Examination of Witnesses (Questions 960-979)
8 FEBRUARY 2005
MS EMMA
FLOOK, MS
LIZZIE FOSTER,
MS FRANCESCA
HINCHCLIFFE, MS
PAT SANDOM,
MR IAN
HINDS AND
MS KAREN
CHAFFEY
Q960 Jeff Ennis: Has the emphasis on
basic skills crowded any other areas of the curriculum out, do
you think, particularly for the younger students under 16?
Ms Sandom: Some of those under
16 do not want to go to formal education. They like it more informal.
They consider they are adults. The law says they are children
but they are not. If you look at a six foot six lad who is 16
years of age you can hardly call him a child. He is a young adult,
an adolescent but he needs that help and he needs the encouragement
and more often than not the one-to-one is what works better rather
than sticking him in a class with half a dozen pupils. They can
come on to training which will benefit them when they get out
but also reading and writing skills and being able to add up,
basic mathematics. They actually need that.
Ms Flook: We have a numeracy tutor
who works alongside the workshops, the mechanics, the paints.
She withdraws them on a one-to-one basis and teaches numeracy
alongside those subjects, very much related to what they do.
Q961 Jonathan Shaw: Is that new?
Ms Flook: No.
Ms Sandom: She has been doing
it for quite some time. She used to do it group-wise and take
the whole group but found it worked better taking them away from
that group one-to-one.
Ms Flook: Giving them 20-minute
minute blasts and they do that every other day. That is hugely
beneficial for them.
Ms Chaffey: I think that will
come more into effect when you have the learning support assistants
helping out the tutors in the class and then they would do the
one-to-one.
Q962 Jonathan Shaw: We have heard lots
of good things about learning support assistants.
Ms Sandom: We could do with more
here so that every lad has access to an individual tutor for basic
skills.
Q963 Chairman: What do they do?
Ms Sandom: They do maths, they
do basic reading. There was one here that I had on a course who
could not read and write at all but with one-to-one tuition that
lad came on and could read. He was a traveller and had never been
to school in his life.
Q964 Jonathan Shaw: He was sitting in
your chair a little while ago.
Ms Sandom: It would not be Levi
Smith, would it?
Q965 Chairman: He told us he could not
read or write when he came here.
Ms Sandom: He could not read at
all. He could not recognise his name. The first thing they taught
him to do was to write his name and you looked at it and it looked
like a child's who had just started school but he is a young man.
Then he was a bit frightened of using reading and writing. He
was frightened of making a mistake. It certainly helped with the
one-to-one tuition he had. His tutor used to come over to my workshop,
take him away for half an hour and read with him and then put
him back.
Q966 Chairman: What qualifications do
the learning support assistants have?
Ms Sandom: I am not sure. Most
of them are volunteers.
Ms Foster: There is a range.
Ms Flook: They should all have
at least GCSE standard maths and English.
Ms Foster: Some of them have degrees,
they are educated and they tend to move on to do teacher training.
Ms Flook: They receive training
in-house.
Ms Chaffey: The LSAs though are
only towards the juveniles. When you have the YO side you have
to rely on VSE board of education volunteers and they are matched
on a one-to-one basis with students that way. You do not get LSAs
for young offenders.
Q967 Chairman: They deliver things like
the Toe by Toe? That works here, does it?
Ms Chaffey: It has been used.
Ms Foster: It is in evidence here.
Ms Chaffey: It is not used here
all the time but it has been used at times and I think it is still
used sometimes.
Ms Foster: There is an imbalance
on the YO side because the boys can go to VSE voluntarily or they
can be recommended, but very often we could do with support in
the class with the YOs regarding their basic skills. Juveniles
are covered with LSAs and that works extremely well but there
is an imbalance on the YO side.
Q968 Chairman: Can I ask a very simple
question. What is your relationship with prison officers? Are
they supportive of education? Do they understand as well as you
do that prison education is important and should be delivered?
Is it a good, harmonious working relationship or are there difficulties?
Ms Sandom: In the main it is quite
harmonious. You can talk to the officers. You can phone and talk
to the unit staff or even go over and see the unit staff and if
you have got a particular problem with a lad they are very supportive.
Q969 Chairman: One of the things we have
been worried about as a Committee is that prison officers in this
country as compared to other countries get a very short amount
of training. They only have to have a short written test, no qualifications
and a six to seven-week training period. That is very, very short
for most professions. Do prison officers continue to be trained?
Ms Sandom: They receive training
all the time. You would know more on that.
Q970 Chairman: Anne Loveday told me there
was no more training once they had qualified as a POA except for
training in restraint.
Ms Sandom: They have training
all the way through. There is JASP training for juveniles.
Mr Hinds: You are absolutely right
because the current new officers course is five weeks on the college
and the rest of it then within the home establishment. Of those
five weeks on the college, one week of that is control and restraint,
so 20% of their knowledge is control and restraint, which is a
vast percentage of a prison officer's training.
Ms Chaffey: My partner is SO Training
in here. He has been in the Prison Service for about 16 years.
The training has come down from when he started. He would be one
of the first to admit that. You have an eight-week training course
and you get five weeks of training in the classroom and three
down weeks where you are at your establishments. You get control
and restraint which is done every year and then they do JASP training
as well working in this prison. The other ones who work at Wormwood
Scrubs and Wandsworth will not get that because they are not working
with juveniles.
Q971 Jeff Ennis: Going back to the imbalance
in funding in terms of the juveniles getting better funding levels
and more learning assistants, et cetera, is that more of an attraction
to tutors to teach in that age range, as it were?
Ms Foster: Although Feltham A
and B is on split sites it is one educational department and at
any given time we can teach on either side.
Q972 Jeff Ennis: So there is no attraction
one over the other?
Ms Foster: No because although
we have staff that have been on A for some time you can be called
to teach on B, so there is no real attraction and I would say
there is no real incentive.
Ms Sandom: On workshops we mix
the two together. We have them from A or B. Often that works better
than having six juveniles or six YOs.
Q973 Jeff Ennis: Do you think that the
mixed regime could be extended across the whole curriculum or
not?
Ms Sandom: I do not know. The
YJB prefer them kept separate, do they not, for most of their
classes and what have you. We find it works in the workshop better
because the older ones tend to say to the younger ones, "Don't
act stupid because we are going to be sent back." It tends
to work that way. There is not a great deal of difference in their
ages anyway.
Ms Chaffey: When I started we
used to have class visits into the library and there was mixed
education then. It was not split up into the juveniles and YOs
and the class as a whole is fine and there is no problem with
the mixture of ages.
Ms Sandom: We have not had a problem.
It is much better. We are a mixed world, are we not, a mixed society.
Some of them are 16 to 18 but the moment they are 18 they are
considered to be an adult and they go on to B side, but there
is not a lot of difference. One lad could be 17 years and nine
months and the other one just 18 but we put one on one side and
one on the other. There is only a three-month difference in their
age group.
Q974 Chairman: They are legally children
until they are 18.
Ms Sandom: I know.
Ms Chaffey: I think it highlights
the differences in education on either side because the education
is not the same on either side. The education department would
be the first to admit that.
Ms Foster: How do you mean not
the same?
Ms Chaffey: There are more resources
available for the juvenile side than the YO side.
Ms Foster: Yes, I would agree
with that.
Q975 Chairman: What would you want to
change in the system that we have at the moment? How would you
improve it?
Ms Foster: For me personally as
a teacher within this establishment I would like to see more support
for YOs. It is heavily weighted to the juveniles. If we are looking
at 26 as being a kind of cut-off point when boys seem to reduce
their offending dramatically or stop, I think there needs to be
input from 18 to 22 in establishments that take them to 22. To
me it seems false economy to not support the YO side as regards
their basic skills. I think it is crucial that if they are here
until they are 22, for the ones that come out of here or they
go somewhere else but they are finishing a shorter sentence, there
needs to be an input into that side as well.
Q976 Helen Jones: Francesca, how many
different languages are you dealing with here most of the time?
What proportion of young people come in here with English as a
second language or do not speak any English at all?
Ms Hinchcliff: On average I think
it is about 25% of the inmates in the establishment are foreign
nationals. That varies slightly month on month because last month
it was about 23%.
Q977 Helen Jones: We are only talking
rough figures.
Ms Hinchcliff: I could not give
you an exact percentage but probably around ten to 15% come in
with English as a second language who are unable to speak English
fluently, shall we say, who come into the ESOL classroom, and
on the YO side they tend to be a slightly large proportion than
the juvenile side but the numbers vary obviously depending on
the movement. So there are a substantial amount of lads who come
in here who need support with English. Obviously there are foreign
nationals who are Caribbean who come over and English is a language
they use as well as another quite fluently. It is still quite
a high proportion.
Mr Hinds: I think there is a huge
number of different languages now though. I am trying to remember
what it was before Christmas. It was 60 or 90 different languages
within the establishment at the time and that is phenomenal.
Ms Hinchcliff: Predominantly the
languages that are dealt with are East European—Romanian
and Albanian. We have quite a large proportion of those students
and from the former Soviet Union Eastern Bloc countries, the Balkan
states, North and West African regions, and some Far Eastern languages
as well. Of course, if you are looking to the Indian sub-continent
there are a vast number of languages there as well. There are
countless really, a lot.
Q978 Jonathan Shaw: As many as you want.
Ms Hinchcliff: Unfortunately I
cannot speak them all but I try.
Q979 Mr Greenway: This Learning and Skills
Needs Analysis, which now having raised it we might be able to
somehow or other put it in the evidence, is fascinating because
it suggested that 30% of those needing language assistance are
Albanian.
Ms Hinchcliff: There are an awful
lot of them, yes.
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