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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 114-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
Monday 6 December 2004 MS CAROLINE NEVILLE, MR JOHN GAMBLE, MRS JANICE SHINER and MR CHRIS BARNHAM
LORD FILKIN CBE and PAUL GOGGINS MP Evidence heard in Public Questions 701 - 797
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Monday 6 December 2004 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Valerie Davey Jeff Ennis Mr Nick Gibb Paul Holmes Helen Jones Mr Andrew Turner ________________ Memoranda submitted by Department for Education and Skills and Learning and Skills Council
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ms Caroline Neville, National Director for Learning, and Mr John Gamble, Director of Adult Learning, Learning & Skills Council; Mrs Janice Shiner, Director-General, Lifelong Learning Directorate, and Mr Chris Barnham, Head of Learning and Skills Unit, Department for Education and Skills, examined.
Q701 Chairman: Can I welcome the four of you to our proceedings and say how pleased we are that you have been able to respond at quite short notice. We enjoy all our inquiries but we are particularly enjoying this one. We are learning a lot and getting around the country. We have looked at three prisons in the UK, one in Finland and one in Norway. We are going to take evidence in Feltham Young Offender Institution. We are not only seeing but we are getting some very good quality evidence as well. Thank you very much for coming before us. I am going to give one of you on each side two minutes if you want to say something to start, otherwise you can go straight into questions, it is up to you. Why do I not start with Janice Shiner or Chris Barnham, whoever wants to start, and then switch, but only one of you for two minutes? Mrs Shiner: Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity. We thought it would be helpful to say something more about how we are going to deal with the issues that you have raised, and in particular to look at planning and funding. Perhaps I can start by saying I recognise that there remain considerable pressures in the delivery of high quality consistent offender education but we believe that from a low base we have put some important building blocks in place. I think the Adult Learning Inspectorate has acknowledged that. In that list, I would probably put the appointment of the Heads of Learning and Skills and it is early days but there are some real signs of value added, increases in funding, achievement of basic skills qualifications, some quite significant capital projects and the work that is going on to build the project REX and to deliver that service, a service that we want to be as good as anything you would get in the mainstream and, in some cases, perhaps even better. There has been improvement in teaching and learning. We know that 70 per cent of teaching and learning sessions are satisfactory or better. Significantly, there are two prisons that have now got a grade two of good grade for leadership and management. We are not hiding behind these achievements, however, but want to acknowledge the progress made and give credit to those who have worked tirelessly to move things on, but there is much that we need to do. We know that it cannot be right that 30 per cent of classes are less than satisfactory. We know that we have got to integrate skills and basic skills. We know we have got to have learning taking place not just in the classroom but enable it to take place in the cells, in the workplace and wherever else, so it is not just about three or four hours a week. I hope you recognise the extent to which the issues that you are raising are at the heart of our agenda. There are just a couple of other things. It is important to remember that this is the most challenging cohort in education terms: of regular truants, three per cent compared to 30 per cent offenders; those excluded from school, two per cent compared to 49; and in terms of unemployment five per cent compared to 67. We believe we are working on the agenda that has been set out but we look forward to the comments that you might make to help us take this forward. Finally, this is my day job. I am responsible for post-16 education wherever it happens, therefore the quality of education in the Prison Service, in communities, is absolutely key for me. One of the benefits of it being my day job is that we can learn from what works in mainstream further education and also we can learn from what happens in custody and transfer that. We welcome your inquiry and look forward to the questions. Thank you. Q702 Chairman: Thank you. Ms Neville: Thank you for this opportunity. The Learning and Skills Council's role is to transform post-16 learning and skills in this country and make it a better skilled and more competitive workforce. Offenders in custody are one of the most disadvantaged groups in terms of accessing learning and skills. We believe that boosting the skills of offenders will enhance the employability of those offenders and employability increases the chance of sustained employment and sustained employment reduces recidivism. We are delighted that we will be taking on a growing and developing role in relation to offender learning and skills and we will be taking a lead role from January 2005. Q703 Chairman: That is an excellent introduction. Can I say, I was feeling really positive about this session until this popped through my letterbox in Yorkshire on Saturday Morning. It is The Skills We Need: Our Annual Statement of Priorities by the Learning and Skills Council. Because I was preparing myself for today I took some time to read it and prisons are not mentioned once. It seemed disappointing that we have got this statement of your priorities and you have just said that prisons are very important but it is not there at all. Ms Neville: It is there. Q704 Chairman: Where? Ms Neville: It is there as an action in terms of the transfer of responsibilities from DfES to the Learning and Skills Council for 2005-06. This is an annual statement of priorities and the full roll-out in terms of the LSC's role will be from August 2006. For 2005-06 it will be to ensure that there is effective transfer of responsibility from the Department to the LSC. Q705 Chairman: The prototypes are up and running, yes? Ms Neville: The prototypes are up and running from January 2005. Q706 Chairman: So that is one of your priorities. Ms Neville: That is right. Q707 Chairman: It must be an ongoing programme if these are the priorities that you are flagging up. You have got a very exciting year ahead of you according to what we have had from your other evidence and there will be a transfer in September of next year. Ms Neville: Yes. The prototypes start in January and there are two phases effectively. Q708 Chairman: Are they all planned? They are ready to go, are they not? Ms Neville: They are planned and ready to go for January, yes, in the three regions. Q709 Chairman: Do you not think it is disappointing that you have not put much in there? Ms Neville: There are two points. One is that we have specifically mentioned the transfer of responsibility for offender learning and skills on more than one occasion, but it is the whole Annual Statement of Priorities which has relevance in terms of developing regional capacity, developing the role of Learning and Skills Council in economic regeneration, and the integration of the service, bringing together the vocational and educational services that are provided, that we see as the heart of the local community. It is specifically mentioned. The document is designed to be brief and to draw out those priorities for 2005-06. Q710 Chairman: In a sense, did Mrs Shiner not let the cat out of the bag by talking about her day job, which encompasses a vast area, of which prison education is a small part? How do we expect prison education to survive when it gets into the hands of the Learning and Skills Council when prison education is a very small part and there is an enormous other day job and now we are not going to have any ring-fenced funding within the LSC? This Committee takes evidence from an awful lot of people demanding more money from the Learning and Skills Council, are they all going to be fighting for that money? Is it going to survive? Is it going to get a serious amount of funding? Ms Neville: The Department has determined not to ring-fence the funding for offender learning and skills and I think that is in line with the overall trend of reducing ring-fencing. The Learning and Skills Council has quite a heavy involvement in offender learning and skills already. From April 2004, the Learning and Skills Council took over responsibility for offender learning and skills in the community. I quote the North East but a number of our regions have longstanding partnership arrangements with the Prison Service and established protocols. I think it is around 75 per cent of Learning and Skills Councils already have heavy involvement with their local prisons, they are a part of the community. Q711 Chairman: How does that work, because we are halfway through this inquiry and we are getting under the skin of it, we think, but the evidence we have got, and the visits to prisons back this up, is that the Learning and Skills Council is very rarely mentioned. They mention the partners that they are working with and the relationship with people employed by the Prison Service but - I am looking round the Committee - the Learning and Skills Council is rarely mentioned and you are saying there is a positive partnership already. Ms Neville: There are examples of positive partnerships across the regions but, as I said earlier, we take a lead in January 2005 with the three prototypes. That is entering into a different phase at that point. Q712 Chairman: How do we make sure that prison education still gets the funding? Ms Neville: We will be measured by our performance. Obviously we will be responsible for increases in achievements of learners, for example, and we will be responsible for securing high levels of sustained performance. There will be key performance measures for which we are responsible and we will want to deliver on those. Indeed, in the offender learning and skills population we already contribute to our targets in terms of Skills for Life and Level 2. The prison community is, in fact, core to our work in local communities already. Q713 Chairman: It has been difficult to be core up to now because of the arrangements for contracting out and very often it is not the local college that is providing the service, it is someone at some distance, is it not? Ms Neville: It can be, yes. I was involved in providing prison education as a college principal for nine years and we provided for eight prison education departments across three counties. Q714 Chairman: The local link is difficult sometimes, is it not? Ms Neville: I think the local link can be strengthened. That is the advantage of the integrated approach that we will be taking. One of the main limitations of the current regime in the broadest sense of the word is lack of continuity. It is about progression and the problems that offenders face in terms of progression either between institutions or coming out of an institution into the community. The Learning and Skills Council, which has responsibility not only for being on top of local labour market needs and regional labour market needs but also the labour market in terms of the supply of education and training, I think is very well placed to try to ensure that the shape of that provision is one which allows offenders and ex-offenders to progress. There are many advantages of the local nature of the Learning and Skills Councils developing not just a good relationship with the local employers, as might be the case currently, but actually ensuring that there are pathways, both vocational and Skills for Life pathways, to higher level qualifications within the community and within the region. I am not saying that it is going to be easy but I think our core purpose and our core mission and our experience in relation to post-16 learning and skills is unprecedented really. Q715 Chairman: Mrs Shiner, could I ask you and your team if you are confident because there is a lot of change going on here and really it is a test of joined-up government, is it not, that on the one hand you have NOMS coming in and they have a different regional structure than the LSCs, let alone with AQA. Is either of those coterminous with government departments in terms of the regional structure of government departments? Do you not see a problem here with NOMS coming on track at the same time as you are changing everything? How are you going to get a consistency of policy across the piece? Mrs Shiner: I think it is precisely because NOMS is coming on track that we want to do what we are planning to do. You have taken evidence about project REX and project REX was about trying to sort out the difference between education and vocational training inside the prison and to deal with what was the natural course of events, which was a re-tendering of a contract. The opportunity of NOMS made us stop and think that here is the Home Office trying to have an integrated approach to custodial and non-custodial sentencing in a way that would take place on an area basis, a regional basis, and, at the same time, here we have the Learning and Skills Council moving to establish a regional structure. That gave us an opportunity to think, well, how could we not see those things as separate and how could we bring those things together? Therefore, I can see huge benefits because we have got one organisation, the Learning and Skills Council, planning and funding all post-16 education, we have got a single process for dealing with the sentencing of a criminal and we have got an opportunity to say: "Well, okay, if that is the offender and this is their learning need, how do you bring those two processes together and keep them together through whatever happens", whether it is a custodial sentence into the community, probation support into full-time education and then into work? I do not think for one moment that it is plain-sailing and that is why we have these three prototypes because there are different ways of doing it and we want to try and see how best to do it. The most obvious thing we could do is to say: "We will just contract in the way that we have always done. We will contract with a provider for education provision in one or more prisons", but we want to look at this in a different way and keep the offender, in our case the learner, central to this, so that means us thinking about this in a completely different way. If you said to me now, "Janice, how is this going to look in a year's time?", I would put on the record that I do not know. These three prototypes will give us the answers and we are testing a whole range of different ways of doing things. Q716 Chairman: What about the central problem that this is a massive change, it really is a very massive change, and the other evidence that we have taken suggests - we have had written evidence as well as oral evidence - that this is very slowly gearing up and this is a lot of change and the Learning and Skills Council are biting off a great deal here and even though it is a small percentage of their overall work, it is a quite a fundamental change. In one sense, the degree of planning, the degree of working out who does what is at a very early stage and the crucial thing that we find when we visit prisons is, where is the divide - and it seems totally arbitrary - between education, training and the workshops? Who is going to be responsible for which bit of that? Mrs Shiner: You are right, I would be foolish to pretend that this is not a significant change, but what is consistent is what the problem is, whether it is the Adult Learning Inspectorate Report or the All-Party Parliamentary Report, whoever looks at this work, they come up with about the same six or eight things which are problematic. When you start to say: "How do we deal with those?", it is not about trying to improve what you have got, it is about saying that we need to look at this in a completely different way. If you have that sort of radical change, then it takes its toll. The trick, I think - and maybe some of the evidence says we have not done it as well as we might - is to keep people informed about what it is you are trying to achieve and keep them informed of progress along the way. We have set up websites, we have had seminars and we have written letters and we are aware that we need to work harder and keep going on that, but that is not a reason not to do it. I think it is a reason to do it well and to move it as quickly as we possibly can because we are trying to break some new ground in terms of how we commission education and then, I think, by its very nature, we need to pilot that. The question you raised about inside the prisons is absolutely right. It cannot possibly make sense to have education and training as separate activities within a prison. As educationalists we know that the best way adults will learn is through the vehicle of a particular skills area. So, you teach them basic skills through construction, catering, cleaning or whatever it happens to be and, therefore, we have always been intending to bring those together. Of course that creates more change for those training officers within the prison sector. We just need to keep going with it, keep testing that we are doing the right thing and keep communicating well. I believe that in 18 months' time we will be in a significantly different place. All the evidence says that the building blocks that we have already put in place are quite considerable. We have been working on the improvement of quality but we have been trying to put some infrastructure in place and to understand what needs to be done. We need to see those working and then to make that major change in August 2006 to get this up and running. Q717 Jeff Ennis: Continuing on your line of questioning, Chairman, a lot of the evidence we have taken so far seems to indicate that the Cinderella part of the Prison Service or the offender service is the poor levels of aftercare once the prisoner leaves their particular institution. They may be halfway through a course and then when they leave the prison they drop the course automatically, or a lot of them do. Effectively, we have been steered towards a situation where many of the witnesses are saying that aftercare should be a part of the Detention Order and part of the education contract. Obviously, now we have got a division of labour, to some extent, between the LSC, who would be responsible for the education provision, after consulting local providers et cetera, and I guess the main role of aftercare will be provided by NOMS, the National Offender Management System. I guess if aftercare is the Cinderella part of the system, what is going to be crucial to the new structure will be the relationship between the LSCs, as I can see it, and NOMS. I wonder, Ms Neville, if you could say a few words about how crucial that is to the success of the new structure? Ms Neville: I agree with the importance that you are placing on that relationship. To date we have worked in partnership with the Probation Service, the Youth Justice Board and obviously with OLSU and, certainly, I think there would be a lot of evidence that that partnership working has helped us to do the job we are doing. NOMS is its new service and is one which I think we are going to be relying on quite heavily in terms of tracking prisoners. I think the other important point is that continuity progression, the concept of a learner journey, is at the heart of the provision which we will be prototyping. For example, again I think it is in the North East, there is a mapping exercise going on looking at the provision in terms of the secure unit for young people and Young Offender Institutions to make sure that progression and pathways are there but, ultimately, the learner is at the heart of what it is we are doing and NOMS is going to have a crucial role to play. Q718 Jeff Ennis: I wonder what sort of checks and balances there will be, for example, if a regional ROM is not doing his or her job in a particular region and the LSC is aware of this? How would that be progressed, shall we say? Ms Neville: In terms of the governance arrangements, obviously for prototypes we have project boards but, again, I think it is about clarification of roles and responsibilities between the partners who are delivering. As I have already said, if you take the partnership work that we have had with the National Probation Service on offender learning and skills in the community, it is a very, very strong partnership with clear lines of accountability, a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities and monitoring is clearly much easier. There is excellent practice out there from some prisons in terms of post-monitoring, following up on individuals going out into the community. Q719 Jeff Ennis: Also, we have taken evidence that the contracting arrangements do not really lend themselves to involving the ordinary prison officers within prisons to get involved in educational programmes. It seems to me that we may be missing a trick here because education should not just be about the teachers but about anybody else who is interfacing with the prisoners within the institution. I wonder if this is a problem and, if it is, what are we going to do about it? Mrs Shiner: I think it relates back to what I was saying earlier. At the moment, reading some of your evidence, the suggestion is that prisoners are getting two or three hours a week of education, but they are getting two or three hours a week sitting in a classroom with a tutor whereas you can learn in a whole range of ways. It is the prison officer who will be with that prisoner for the rest of that week in the main. What we want to do is to take the really good practice around the mainstream FE sector about how you can manage your own learning through the use of ICT and learning materials and so on and for the prison officer to have an holistic view of that prisoner; not just their education but their health, their forthcoming housing needs and so on, and to see them as part of the resource. I do not mean take that too far necessarily by saying they have got to be a health expert or a teaching expert but to enable them to see that person in an holistic way. Q720 Jeff Ennis: How does that sit with the very short training period that we give officers in this country compared with some of the Western European examples we have looked at? Mrs Shiner: That is probably for Martin Narey and Phil Wheatley to respond to. Q721 Jeff Ennis: I would like to get your view on that as well. Mrs Shiner: I am not an expert on the training of prison officers but what I do know is through our own staff development, continuous development, initial teacher training arrangements that we have in place for teachers in further education, the intention is as we revise those, and we have got a new set of proposals for initial teacher training, training officers in the Prison Service can have access to that training. Therefore, there will be opportunities for them to improve their understanding of the learning that is going on and understanding some of the training needs of that individual. That is not a full answer and I accept that. Q722 Chairman: Are you not doing a bit of buck passing in the sense that we have taken a lot of evidence, including from Her Majesty's Inspector who says that once they do the seven weeks there is no particular training for prison officers except in restraint? Surely we should be looking at that or is it that you are used to comfortably dealing with the NUT and NASUWT and the Probation Service, the professional organisation, and the Prison Officers' Association are too much for you, that is what is holding all this up, that you have very strong unions that delayed NOMS and will not allow you to educate the prison officers? Is that what is wrong? Mrs Shiner: I suppose what I was saying was we will create the opportunity for them to access that training and maybe that has not been so obvious in the past. Q723 Chairman: That is part of the plan? Mrs Shiner: Yes. Chris, do you want to say anything more? Mr Barnham: This is on slightly a different point. The picture is not as grim as it is sometimes painted. Q724 Chairman: It is pretty grim when you see the percentage of people who get any education in prisons. Mr Barnham: I am talking about involvement of prison officers in education. I can think of particular examples. We have had specific funding for a thing called the Prisons' ICT Academy, which is all about using IT for learning. There are various examples of that. I went to a prison on the Isle of Sheppey which is run by prison officers themselves, the educational contractor has no involvement in that, and it is one of the most impressive bits of learning I have ever seen in a prison. It is not the case that prison officers do not get involved and cannot get involved, but it is certainly true that what we have had in the past is an unhelpful division because we have contracted out the education service and, for example, we have had vocational training run by prison officers who have got particular skills. One of the things that REX would have done, one of the things that the new service will do, is bring those two things together. Q725 Chairman: Are you sure that is true? Mr Barnham: That is true. Q726 Chairman: It is going to be seamless? Mr Barnham: Vocational training will be included as part of the overall service. Either it will be done by providers who are contracted by the LSC or it may continue to be provided within the Prison Service. We are not adopting a one-size-fits-all approach; it is quite possible that the Prison Service itself will be an LSC provider as long as they meet the requirements. Q727 Helen Jones: Mrs Shiner, I am very worried by what you have been saying to us. I would like to highlight something we have found throughout this inquiry, that various people giving us evidence may have the best of intentions but actually no-one has control over the whole system. You may say, "Yes, we would like prison officers to participate, we may make the training available for them", but no-one is actually saying what training should be required because that is not your responsibility, that is a different department's responsibility. Is not the whole problem with this that there is no-one in overall charge of the prison education system, it is split everywhere, and people in front us, the LSC, yourself, may have the best of intentions but no-one has got a grip on the whole thing? Mrs Shiner: Currently the person responsible for prison education is the governor because the education manager in the prison would report to the governor. They may well report to the Head of Learning and Skills and then to the governor, but currently the governing governor is responsible for education. In fact, they are given targets and Phil Wheatley would hold them accountable for those targets. Currently, it is pretty straightforward and direct: the education manager would deliver the contract on behalf of the provider and the establishment of the Heads of Learning and Skills is there to bring together that education contract and the vocational training within the prison under one umbrella reporting to the governing governor. Q728 Helen Jones: That is a very interesting answer but, again, it is sending the responsibility downwards. As a Committee, our concern is who has got a grip on this in Government because Government sets the policy. It is all very well you saying to us that prison officers should do this and it would be very nice if they did this, but there is not a way of making sure that comes about, is there? Mrs Shiner: I misunderstood your question. I was trying to give the answer as to what happens in the prison. In Government, it is split and you are right to state that. It is split with the Department for Education and Skills, and I am the person responsible for setting the policy for education in terms of both custodial and non-custodial, both prison and probation, and for ensuring the implementation of that policy in terms of the education policy, but we have to - and should - work in partnership with our Home Office colleagues because they control the Prison Service and the Probation Service. By working together, we need to be clear about the policy that we want to implement and then to use the levers that are available to us to make that happen. We meet very regularly and we have a governance structure in place to make that happen. A very good example would be how we introduced e-learning into the Prison Service. On the one hand, clearly there are issues about security and access and all of those things that are well rehearsed, and, on the other hand, from an educational perspective we are saying if we want to increase the two to three hours, seven hours, whatever it is that prisoners have in learning, we need to be able to introduce ICT. If we want to be able to avoid prisoners being over-assessed and their information travelling with them, we need to have ICT. Together, the Home Office would pull the levers they have throughout their own line management structure and I would do the same by the way we are looking to the LSC to take this future plan forward. That is the Government's arrangement. Martin Narey chairs a committee called the Reducing Reoffenders Committee, where I sit representing education, and there are people representing housing, drugs rehabilitation, etcetera. A member of my staff, a director, chairs a joint committee with JobCentre Plus on education and employment. They are held accountable by Martin Narey's umbrella committee. The governance structures are well established and work well. It is part of how a lot of Government is working where a lot of the policies we have cross more than one department and, therefore, the key is to find the right governance structures to ensure that you can deliver. Helen Jones: I am still not convinced but I know that one of my colleagues is waiting to get in. Q729 Chairman: The fact is that the Prison Board - we will be asking the Ministers about this later - has a health representative but does not have an education representative. When the governing governor of Durham was here, he told us two things: one, that he would not have an education person on the top managing committee of the prison; two, other evidence says governors are only going to be there for 18 months on average, so do not expect them to be a consistent thread. Mrs Shiner: On the Prison Board there is Peter Wrench, who has the education brief, so he is our point of reference for that. Q730 Chairman: Our information is there is a designated health person on the Prison Board but not a designated education person. Has he got other things to do? Mrs Shiner: There is not a designated person but there is somebody from the Prison Service, Peter Wrench. Mr Barnham: He is the Director for Resettlement. In terms of the way the Offenders' Learning and Skills Unit works, which I head in the Department for Education and Skills, I report equally to Peter Wrench for education in the Prison Service as we report to Phil Wheatley's board. He has a regular report on education issues which comes to us. Mrs Shiner: You are right, not all of the Heads of Learning and Skills are sitting on the senior management team. We will work very hard to make that happen because the evidence is clear that they are part of the management team and it is a more effective organisation. Q731 Mr Gibb: This is more of a funding issue. Can I just ask, is the DfES to fully properly fund prison education? Mrs Shiner: Is it committed to fully funding? Q732 Mr Gibb: Properly funding. Mrs Shiner: Yes, within the constraints of a budget that is pulled in a whole range of different ways. The budget has gone up and it will continue to increase. Q733 Mr Gibb: How much is it? Mrs Shiner: It has gone up from 93 million to 127 million, is that right? Mr Barnham: From 97 million in 2003-04 to 136 million this year and going up again next year to 152 million. That covers offenders in the community as well, although that is a small part of it. Mrs Shiner: I was taking that bit off. Are we committed to spending that money on prison probation? Yes, we are. Q734 Mr Gibb: You said two or three hours a week in the classroom, which is roughly what we have been hearing, or a couple of hours more maybe. Is that enough? Mrs Shiner: No, it cannot possibly be enough, particularly when you think of the skills gap for the prison population. It is a significant step on from where it was, and it needs to move on, but it needs to increase, not necessarily by having people sitting in a classroom with a tutor, we need to extend the learning opportunities through a whole range of other ways. Q735 Mr Gibb: You keep saying this and yet, on the one hand, you say prison officers should be part of this and then you say nothing about their training, it is not your responsibility, but you are the one saying this is going to be the future. Are you there just to craft the words for ministers or are you in charge of running something? Mrs Shiner: I did not say that I did not know anything about it, I said I did not know as much as others. Chairman: Quite right. Q736 Mr Gibb: You are the one advocating this as the future for education. Mrs Shiner: You are absolutely right. You are right to challenge me and I will respond. In mainstream further education you will have learners with a whole range of demands on their time, either domestic, work, illness, whatever it happens to be, so further education has become a very flexible service. If somebody cannot come on a Tuesday morning because they cannot get childcare there is probably some ICT related activity that they can pick up to take that class, or they may well move away from the area and study in a distant learning way, or there may be a tutorial system using ICT which helps them to learn. There is a whole range of ways. It may be that they have one-to-one tutorials once a month to keep them on track and attend large lectures for the rest of the time. Q737 Mr Gibb: You are in charge of the policy, what is the number of hours a week prisoners are going to have in the classroom, for instance? That is the first question. What is the numbers of hours a week they are going to have using ICT distance learning? Mrs Shiner: I do not think I can be as precise as the number of hours. The answer to the first question is we want to be able to increase those hours, but not necessarily for everybody, for those who need it most. That must be the first point. Until we have in place really robust assessment and diagnosis we will not be able to determine that. We have to get that in place first and then we can determine whether somebody needs ten hours or whatever it happens to be. The point I am making, and clearly not very well, is that learners have a lot of time at their disposal when they are in custody that could be used to much better effect. They could be working on distance learning materials, they could be using CD-Roms, they could be using the Internet with all the necessary security controls in place. The point I was making about prison officers was when prisoners are in the cells or on the wings, it is the prison officer who is there with them and for them to be given an opportunity to understand the learning programme that prisoner is on and to support them where they can would be very ---- Q738 Mr Gibb: You are right, they do have a lot of hours. Combine the two together, hours in front of a tutor plus hours in front of the computer per week, on average, what are we looking at as an objective? Mrs Shiner: I think you have to say the objective is to give them as much as you possibly can. What is the limit? They will be spending some time at work, they will be spending some time on other activities. In theory, they could spend a vast amount of their time managing their own learning once they are motivated and once they have got basic skills in order to be able to do that, which is why getting basic skills is so important. Mr Barnham: Could I just add to that. One of the best examples I saw very early in this job was when I visited Leeds Prison and I was lucky enough to have lunch there. The primary purpose of everybody working in the kitchens at Leeds is to produce the meals that the prison needs, but many of them are receiving on-the-job training and are achieving qualifications in catering. From our budget in the DfES I do not think we are paying for that through the mainstream education funding but it is one of the benefits of having a Head of Learning and Skills who is looking across the whole regime and asking "Where are the learning opportunities?", many of which are outside the classroom and can be achieved on the job in doing things that people would otherwise be doing. It is quite hard for us to say how many hours of learning have gone into that because people have been doing other things, but we know the qualifications that get achieved and the positive outcomes. Q739 Mr Gibb: I get the impression that the thinking going on is at quite an early stage in terms of the policy development in this. Mrs Shiner: No. The whole move towards the funding and planning by the LSC is to enable us to put these things in place because we need part of that mainstream activity to support it. The development of e-learning within prisons is at an early stage but it is on a very clear trajectory to have that in place. The opportunity to be able to have new commissioning from providers where we ask them to provide learning in that way is also part of the thinking, it is all of a piece. Q740 Chairman: Can I ask Caroline Neville to come in on this because we have not heard whether you think this increase in budget, which is considerable - this Committee is not knocking the fact there is 30 million extra - this 156 million next year is going to be enough to deliver this. Ms Neville: There are two points I would make on funding and I will answer that question. Currently there is inconsistency in terms of funding across the piece so we are looking at developing a national funding model which would still have flexibility to meet the needs of the individual prisoner's circumstances, but nonetheless be fair and transparent. That is where our experience will come into play in terms of developing that methodology. We want to avoid unnecessary turbulence as we move from one system to another, so we are looking at protection arrangements to ensure that as we develop this new methodology we are not causing unnecessary problems for prison institutions. With regard to affordability, we are in the final stages of confirming the budgets and I am sure that will take place very early in the New Year and both the OLSU and ourselves share the aspiration in terms of quality and in terms of quantity. We feel very clearly that a step change in quality is of paramount importance, and you may wish to come back to that. We are confident that we will make progress on that quite rapidly. There will be concerns about the quantity in terms of the increased provision that we can find, but certainly we will be targeting those resources differently. An example of how we will be targeting those resources differently would be to lead to more qualifications. We want to see more relevant up-to-date outcomes from the offender's learning experience and training experience. We will be using the funding in quite a targeted way. Whether that allows us to increase the quantity of learning in the way that we would like, we have yet to see that as we are undertaking our financial modelling. I think Chris made a very important point, that there is an opportunity for the prison, as a whole, to embrace the learning and skills challenge. We have talked about vocational workshops and we have talked about the catering and the various tasks that are going on in the prison. If we insist, where it is appropriate, that nationally recognised qualifications come out of those experiences then I believe that will be in the interests of the learner as well as in the interests of the local economy. In that way it should be possible to increase in terms of quantity, but at the moment we are undertaking that financial modelling exercise. Q741 Mr Gibb: That confirms what I thought, that things are at a very early stage of policy planning. Can I just ask Mrs Shiner what the proportion of prisoners entering prison who cannot read properly is? Mrs Shiner: About 60 per cent. Mr Barnham: Two-thirds either at or below the level of an 11 year old. Q742 Chairman: Mr Gamble, would you agree with that? Mr Gamble: Yes, that is the evidence that we have seen. Q743 Mr Gibb: Ms Neville, you wanted to have more up-to-date outcomes, so what are you doing to assess the outcomes of your basic literacy strategy? Ms Neville: Within the prisons? Q744 Mr Gibb: Yes. Ms Neville: We take responsibility for the three prototypes from January, so it is obviously difficult to answer the question at the moment. Q745 Mr Gibb: Let us ask Mrs Shiner. What are you doing in prisons to monitor the outcome of your basic literacy strategy given that two-thirds have a reading age below the age of 11? That must be the most important and pressing matter, so what are you doing to measure the success of current policies and future policies? Mrs Shiner: It is the most important one. The decision when we started with the Offenders' Learning and Skill Unit was that we would focus on basic skills, although now we want to try and broaden those outcomes. Each prison governor will agree targets for their particular establishment in terms of what they will achieve at the various levels and those targets are monitored and recorded. If it looks as though targets are not going to be met then pressure is put on for those to be achieved. If your question is about the impact then - you will not want to hear this - it is early days in terms of the research that will make the link between basic skills and not reoffending. About 18 months ago we started a major piece of research to ---- Q746 Mr Gibb: You are not quite sure yet whether being able to read does matter, is that what you are saying? Mrs Shiner: What we do know is that the North American research shows that there is something like a 13 per cent relationship between basic skills and reoffending. We do not have any UK evidence. Q747 Mr Gibb: And until that time you are not going to teach reading, is that what you are telling me? Mrs Shiner: Sorry? Q748 Mr Gibb: Until you have had this research you are not going to teach basic skills, is that right? Mrs Shiner: No, we are teaching. Q749 Mr Gibb: I am asking you how you measure the success of your teaching reading. Mrs Shiner: By the targets being achieved and by the fact that ---- Mr Gibb: How do you assess those ---- Q750 Chairman: I know your style, but you have to give the witness time to answer one question before asking another. Mrs Shiner: Sorry, obviously I am not answering your question. Sixty per cent of people entering prisons have got a basic skills need, not achieving at the level of an 11 year old. 36,000 offenders gained basic skills qualifications last year, that is about 37 per cent of ---- Mr Barnham: It was 46,000. The target was 36,000. Mrs Shiner: We know what the problem is and we know what we are delivering. I was trying to answer your question when you asked about impact and impact is still part of this major piece of research and the only international research is this work in North America, so we are focusing on that. We know that those qualifications are being achieved but what we do not know is the impact of those, where people are taking them, yet, but we will. Chairman: I am afraid we have got to move on. We have got a lot of questions for a short time. Q751 Valerie Davey: I am fascinated by what you are saying and I think with the extra money and the ideas you have got, the potential is there, but still I am not sure whether the emphasis is on achieving for the assessment and the provision for the individual prisoner or whether these targets are institution based. At the moment you seem to be emphasising the governor of the institution, who obviously is crucial, but as far as the individual prisoner, who is going to be moved, there is this wonderful set-up in Leeds with catering but suddenly one of those prisoners is moved to somewhere that does not have catering, who has the levers to ensure that in the future the individual prisoner has the benefit of the education of quality that you are going to provide in an institution? Mrs Shiner: You are raising a question that is the tension between what we do now and where we want to go. What happens now is that the targets are set for the prison and the prison governor is held responsible for those and we know whether they are achieved or not. What we want to move to is a situation where we assess an individual, we work out what the training needs are for that individual, whether it is dyslexia or basic skills or construction Level 2, and we create a learning journey for that individual, whether they move from prison A to prison B or, indeed, out to a non-custodial sentence, which is going to be more and more the norm in the future. Clearly if they move from prison A to prison B and they are doing an NVQ in construction and prison B does not have a construction unit then what you would want to do is make sure they can do the underpinning theory while they are there, for example, but on basic skills every prison will be able to offer that. What you are trying to create is a seamless journey for that prisoner, who we see as a learner, properly assessed, properly diagnosed and that diagnosis, that template of that learner's needs, follows them wherever they go to the end of their sentence. That is what we are trying to create. Your colleague is absolutely right, we do not have that in place yet but what we believe we are building is the infrastructure to make that happen, that is one funding and planning organisation only buying quality and working at a local level alongside NOMS. Q752 Paul Holmes: We have heard from a number of witnesses that there is a disincentive in prisons that works against prisoners taking up education, ie they can earn more money to buy phone cards, etcetera, by doing prison work than by doing education and that some governors prefer them to do prison work because the money that is generated is part of the prison budget. Have you got any views on that? Mrs Shiner: I have heard that in my own visits to prisons but there does not seem to be any evidence that that is actually happening. You hear the stories about you get more money to go and sew bags in the workshop than you do going into education but we have not seen any evidence that is the case. If people are wanting to go into the workshop because it gives them phone cards and cigarettes or whatever, we need to make sure that when they are in that workshop they are learning and they are clocking up some NVQ modules. That is what we are trying to create. Obviously I have not made it very clear, but it is about not seeing learning as that which just takes place in the classroom but wherever they are. Actually, prisons need them to work, that is part of the operation. There are some wonderful examples with cleaning, with catering, and so on, but we need to make that mainstream and the only way we can do that really effectively is by bringing education and training together and that is why that is so key. Q753 Paul Holmes: When you say there is no evidence, do you mean there is no evidence of an actual differential in pay or there is no evidence that is a disincentive? Mr Barnham: We have not got any hard evidence that difference in pay, which are not uniform, there is quite a range of practice, is preventing people from going into education because, indeed, if we had more money to provide more education then there would be the demand for more. It is not that people are staying away, as far as we can tell. The other thing is, it is not just down to an individual's choice. One thing that is clear in the guidance to the Prison Service is whatever pay scheme they have that must not provide disincentives to people to do things which their sentence plan says they ought to be doing. Increasingly, we need people's sentence plans to have their learning needs in them. That happens to some extent now but that is a crucial part of the new service. It is not just down to an individual as to what they do, their needs need to be assessed and they need to be doing things that contribute towards those. Q754 Paul Holmes: Would there be a disincentive the other way, that if you increase the amount for education then people will just go and sit in a classroom for the money rather than to take part in learning? Mr Barnham: We would not want that any more than we would want people not doing learning when they need it. I do not think there is any evidence that way either. For example, some prisons, leaving aside the pay, will say, "You cannot do the work that you may want to do to earn income until you have achieved a basic skills qualification", so they provide a gateway: "You can do that cleaning job when you have reached a level that says your basic skills need that we have found has been addressed". Q755 Chairman: Very quickly, can I just ask the LSC team, with all this shake-up and change is the budget going to be divided up in a different way now? I want Mr Gamble and Ms Neville to answer this because I am determined all witnesses get a chance to say something. If the budget is being changed, are some people in the Prison Service going to lose their jobs, are they going to transfer or have to be retrained? What is going to happen in terms of how that budget flows down to the people who use that budget? Ms Neville: As we are looking at designing a system for the funding of Offenders' Learning and Skills, we have agreed a number of principles in relation to that funding arrangement. Certainly we are very concerned that there is some protection arrangement so that there is not turbulence in the system as we move from one methodology to another. The changes to methodology will not happen overnight. The Learning and Skills Council is undertaking a root and branch review of the way that it funds post-16 education and training. That review has commenced and the work of that review clearly will be helpful in informing the model that we develop for Offender Learning and Skills. We are not suggesting in any way that there will be a knee jerk change but we will have to ensure there is a phased change to a new methodology. The objectives of the new methodology will be open, fair and transparent across the prison estate. Q756 Chairman: What is transparent to us, Mr Gamble, is we have the Prison Governors' Association who come here and say that the trouble is most men and women in prison spend most of their time lying on their beds or their bunks doing nothing: not working, not educating, not doing anything, just lying there doing nothing. Come on, are these reforms going to come through to change that? Mr Gamble: Yes, because it is the business of the Learning and Skills Council to plan and to fund in terms of how new technology is going to enhance the learning experience. As has already been said today, it is not just about the hours in front of various individuals that is critical here, it is exploiting new technology to enhance the learning experience. In terms of developing the curriculum, the whole point of this transfer of responsibility is to ensure that the learning experience inside prison establishments reflects what is happening in what I call the mainstream education and training environment in the further education and work based sector, so there is a commonality in the learning that takes place so that when offenders actually leave custody and either serve the rest of their sentence in the community or, in fact, become citizens within the community, they can access the same learning and be motivated whilst they are inside in custody or on probation to continue with that, because they will see the relevance of that learning and they will also see that it is the same learning that takes place with the same outcomes, the same qualifications and the same job opportunities that are open to all in the wider learning community. Chairman: That sounds a very exciting prospect. Thank you very much for your attendance and thank you very much for your evidence. As we always say, when you are going home on the tube or the bus or in your chauffeur driven car - I am saving that for Paul Goggins - and you remember something, please communicate it to us, we only want to make this report as good as it possibly can be. Thank you. Witnesses: Lord Filkin, CBE, a Member of the House of Lords, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families, Department for Education and Skills, and Paul Goggins, a Member of the House, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Correctional Services and Reducing Reoffending, Home Office, examined. Q757 Chairman: Can I welcome our colleagues, Paul Goggins from the Commons and Lord Filkin from the other place? What a privilege it is to have the House of Lords here. You can refuse to come but I think you have to come if you are a Minister. We want to make this as good a report as possible so we do value having both departments represented here today. Do either of you want to say anything to kick us off? Paul Goggins: First of all, can I say how much I welcome the fact that your Committee is doing this inquiry and for the opportunity to participate in it. I will probably regret saying that in an hour or so because I am sure you are going to give us a good grilling. For all the shortcomings which you will identify and make recommendations about, it is worth saying just how far prison education has come in a very short time. Last year, one in ten of all basic skills qualifications gained anywhere in the country was gained in a prison. That is testament to the hard work that is going on. Indeed, four out of every ten prisoners are now engaged to some extent in education in prison, 1,000 of them on Open University courses. I got an endorsement for the improvement from an unlikely source last Thursday at a conference I was speaking at to do with rethinking crime and punishment, an important piece of work that is being done, from Tony Adams, the former Arsenal and England centre half who spent some time at Chelmsford Prison some 14 years ago and spoke about how different it is now. There was no education when he was in prison 14 years ago and there is so much more today. The second comment is simply to emphasise that this discussion, this inquiry and the work that we are doing to develop further education and skills training in prison is happening within the biggest reform of prisons and probation that has been undertaken for decades as we develop the National Offender Management Service to do three things. First of all, to rebalance the system so that we have fewer short term prisoners in our prisons doing precisely the kind of thing that you were just describing, lying on a bunk for a few weeks doing very little else when they could be on robust community sentences. Secondly, to make sure that we deliver the new sentencing framework arising from the Criminal Justice Act 2003, where people who go to prison will serve the whole of their sentence, the first half in prison, the second half in the community, under more robust supervision. Thirdly, to make sure that we join up government agencies, voluntary organisations, private sector organisations in the whole business of effective resettlement so that we get a better outcome for the investment that the taxpayer puts in in terms of reduced reoffending. In a sense, that sets the context for the discussion that we are having here specifically on education. Lord Filkin: First of all, I think a lot has been achieved. If I look at the increase in expenditure by comparison with, say, 1996/7, the spend has roughly trebled. If I look at the numbers of basic skills that have been achieved in prisons from about 12,000 in 2001, we are probably going to hit about 60,000 this year, so we are seeing about a five fold increase in the basic skills being achieved. Also, we have seen a significant shift in terms of the creation of a head of learning and skills in every single prison. Secondly, there is an enormous amount of work and change in progress, as you probably sensed from the previous session, particularly in terms of the implementation of NOMS and the potential that gives for having education and skills straddling both community and custodial situations, which is clearly essential and, secondly, in terms of the capacity of the Learning and Skills Council to be fusing both basic skills and work skills so you have two integrations going on at once, which is pretty obviously necessary for this to work better. The third point is that both Paul and I and other ministerial colleagues are really clear there is a heck of a lot more to be done. We will seek to outline some of that in the rest of our evidence. Q758 Chairman: Is it not all a bit slow though? This was in our manifesto to radically improve prison education. Normally, you expect to have a manifesto and then a mandate - we certainly have the mandate - and then to deliver. Here we are talking about the next election and, being generous to the very good people that we have just had evidence from, they are talking very tentatively about things that might happen. Some things have improved but a lot of people like us going to three or four prisons and having witnesses realise that we have not really delivered very quickly on this manifesto commitment, have we? Paul Goggins: I think we have. Every prison now has a head of learning and skills. We have seen relationships developing between the Learning and Skills Councils and individual prisons. Last year, we had a target for 36,000 basic skills qualifications. The Prison Service achieved 46,000. The target for this year is 56,000. Where it really matters in terms of the outcomes for individual prisoners, I think we are making substantial progress. By the autumn of 2006 when the structural changes we are making really are bedded in, we will see further change still. Q759 Chairman: You may know that I was shadow Minister for Police, Prisons and Crime Prevention quite some time ago when I was Roy Hattersley's deputy. I used to berate the Secretary of State for the Home Department for having 50,000 people in prison. We now have how many? Paul Goggins: We have 75,149 today, or thereabouts. Q760 Chairman: That is a substantial increase. Is it possible to manage to get an education and skills programme working when, on the one hand, we have a very large prison population and, on the other, everyone says it is so difficult to do anything because of the high degree of churn in prisons? Paul Goggins: We have enormous pressure arising from the increasing population. Over the last ten years, we have seen a 50 per cent increase and a 200 per cent increase in the number of women in our prisons. This is largely because of increased severity of sentencing and so very many of the people going into prison are going for fairly short periods of time. That is why we are rebalancing the system so that people who go to prison for three or four months who could very easily be on community sentences, properly enforced, are in the community and not in prison. Prison should be reserved for the serious and dangerous offender. I think we are beginning to see that that message is getting through. Whilst I gave you a figure for the prison population today, it is around 350 fewer than it was at Easter. There are fewer women in prison today than there were a year ago and I think there is evidence that sentencers are seeing the value of the community sentence rather than a short term prison sentence. There is no doubt that if we can stabilise the prison population we would get less churn; we would have a more stable population and the staff would be able to get on with the job they want to do, whether that is in terms of offender behaviour programmes or indeed education and training. Q761 Chairman: We were talking about constructive alternatives when I was in the field. Why are we not picking up on ideas like the Australian system of having people going to prison for a weekend, because that is when they hate losing their liberty, but it allows them to carry on with education, work, training or whatever and does not make them unemployable. Are we looking at aspects like that? Paul Goggins: You will be delighted to know that we have begun a pilot initiative called the Intermittent Custody Pilot at Kirkham for men and at Morton Hall for women, where precisely what you have described happens. Part of the week is spent in custody; part of the week at home, so that prisoners are able to keep hold of their job and sustain their families but also lose their liberty for part of the week. The pilot only began in January but what we have found so far is that there are more people who go on weekend custody and stay at home during the week, rather than the other way round. I think we would all expect that. We are finding a very high adherence rate for those people who are sentenced. I can provide the Committee with accurate figures but we are looking at somewhere in the region of 130 people who have been sentenced to this. 86 have completed the period of custody without any further problem. Only six have been sentenced to full time custody. I think you are right. This would be an effective, imaginative use of custody which helps people to hold on to jobs and family. Q762 Helen Jones: We have heard an awful lot about what we are doing in prison education. What I think the Committee would like to know first of all is where we are aiming to get to. What do you think the purpose of prison education is? What is the over-arching direction that should be determining all the things we decide to do? Lord Filkin: I agree. I think that is one of the fundamental questions. There are several goals for prison education. I can think of at least three off the cuff. The most important one is getting people into work. Q763 Helen Jones: And the others? Lord Filkin: Seeking to get as many offenders into work will require that basic skills are addressed. One will never get everyone into work for all sorts of obvious reasons so there will still be some who, whilst it might not be possible to get into work, will still have very significant life skill deficits. Therefore, we ought to have as an object of policy reducing illiteracy and innumeracy for social exclusion reasons as opposed to employment reasons. I suppose the third one would be essentially about almost classic reasons for education, by which I mean that it has a value in its own right in terms of what it does to the individual. If you think of the lifer in prison, in that situation, whilst they may not be going to get into work or they might not have illiteracy problems, it is important that there is some meaningful use of the time that they have to spend. Access to other forms of education for them is a different objective but also important. Q764 Helen Jones: I do not think many of us would disagree with what you have outlined but, from the evidence we have had, it is very clear that for many prisoners it is very difficult to bring them up to the standards where they can go out and get a job while they are within the prison system and they need to work both while they are within prison and afterwards. What progress has been made to get this holistic approach together that continues education during the sentence and after but also deals with the other problems that many prisoners have? Many of them may have drug problems, for instance. They may have problems when they come out accessing housing and getting a more stable lifestyle. Ought those things not to be all together as one package? What progress is made towards delivering that? How, when the LSC take over prison education, are all those things going to be linked together? Lord Filkin: In essence, yes, we would agree with that. That is why Paul and I and Jane Kennedy in DWP are essentially asking the question. Over and above the good work that has been done so far and the very important and quite challenging work that is going to be done over the next two years that we have to put in place in terms of the changes that are being implemented through LSC, what ought to be the medium term goals for policy and what would that require in terms of changes to a set of systems so that they do, in your earlier phrase, behave like one system which is focused on how to maximise the number of offenders, whether in prison or not, who are helped to get into work and sustain it. That has to be a central goal of policy across government because obviously if it can work more it will reduce reoffending and it is also better for an ex-offender because they will have we believe a better prospect in their life. We are at the very early stage as a ministerial trio of working with officials about thinking what is the nature of scoping how such a system would perform but you are quite right. A crucial part of that, as well as undoubtedly having an effective system for assessing the skills deficit and aptitude for work, and as well as putting in appropriate training and interventions and an appropriate set of motivations, is the resettlement process as well. Even if a person was motivated and had adequate skills, if they are not off drugs or if they are homeless or if the resettlement process is not supported, that is likely to be nugatory. Therefore, you are quite right. One has to have a broad approach to that across all of those elements. Paul Goggins: The whole purpose of this is about reducing reoffending. That has to be the sole purpose. We see education as a means to an end, equipping people with skills to gain jobs that can sustain a life outside of crime. In terms of policy, we published in July the National Reducing Reoffending Action Plan and a clear mandate that every region of the country must have in place a Regional Reducing Reoffending Action Plan by the spring of next year. Q765 Chairman: Who is going to produce that? Paul Goggins: At the regional level, it will be for the agencies concerned to work together to produce it. Two weeks ago, I was in the north east with the government regional office, the Prison Service and the Probation Service to publish their Reducing Reoffending Action Plan and every region will have one. Q766 Chairman: Will the LSC be part of that? Paul Goggins: Indeed. The LSC were represented at the event. The whole idea is to bring together all of these agencies and say how, on the ground, can we work together in order to achieve that objective of reducing rates of reoffending. At a practical level, this is where offender management really comes in. There will be a named offender manager for every single offender, whether in custody or in the community, who will ensure that their punishment, their programme, is properly enforced. That can be housing; it can be drug treatment; it can be education; it can be offending behaviour programmes, whatever is the appropriate mix for a particular offender. It will be the responsibility of the offender manager to follow that through with an emphasis again on reducing rates of reoffending. That really is the overall goal that we are looking to achieve. Q767 Helen Jones: Can we go back to the education system? There is undoubtedly some very good work done but we have also had a lot of evidence about poor provision and in particular one of the things that concerns me is the position of staff delivering prison education who are often very isolated from other staff in the further education sector and so do not get the opportunities for career development and so on. We saw how that was tackled when the Prison Health Service was improved by putting it under the Department of Health but we have not yet received much evidence that it is being given as much priority in the DfES. It was championed through the Department. Who is championing prison education inside the DfES which has an awful lot of other responsibilities to deal with? Who is making sure this does not slip down the agenda? Paul Goggins: You alluded to the parallel development in terms of health. I think it is important to emphasise that we see these as parallel developments. The education aspect of this started a little later than health developments but by the end of 2006, as I see it, all health care in prisons will be commissioned by the Primary Care Trust. All education and skills training will be commissioned by the Learning and Skills Council. We will end up at around the same time arriving at the same commissioning arrangements. It is entirely right in my view - I say this obviously as the Minister responsible for the Prison Service - that we have education and health care run by those who understand it and who know how to achieve higher and better standards and also who would be able to connect those staff who you identify as perhaps sometimes being rather at the end of the system and identify how they can be fully connected to the wider education process. Lord Filkin: The short answer is I have the ministerial responsibility specifically for what was called prisoner education. I have now called it offender education for obvious reasons. I work to Charles Clarke on that. In the seven weeks I have been there, I have already had three discussions with him about it which is an indication of the priority that he gives to it as well. The other answer to your question is that the perspective I have developed in discussion with Paul, with Martin Narey, with the chief inspector for adult learning and other ministerial colleagues is that we have to work with officials at a further question over and above the successful implementation of what are very important processes underway. That further question is best summarised by: what would a system look like from beginning to end that had as one of its central objectives the maximisation of the number of people getting into work and supporting them doing so? That is the question I, with Paul and with Jane Kennedy, said to officials we wanted to work on identifying the answer to over the next few months, however long is necessary. The reason for that is obvious. Whilst we have some very good processes underway, the real challenge is will those go far enough? Will they be successful enough to maximise the ability to get more prisoners, more offenders - because I think the ambit has to be wider than just prison - into work and to stabilise other aspects of their life sufficiently so that they are more likely to stay in work. By asking that question, we are not being naïve. We are not expecting that the answer can possibly be 95 per cent because that would be daft. Even if we increase by 10 or 15 per cent the proportion of ex-offenders who hold down a job, we would have made a phenomenal achievement. Therefore, that is why I think it is right that we ask that very tough question about how would you design a system that had that as its objective and then how do you get there having done so. Q768 Helen Jones: How are you proposing to make sure that this is given enough priority by the LSC who have other demands on them? Let us be blunt inside the Committee. A lot of the pressure is on the LSC and on local Learning and Skills Councils to do certain things but prisoners are not high on anybody's agenda outside them. I am sure they are high on your agenda but they are not high on the public's agenda. How are you going to make sure that the LSC give enough priority to delivering a better system of offender education and that they understand the reasons for doing it? It is not just about education but it is also about reducing the offending and ultimately protecting the public from more crimes and so on. Lord Filkin: Essentially, by making them aware that success looks like maximising the number who get into jobs and stay there. I say that because it gives some clarity as to what the business is about which all of us need, but if they start to succeed in that, the politics will follow that, if you understand what I mean. Q769 Jeff Ennis: Paul mentioned progress that has been made in prisons. There is no doubt that progress is being made but we have a long way to go. One of the main focuses of that was the appointment of head of learning and skills within prisons which has obviously been a key driver to take the issue forward. We are talking about adult prisons being some of the biggest remedial education establishments in the country with 60-odd per cent of the clientele with basic learning problems. We see that in the youth offender institutes we have special educational needs coordinators operating, SENCOs as they are commonly known, as you do in most mainstream educational establishments. We do not have SENCOs in adult prisons. Is there a need, because of the overwhelming emphasis on basic needs in adult prisons, to consider establishing SENCOs? Lord Filkin: It is not a question I have put to myself before but it requires me to reflect on it because you are quite right. The scale of educational under-achievement for people coming into prisons is about as bad as it can get. I do not want to imply by that that we should be diverting from the LSC route as the way in which we try to deliver the lift. I also have responsibility for special educational needs and what I need to do is to take that question and discuss it with LSC, because it clearly implies that the nature of the educational input they are putting in has to be informed by the best understanding of how you address special educational needs. Q770 Jeff Ennis: This question goes back to the point I was making with the earlier witnesses about the very short amount of training that prison staff have in this country compared with most other western European countries. We need to involve prison officers more in the individual training and educational needs of the people they are looking after. Is there a need for us to review the amount of training that prison office staff currently have with a view to trying to incorporate a module looking specifically at educational needs of the prisoners? Paul Goggins: Just having listened to the exchanges this afternoon, I sense that you will have something to say about the training of prison officers. I hope the following comments are helpful to you: it was the case that prison officers received 11 weeks training. They now receive eight weeks training and that focuses mainly on security and resettlement. The three week reduction was because fitness training was no longer felt to be part of it, since most of the people who come along are pretty fit anyway. What we need is a fitness test and they can get fit in their own time. However, that is not the end of the story as regards training because what the Prison Service has done is to devolve responsibility and resources down to establishment level for working out what is the appropriate training for that particular prison. Every prison has to have an establishment training plan. Every prison officer has to have a personal development plan and it is possible to follow through training within individual establishments, to take NVQs and so on that are appropriate. You can imagine that the training needs of a category D open prison are rather different than a high, secure prison taking category A prisoners. Therefore, what we have sought to do is to make sure everybody has the basic training so that prison governors can then work out what is the appropriate training for the individual staff within their establishment. It is not quite true to say all we have done is cut the training and left it at that. There is a lot of training that goes on at establishment level. Q771 Jeff Ennis: We have been informed by other witnesses that the amount of budget per head available for training within prisons is very limited and it tends to go on training for restraint and issues like that rather than education provision. Paul Goggins: I do not deny that there is a bit of a difference of opinion. I know that Mike New gave evidence to this Committee. He has a particular view on this and the Prison Service will have another view. We need to take a balance. There are resources there and what the Prison Service has sought to do is to place responsibility on governing governors, to work out what is appropriate for their establishment. That is the right approach. We certainly need some training at national level but we need to make sure that the training is appropriate. What happened before was that a lot of training that was done was not helpful to a particular, specific establishment and that is clearly wasteful. Therefore, we have to make sure that what is appropriate is done at each particular prison. Q772 Chairman: Surely we want to have a well trained and educated workforce in prisons? It is the mark of good management. Digby Jones said the other day that there will be no jobs for unskilled people. Given that prison officers come in at quite a low level of education, surely it would be our aspiration to educate and train them relevantly for the job and to develop their own talents? Paul Goggins: I agree very strongly with that. What we have now is a system where prison governors must work out with their staff what is the appropriate training for them and make sure that is carried through. The Prison Service staff need to be well trained and need to gain vocational qualifications that are appropriate. Q773 Chairman: Would you like to see an environment in which prisoners have an entitlement to education and training and prison officers have an entitlement? Paul Goggins: That is a very good way of putting it. I think the staff do have an entitlement to expect to receive appropriate training. In the end, what are they being trained for? They are being trained to work with and motivate the prisoners who are in their custody and care. What we are trying to do in prison is to change lives and that requires tremendous skill on the part of an officer who has to be responsible for security and safety but also has to be able to motivate and help people change their behaviour and attitude. That is a highly skilled job. Q774 Chairman: We have seen good evidence of some very highly motivated prison officers, although we are finding prison officers at a senior level a little elusive in coming before this Committee, but we shall make them in the end. Paul Goggins: I am glad you made that point. It is a point I make whenever I have the opportunity. We have a very dedicated workforce in our prisons who do a fantastic job. They are no longer turnkeys; they are professional people who are trying to change people's lives. Chairman: We will have the Prison Officers' Association at the highest level here. Q775 Mr Turner: Could I go back to why the transfer of health care worked? Why do you think it worked? Paul Goggins: Primarily because people understood that the people who should run health care are the health professionals rather than the Prison Service. That was a message that was understood. Then we needed to translate that into action which clearly required some planning. From April of this year, the first 18 primary care trusts commissioned health care in their local prisons. Next April, we expect most other primary care trusts to be commissioning the services and by April 2006 the whole thing will have gone across. As I visit prisons - I know the Committee has been to prisons too - I can begin to see the difference that that is making. It beggars belief that it is only a little over a decade ago that people who were planning prisons were planning operating theatres within our prisons. It shows you how far we have come. Of course, that is a ludicrous idea and we need appropriate health care run by health professionals. We see evidence of improving physical health care but also improving mental health care as well, which is a huge challenge as we all know in our prisons. Q776 Mr Turner: With the exception of a very small number of prisoners, health care is a dip in and out for most of us. Our need for health care is from time to time, whereas the need for education is continuous and progressive. Is the analogy absolutely right between health and education and what do you think the LSC has to do that the PCTs do not have to do? Paul Goggins: I think there is an analogy there because just as there is a high level of need in terms of education for people in our prisons so frankly there is a relatively high need in terms of health care. Many of them have acute health needs. Many people coming into our prisons have drug abuse problems and so on so they do require a relatively high level. What can the Learning and Skills Councils learn? I think the most important thing is to get the partnership relationships right, to make sure that there is good communication. I have seen over the last year or so those prisons that have been able to establish good communication with the primary care trusts. They are able to get on with things and get things in place. They are the ones that will be in the best position. Some of them are the ones that went ahead in April of this year with the new commissioning arrangements. My strong urging is that the Learning and Skills Councils are engaged actively and personally with our prisons so that we make sure that there is good communication so that we can get things in place. Q777 Mr Turner: I am not quite sure what that means. Engaged actively? What do you want them to do? Paul Goggins: It starts with proper communication. I am aware that in most cases when it came to the relationship between the primary care trust and an individual prison people got on with it. They engaged in proper conversation about what was required, about what clinical governance arrangements would be in place etc. There were some where people were less inclined to communicate and that is a situation where people are slow to develop the proper systems that need to be put in place. I think the lesson is an obvious one that where people communicate, share an issue and come to a common solution, we can make rapid progress forward. That is one of the lessons from the devolution, if you like, of health care to the primary care trusts which can be transferred across to the Learning and Skills Councils. Q778 Mr Turner: I was going to ask about the manager. Each offender will have a manager and I assume they will have that manager, as far as practicable, throughout their sentence and any probation or whatever may follow on from that sentence. What if an offender is moved from prison to prison, as does quite often happen, and the local LSC is commissioning something in the prison where the offender is moved which does not provide continuity with his previous educational experience? What does the manager do? Paul Goggins: The offender manager literally picks up the case right at the start of the whole process, before court. He would be responsible for writing the report for court, recommending a programme or sentence to the court and making sure that that sentence is effectively carried through, both the custodial elements of it and also the community elements. The scenario that you describe is one in which a prisoner's education would be dislocated and it would be the job of the offender manager to make sure that as soon as possible it was possible to put that education programme back on track. What I am hoping is that as we develop the offender management service with a stronger regional focus fewer people will have to go outside their region in order to be found a prison place. At the moment, about a third of prisoners are imprisoned outside the 50 mile distance from home. You know this very well because of your own experience of prisons in your constituency. I want to see that number reduced because if we can keep more people who are in prison in their home region we can better connect them with the rehabilitation and resettlement services that we are trying to develop. Q779 Mr Turner: That sounds like a promise to close some of my prisons. Paul Goggins: There are absolutely no plans to close any of your prisons. I visited the three prisons only two or three weeks ago and I saw in Albany Prison some of the best prisoner education that I have seen with classrooms full. It was very active and very well balanced between workshops and classroom. Q780 Valerie Davey: Staying for a moment with the analogy of health, the Department of Health before it made its provision and funding did a very robust assessment of need. Has a similar assessment been made for education? Paul Goggins: We have been discussing some of the level of need that we have already established. Four out of five people who go to prison have had some period of exclusion from school and we have heard about the very low levels of numeracy and literacy. They are well recognised, well established figures. It is because of the need to build on the achievements that we have so far made and to sustain those in the long term and link them ever more effectively with the education and training systems that we are now moving to this latest phase. Q781 Valerie Davey: We have had an extra 30 million for prison education in the 2004/5 year. Has that money been spent? Is it reaching some of those aspirations that people have been very eloquent about this afternoon? Paul Goggins: The increase that we had last year, £97 million, was spent; this year, 136 million; next year, 152 million. Add to that £20 million invested in developing facilities within prisons. 53 prisons have benefited from that extra investment. The money is certainly going in as never before. It is not a coincidence therefore that the outcomes are showing signs of significant improvement. There is more going in; there is more coming out. There is absolutely no question of that. The old ethos used to be in prisons: get the work ethic going and somehow by osmosis or whatever the prisoner will catch it and then go into work. What we know absolutely for certain is that it is qualifications that enable people to move into work. As we have been able to see this greater number of basic skills qualifications, work qualifications, we can be very confident that that will feed through over the next few years into higher numbers of ex-prisoners going into work and staying in work. There is a very clear understanding now that it is qualifications that lead to work rather than some sort of process of the work ethic whilst inside. Q782 Valerie Davey: The expertise clearly lies with the Education Department. How is it directing this funding to meet the needs most effectively? Lord Filkin: The thrust to date has been quite clearly to significantly ramp up the increase in basic skills training. That increase in the numbers has been remarkable. The sort of questions that we are now asking ourselves -- and the three Ministers are working on this together - are will that by itself, even if there were to be more money put in, be sufficient? As Paul indicated, we are clear that it will not be, by which I mean that health is an end in itself. In this context, I do not think that education is an end in itself. In other words, just by ourselves getting more of the basic skills numbers or work skills I do not think is an adequate measure of success. I irritate my departmental officials at times by saying, "I do not think our job is education. Our job is being part of a process that gets people into work." Therefore, why I am banging on about it is that, even if we do world class interventions - and I hope we will - in terms of putting in through the LSC and other processes improved systems to get more and more offenders able to take an opportunity of getting basic skills or employment skills in place, we have to try to look at what would the totality of the system need to deliver. Otherwise, that will be a waste of money, by which I mean we have to see the NOMS focusing on getting people into employment, NOMS supporting the wider stabilisation of that person in the community and Job Centre Plus and DWP seeing that they share with us a very strong focus in policy terms of getting ex-offenders into jobs and keeping them there. Therefore, whilst we will hopefully do a lot by ourselves, that is why I have been quite clear - Paul shares my view; so does Jane Kennedy and so do Cabinet Ministers on this - that we have to look across those three departments, particularly at how we shape a much stronger system which will not just put the skills in and make the motivators in prison work but have an appropriate system that makes it far more likely that they will be helped into getting a job and staying there. Q783 Valerie Davey: Who is doing the research to decide how basic skills are best delivered in prison? We heard the earlier comment about the prison kitchens where clearly, providing food, people are learning basic skills for a job. They are also being involved therefore in needing to do the basic literacy and numeracy. That would appear to be in all our skills debates a better way than sitting people in a classroom; and yet we are still developing classrooms. Who is doing the research to decide how best to spend this 30 extra million, plus plus, which we are anticipating in order that the very things that everyone wants to see are accomplished? Lord Filkin: I do not know. I can find out but I do not know the answer to that question off the cuff. Paul Goggins: The research which the Home Office is carrying out in this area is in relation to what interventions can make the biggest impact in terms of reducing reoffending. We are just beginning a five year study that will look at a range of interventions. Education and learning will be one of those interventions that we will seek to measure over time. We have a hunch, that we are backing with substantial resources, that this will lead to greater employability and reduce reoffending but we have to make sure that we have the research results in place that confirm whether or not that is true. Q784 Valerie Davey: I hope the Education Department somewhere can give you the professional advice as to which way to teach because that seems to be fundamental. Paul Goggins: That is fundamentally why, as with the question of health, we believe that education should be in the hands of the educationalists, the professionals, to deliver because they will know best what to do. Lord Filkin: A fuller answer to the question would be that that is one of the questions that we will undoubtedly have to address as part of the fairly root and branch review I have been seeking to outline for you for two reasons. We have, within whatever money there is currently, to ensure that it is applied to where it can have most utility. It is a brutal question but it has to be because you have to say, "If that is the amount of money there, how is that money going to be most effectively used" to achieve the goals I talked about which were about maximising the numbers into employment. It also lays a foundation, if you can demonstrate that, for making a legitimate argument that it is better to redirect other resources if you can demonstrate that you are getting effective outcomes in that way. Q785 Chairman: Whilst we would agree wholeheartedly that education should be in the hands of trained people in education, the evidence we have from some of the small groups is that things like toe by toe, teaching literacy but using prison officers who are fully engaged, are a wonderful way to supplement the professionals. We were very encouraged by toe by toe and we would not want that to be excluded. If you get a holistic learning environment, that is one of the benefits, is it not? Paul Goggins: I agree very strongly. If prison officers have a role to play there, other staff have a role to play and voluntary organisations and others who come into the prisons in large numbers to help with this and other important tasks that go on in prison can add tremendous value to the basic education task. My point simply is that the overall framework and delivery should be the responsibility of those who plan and fund the education process. Q786 Chairman: Lord Filkin, you said you did not know that particular area of research. When we were in the Nordic countries, we picked up on two problems. One we seem to be more reluctant to talk about here and that is that 60 per cent plus of people in prison in those two countries we looked at recently were on drugs. To educate someone who is on drugs, you have to get them off drugs and encourage them in a drug education and rehabilitation programme. They were experimental also in terms of attention deficient syndrome in prisoners and using Ritalin. Are we conducting any experiments like that in British prisons? Are we learning from their experience? Lord Filkin: I would agree with you on the drugs issue which is why one has to see this as a total process to get people into employment. It is all going to be failing without success on drugs. Q787 Chairman: What about attention deficit syndrome? Lord Filkin: We can follow your lead on that. Q788 Paul Holmes: The witnesses earlier this afternoon were enthusiastic about the example that Val has just referred to about prisoners doing the work in the prison kitchen and doing basic skills and combining the two together. We have heard from witnesses in previous sessions that sometimes it is not as good as that and, because a prison is obsessed with meeting its key performance targets so that the Ministers will praise them at the end of the year, they run classes and the classroom door says KPT classes. When you ask the prisoners what they are doing, they say, "We are doing KPT." Is there a danger of this? Are you aware of this happening within the system? Paul Goggins: I do not make any apology for setting targets because the evidence is that as we set those targets and fund the activity that goes behind those targets we see a substantial difference. Of course it is important that we are also adding value, that we are not just repeating things for the sake of hitting the right numbers in terms of those targets. They have to make a real difference. I was also taken with the example that was given of linking the skills training to a very practical task which needs to go on in a prison, namely to provide food each and every day. I think there are real opportunities there to link that basic task in a prison with good training and education but more than that: to link those people into real jobs outside of prison once they are released. We know that in the catering industry there are huge opportunities at the moment for people to move into jobs in kitchens and elsewhere. It is getting that join up between the education providers, employers, the Prison Service and the Probation Service so that we manage people through and we are not wasteful. The worst thing that could happen is where people are wasteful with resources, where there is repetition of the same courses with the same offenders. What we have to do is continually add value and link all these things together. Q789 Paul Holmes: I assume yourself or members of your department will have looked at the previous evidence we have had. That negative effect of target setting has been raised. Are you not alarmed that there may be prisons where they are just so obsessed with ticking the box that they are running KPT classes rather than educating the prisoners? Paul Goggins: I would be alarmed if there were prisons that were merely seeking to tick the box. The balance that we need is one where people know that they have to be aspirational and ambitious in terms of delivering more and better outcomes for the individual offenders in their care. It must be a meaningful process. It cannot be just literally a question of catching the numbers. It has to be about adding value. From my visits to prisons - I am aware that members of the Committee have also undertaken a number of visits to prisons - I am satisfied that for the most part that balance is being achieved. The important thing is that when it is achieved it can change people's lives. Lord Filkin: What we were talking about earlier was looking at what would be the characteristics of a system that was more likely to maximise people getting into employment. Firstly, you want all of the system to have that as the objective of policy. I do not by that mean letting people get out because obviously that is part of the job, but you are looking for a system in principle whereby LSC, DfES, the Probation Service, the Prison Service, Job Centre Plus all recognise the success around this part of the business which is getting people into employment. Obviously you hang the performance management system off that so that the motivators are aligned with the direction of policy. That is some of the medium term thinking that we will be doing around this because that is where you have to try and reinforce the system to be performance managed and rewarded as a system around the objective of policy. Q790 Paul Holmes: Whenever you set targets which are good for measuring progress, driving people on and so forth, there is always the controversy about NHS waiting lists or teachers protesting in schools and people work to the target rather than delivering the goods. In a previous evidence session we had somebody saying, "But we are doing really well because we have reached this year's target for prisoners going into employment when they leave the prison". Other witnesses are saying, "Yes, but all that is based on is the prisoner saying, 'I have an interview when I leave'" but the Department or the prison does not know whether that does turn into a real job or not. You are saying you have hit a target but you have no idea whether you really have. Paul Goggins: We have to find some way of representing the achievement which we believe does happen when people attend a fresh start interview, because clearly some people do go on to gain a job. The system that we operate we are happy with in so far as it goes. What we need are much better systems for tracking the progress of individual offenders, which brings me back to the issue of offender management. At the moment, somebody leaves prison and if it is a short term prison sentence that is the end of it until perhaps they reoffend and they are back in the system again. Under the new arrangements, they will be supervised after release and we will be able to track them to see whether they did turn up for the interview, whether they did obtain a job and were able to hold on to that job. That will be a far more meaningful system of monitoring than we are currently able to achieve, both in terms of developing the technology to underpin that and have the offender management system in place. Both those things together will help us to be more effective. To return to your model of bad practice, I would describe it as bad practice if people were simply chasing the numbers. We have of course a robust system of inspection at all our prisons and wherever bad practice was found I would expect Ann Owers and her team to make that very clear as indeed she does with some force on a very regular basis. We will not tolerate poor practice of that kind because it is about adding value. Q791 Chairman: What jumps up and hits you when you go to a prison is nothing too nasty but it leaves the feeling that there is very little enterprise in a prison. I always get the same feeling as when I am walking around a university. I want an entrepreneur to be on the campus to shake up the entrepreneurial potential of the establishment. I find that in prisons too. What can you do? You run the Prison Service. You are the Minister responsible. Do you ever say to Martin, "How do we get managers who are a bit more entrepreneurial here? How do we encourage them to stay in an establishment for a bit longer?"? Paul Goggins: I am not sure I agree with your assessment. As I go around prisons - and I have been to quite a few over the last 18 months - I find a huge spirit of entrepreneurial attitudes, bearing in mind that the prison governor and his or her staff have first of all to keep everybody in that prison secure and safe. We have massively reduced the number of prisoners escaping from our prisons and that is a primary task which they have. Beyond that, I find great energy, enthusiasm and imagination. I find partnerships with voluntary organisations. We have 900 voluntary organisations working in our prisons today in partnership with the Prison Service. I see health professionals and educationalists coming in. I think we have a tremendous spirit. What we need to do is to sustain it over a long period of time. Q792 Chairman: You sound a bit happy-clappy. You go and applaud what is after all very patchy. We as a select committee are always looking for systemic achievement and you do not get that if you just say, "I keep going round and I see encouraging signs." What this Committee knows about education is that it has to be directed. Somebody has to be motivating it. Why does everyone send us to Reading? Everyone goes to Reading. Why are there not more Readings? Then you ask the governor and the governor says, "We are a terribly parochial prison. We are doing it" so a lot of people say, "Reading are doing that" so the systemic raising of achievement seems to be difficult in prisons. Paul Goggins: I disagree with you because I have seen enough evidence of it over the last 18 months to suggest that there is a great deal of spirit in the way people approach their jobs. If I can correct one piece of information which from the Chair you shared with the Committee ---- Q793 Chairman: The turnover of governors? Paul Goggins: It was that governing governors stay 18 months. The latest information that I have is that the average is 22 months. Q794 Chairman: That is not very good. Paul Goggins: If it was 18 months and it is now 22 months, that is a move in the right direction. It is certainly a move I would want to see sustained but, if there is a sense in which this is a haphazard system that is in crisis, I would not agree with that. We have 137 prisons. They all have to be well led and well managed and we want top quality people doing that. Where the Prison Service moves a governor into another prison, it is a bit like buying a house. There can then be a knock on effect. Others have to move as well. What the Prison Service must do over a period of time is develop a new generation of governing governors. They need to make sure they get experience in different establishments along the way. It is a complex task. Q795 Chairman: So is running ICI or Glaxo SmithKline. Paul Goggins: My feeling is I think the period for which governing governors remain in place is getting slightly longer. That is welcome but it is a well managed process because obviously I would be very concerned if it was not. Q796 Chairman: What we are trying to bring home to you, because you are in a parallel universe in some sense to us only in the sense that we are education and you are home affairs, is if we saw that there was that sort of turnover of college principals, vice-chancellors, heads, we would be very deeply disturbed because we do not think you can run any establishment or manage it well with that sort of turnover. Paul Goggins: I understand that. Would I prefer it if governing governors were in post for longer than an average of 22 months? Yes, I would. I will be expecting that that period will get longer still. Do I expect that a good sign of a governing governor having been successful is that they are in post for ten years? Not necessarily. We have to understand that the Prison Service is itself a system where people perhaps move around rather more rapidly than one would expect a head teacher of a local comprehensive school to do. Q797 Chairman: If education is going to be valued, you do not want a system that we tripped over in one prison where the governor said, "The next governor coming in might not value education." Indeed, we had evidence from one governor who said, "I am not having anyone from education and skills on the senior board in my prison. It is not that important. It is a subsidiary thing." If you do not value and put on the prison board an educationalist along with your health person, how can you expect us to believe that you are prioritising education? Paul Goggins: There should be more consistency of approach. I would expect the heads of learning and skills to be on the senior management team and I believe that in most prisons they are. Chairman: It has been a very good session. We have had such excellent answers and I have to say to our colleague from the House of Lords, thoughtful answers. Both of you were thoughtful but he was even more thoughtful than you, Paul. It is nice to have a better class of witnesses. Thank you. |