractor, I have to say that the quality of teaching staff
that they do recruit is excellent but recruitment is slow simply
because of the area that we live in. Every other prison in this
area will say they have problems recruiting and also we have to
have enhanced security clearance here which takes sometimes three
weeks or sometimes it will take seven months. So you may have
half a dozen people lined up to support you but by the time you
have got them they have got jobs elsewhere.
Mr Blunt: They want a job now
not in seven months' time.
Ms Loveday: Exactly, that is one
of our problems.
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