Examination of Witnesses (Questions 952-959)
8 FEBRUARY 2005
MS EMMA
FLOOK, MS
LIZZIE FOSTER,
MS FRANCESCA
HINCHCLIFFE, MS
PAT SANDOM,
MR IAN
HINDS AND
MS KAREN
CHAFFEY
Q952 Chairman: Can I welcome you to the
Select Committee's hearing here in Feltham. We do not often meet
outside the House of Commons. We do occasionally but it is pretty
historic when we come to a young offenders' institution and take
formal evidence. I do warn you that everything you say will be
taken down and it will appear in our report, indeed even faster
I think it will be on the internet shortly. Could you quickly
introduce yourselves and we will introduce ourselves and then
we will get started. I will first say that we are pretty privileged
to have had so much help from yourselves and other people we have
met. We have met inmates and we have met some of the people that
manage the education and skills here and in other institutions.
We are beginning to be slightly dangerous because when a Select
Committee has taken enough evidence to know a bit about it they
start thinking they know everything. We have looked at three prisons
on the Isle of Wight. We have looked at Reading. We have been
to British Columbia and looked at three prisons there in Vancouver.
We have been to Finland and Norway. We have been around a bit.
We are getting to the end of our deliberations. The evidence we
have been taking has been pure gold but we have not in a formal
setting talked to many who deliver the teaching at the sharp end.
Ian, could I start with you.
Mr Hinds: Ian Hinds. I am Principal
Officer at Feltham, Head of the PE Department, and I have been
here for seven years, 22 years in the Service. I have been a PO
for the last 16 months.
Ms Chaffey: Karen Chaffey, Library
Resource Manager. I have worked at Feltham for 13 and a half years,
always in the capacity of the library. I started off as Library
Assistant.
Ms Sandom: Pat Sandom, I run the
industrial cleaning course here at Feltham and I have been here
since May 1991.
Ms Hinchcliff: I am Francesca
Hinchcliff. I have been at Feltham for a year and a half. I am
the ESOL tutor in education and that is about it for now.
Q953 Chairman: You must have Yorkshire
blood in you with a name like Hinchcliff.
Ms Hinchcliff: Yes, a little.
Q954 Chairman: Most of the MPs here are
from Yorkshire so you will get quite a welcome.
Ms Flook: Emma Flook, Numeracy
Co-ordinator. I have been in my role almost a year now. Prior
to that I was a Numeracy Tutor.
Ms Foster: Lizzie Foster, Literacy
Co-ordinator and I have been in post round about six months.
Chairman: So a nice range of experience
and diversity of backgrounds. Great, excellent. Jonathan?
Jonathan Shaw: Jonathan Shaw. I am a
Labour MP and I represent Chatham in Kent.
Chairman: Used to be a social worker
when he worked for a living!
Jonathan Shaw: Anything else you want
to say about me?
Helen Jones: Helen Jones. I am the Labour
MP for Warrington North.
Chairman: Teacher and lawyer.
Mr Chaytor: I am David Chaytor. I am
the Labour MP for Bury North.
Chairman: FE lecturer. I am Barry Sheerman.
I chair the Committee and I am the MP for Huddersfield. I used
to be a university teacher as well.
Mr Greenway: John Greenway, Conservative
MP for Ryedale in North Yorkshire. I did spend ten years on the
Home Affairs Select Committee when I first entered Parliament.
I was Shadow Prisons Minister and I have been here several times
before.
Chairman: He used to be a policeman.
Mr Greenway: I was a policeman for five
years, a long time ago. One of my sons is a policeman.
Jeff Ennis: Jeff Ennis. I am Labour Member
of Parliament for Barnsley East and I am an ex primary middle
school teacher.
Paul Holmes: Paul Holmes. I am the Liberal
Democrat MP for Chesterfield in Derbyshire and I was a secondary
school teacher.
Q955 Chairman: So you can see we are
all-Party and we reflect the House of Commons majority so there
are 11 Members, seven Labour, three Conservative, one Lib Dem.
That is why we are balanced like that. We are going to ask all
sorts of daft questions but is there anything any of you would
like to say to kick off how you view prison education and training
as it is today here. Is it good, bad, horrible, wonderful, average?
Mr Hinds: I think it has moved
on an awful lot. I have the biggest experience of prison service
having worked at Latchmere, Wandsworth and Feltham on two spells.
I arrived as Feltham got absolutely slated with a Chief Inspector's
report and it has come on leaps and bounds. It is fantastic. The
facilities are second to none, they are absolutely superb.
Q956 Chairman: One of the reasons we
chose to come here was because you turned round Feltham from a
time when it had something of a reputation five years ago and
whether that was well deserved or not everybody in the community
has said that we should go to Feltham, so you must be doing something
right.
Mr Hinds: I think there is an
issue. Resources is the toughest thing. People always start talking
about money but Feltham definitely benefited from being slated
in the way that it was and then getting the resources to put it
right. Once it had been recognised it was failing, people said
let's do something about it. There are probably other jails within
the Service that are not as high profile as we are that could
do with those resources now, but do not take it away from us.
Jonathan Shaw: Do not give it to anyone
else!
Q957 Mr Greenway: Would it be fair to
suggest that there were all those new residential blocks—or
they were new, they are about 18 years old now—but that
the culture did not change initially? The culture seems to me
to be significantly different to the last time I was here which
was probably about five or six years ago?
Mr Hinds: I think up until four
years ago Feltham had all these different units working independently.
You could walk around a unit and say "This is Partridge unit,"
and then you would go on to Quail and say, "This is different,
it operates in a different way." Now they are very similar
and the juvenile units operate to the same and the YOI units operate
to the same. That has definitely given a better balance across
the establishment.
Q958 Chairman: One of the things that
we are picking up as we talk to witnesses is that there is some
discussion about whether more prison education should be focused
on basic skills and targeting skills or whether that is not crowding
out other things you could do usefully for changing prisoners'
lives. Is there too much emphasis on basic skills, in your view?
Ms Sandom: I do not think it is
too much emphasis. They need basic skills. A lot of them arrive
at Feltham and their reading and writing is very, very poor. A
lot of them are kicked out of school at a very early age. I have
had lads through the courts who finished school when they were
ten years old.
Q959 Jonathan Shaw: Ten?
Ms Sandom: Yes because they are
so disruptive and the schools cannot handle them. They put them
out. They perhaps go once or twice a week to one of these centres
but they do not always turn up. They are thrown on the scrap heap.
It is like looking at a ten-year-old and saying, "You are
finished, you are nothing." They are not. They have abilities
there. Some of them do want a lot of help with their reading and
writing skills and some will accept that help.
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