Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-120)
PHIL HOPE
MP, RT HON
BARONESS SCOTLAND
OF ASTHAL
QC, MR CHRIS
BARNHAM AND
MRS FRANCES
FLAXINGTON
18 DECEMBER 2006
Q100 Stephen Williams: One final
question, it follows from what Fiona raised earlier and the Minister
mentioned it as well, about soft skills of prisons, not just direct
employability skills. In my limited experience of two visits to
Bristol Prison and meeting some prisoners, they have very low
personal articulation and inter-personal skills. Is any of that
built into the prison education targets?
Phil Hope: It is an essential
part. What is important about individual learning is that we continue
to talk about personalising the learning which the individual
will receive and each individual will be different and, therefore,
as well as generic skills training of one kind or another we need
to find out what it is for individuals. That is why different
courses are put on and why different offenders choose which courses
to attend that appeal to their particular interests and perhaps
their particular needs. You are right, Patricia was saying this
earlier, we call these soft skills, I think they can be the hardest
skills for someone to acquire because they have had a legacy of
learning the complete reverse of those skills. The whole of their
lives has been spent communicating badly, behaving badly, treating
others badly and treating themselves badly, to turn that around,
those are not soft skills, those are extremely difficult things
to do and require some extraordinarily talented people that I
see inside the prison system working very well to take offenders
to a point where they have not been to before about looking at
themselves and developing a change about their self-esteem and
self confidence, that moves them forward.
Q101 Stephen Williams: Going back
to my previous question, would that include parenting skills and
anger management?
Phil Hope: Yes, both of those
would be available and increasingly parenting skills—you
mentioned child poverty—many of the offenders, particularly
dads, go back into prison and as a result of some of the parenting
skills for the first time finding out about some very basic things
like reading to your child, for example, that they did not think
about before. I know that sounds remarkable, but it is the case,
Chairman.
Chairman: We are on a nine minute countdown
to the Chairman's Christmas party, to which our witnesses are
cordially invited. We only have nine minutes, but David wants
to ask some questions.
Q102 Mr Chaytor: I cannot wait but
I want to finish the question. During the Committee's visits to
various prisons as part of this inquiry, one of the strongest
messages we received was about the inadequacy of individual learning
plans. Is it the case that the individual learning plans remain
paper-based throughout the system and that they vary from prison
to prison?
Phil Hope: Yes, they are currently
still paper-based and what I said at the beginning, one of the
things that we have not yet achieved, and I see it as a core part
of dealing with this issue of churn, for example, and certainly
dealing with the issue of linking up what goes on in prison with
what goes on outside of prison, is creating an electronic database
that offenders will have, an electronic learning plan and electronic
storage of what their achievements are and so on. Therefore, when
they move from prison to prison we have not got to worry about
are they clutching the bit of paper or the folder with the record
inside. Although we have now got a system where that works, I
think it is inadequate and it is something that we need to do.
Our difficulty is that data collected on the NOMIS system is not
the same or is not compatible with data that the LSC are using,
so this is the technical thing. It is soluble but it is going
to take us a bit longer than I thought it would take to get there.
Q103 Mr Chaytor: When would you expect
the whole system of individual learner plans to be in electronic
format?
Phil Hope: I would hope that we
can overcome these systems over the next year. I know you will
hold me to this so I might as well say it. I want it to be successfully
completed within the next year. I think through the regional test
beds we might be able to take it forward. It is a technical problem
that we have got to resolve here. There are questions about confidentiality
of data records and so on, I think these are all doable, it is
just going to take a bit more time for us to work together to
solve it.
Mr Barnham: Could I add to that?
The Learning and Skills Council will procure in 2007 an offender
learning database.
Q104 Mr Chaytor: What?
Mr Barnham: They will specify
and procure an offender learning database which will basically
hold all offenders' records electronically accessible from various
places so there will not have to be a physical transfer; you will
be able to access them wherever you go.
Q105 Chairman: You said you were
going to introduce that a year ago.
Mr Barnham: It has been introduced
in some of the development regions and in the South West, for
example.
Q106 Chairman: They are having terrible
trouble with it.
Mr Barnham: Certainly there have
been teething troubles, but in the South West, the system that
they have got there, the LSC told me only this week that they
have saved themselves at least 1,000 reassessments that they would
have had to make of people being assessed again who had previously
been assessed somewhere else. So there is some progress being
made but the longer term solution must be an offender management
information system which covers all offender needs, that is a
very long-term solution for the education needs. In the meantime,
the Learning and Skills Council, because it needs this, will procure
something to cover all the nine English regions starting from
2007. I cannot make commitments on the exact timetable of getting
that embedded everywhere, but they will go out to procurement.
Q107 Mr Chaytor: The procurement
of the database will be in 2007?
Mr Barnham: Yes.
Q108 Mr Chaytor: The process of inputting
all the information of all offenders could take years and years
after that, could it?
Mr Barnham: I would not put it
like that. There are systems already in place and, as I said,
the South West has a system already which is operated, it is a
commercial system that the company Tribal, which is responsible
for information, advice and guidance in the South West, has developed
itself and is using. That is also available to the other two development
regions although they have been slower to adopt that. What we
need is a system that applies everywhere. We have got different
systems in operation at the moment and the LSC is requiring e-mailing
of individual learner records and learner plans but they are going
to put all of this on a firmer footing to cover everything that
they are responsible for.
Q109 Mr Chaytor: Does the same situation
apply to the sentencing plans? The sentencing plans are supposed
to relate closely to the individual learner plans, but are the
sentencing plans still paper-based or are they in electronic format?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: Electronic.
Mrs Flaxington: In the longer
term we are going to see it integrated into C-NOMIS, our offender
management database, and that is going to be really important
to make sure that this agenda is part and parcel of electronic
records on offender management.
Q110 Chairman: Now someone is passing
you pieces of paper.
Mrs Flaxington: He reminds me
that we already have OASys. I will let my Minister answer.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: No,
I like it when Frances answers, it gives me a break. Continue.
Q111 Chairman: You could end up in
some obscure office in Leeds!
Mrs Flaxington: The OASys system
is already online, which is this offender assessment that we talked
about which has really helped in terms of rolling out offender
management. It is the focus, this assessment of the needs. I am
starting to ramble so I am going to stop.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: It
has also so far been one of the best models that we have in terms
of accurately assessing both risk and need and rolling it out
is one of the issues which is challenging but actually quite successful.
Q112 Mr Chaytor: Could I pursue this
point. The sentence plan is a paper-based system, but we have
in the three development regions the OASys system which is due
to be rolled out.
Mrs Flaxington: You have got OASys
across the country which is an electronic assessment system. What
you get with the learning and skills, this database which we are
developing in the three regions now, is about the qualifications
that the offender is gaining and doing individual qualifications
and what we are trying to do for the longer term is integrate
it all into one package.
Q113 Mr Chaytor: How does this fit
in with the employability contract because, again, the Next
Steps document makes no reference to individual learning plans
but describes quite carefully what will be in the employability
contract. Are we going to have two things or is it all going to
be merged together?
Mrs Flaxington: I think this is
part of our challenge for the future, we want our offender manager
to have education, training and employment as central to their
assessment and planning and this contract is simply a badge for
us to promote the agenda with offender managers as part of its
roll-out.
Q114 Mr Chaytor: Will the employability
contract be a sheet of paper or will it be an electronic record
and how will it relate to the individual learning plan and the
sentence plan? It sounds chaotic to me, but I want you to explain
why it is not chaos.
Mrs Flaxington: I think what we
are going to do is use the test bed regions as a way of saying,
"Okay, there is your roll-out of offender management, how
do we get a higher profile for education, training and employment
as part of it?" Really, whether it is a piece of paper, it
is about how we get the offender manager working with the offender
in the community in terms of what you need to do to get yourself
into work.
Q115 Mr Chaytor: If you still have
the staff who are delivering the service at the frontline confused
about the status and the transferability of the individual learning
plan, not knowing whether the employment contract is a physical
document or an overarching concept, how is it going to work?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: I
hope I can help. The whole role of the offender manager is to
be the co-ordinator. What the offender manager will have to do
is a risk assessment of that individual to basically assess dangerousness
and otherwise and then do a needs-based assessment. That needs-based
assessment could involve employment, education, accommodation,
difficulties with children, debt, a whole series of things, including
the seven pathways, of which education and employability will
be one. In relation to education and employability, they will
work really closely with the LSC to identify the offender's needs
and part of that sentencing plan may include the employment pathway,
but there will be other pathways. It is going to be important
for accommodation, so, if you like, the offender manager is going
to be the conductor of an orchestra which is going to have many
parts but they are there to synthesise and make sense of it so
you do not get a cacophony of discordant notes but you get a bit
of harmony.
Q116 Mr Chaytor: When the new system
beds in, will there be a single electronic document that will
contain all this assessment and set out the essence of the employability
contract and the individual learning plan?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: There
should be as part of C-NOMIS because OASys was the assessment
tool, but C-NOMIS will provide the means to which that will be
collated.
Q117 Mr Chaytor: When will C-NOMIS
be up and running?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: It
is alive already in one prison in Albany and it has been rolled
out progressively throughout the next year or two. I think we
were hoping that by 2008 C-NOMIS would be rolled out throughout
the system.
Q118 Mr Chaytor: If C-NOMIS is going
to be rolled out by 2008, how does this relate to the procurement
of the database that Phil Hope referred to?
Mrs Flaxington: Can we think in
the short, medium and longer term. In the three test regions we
have already got some database on learning, in the medium term
we will have this offender learning database while C-NOMIS starts
to kick in, getting the education bit into C-NOMIS is going to
take longer, that is why we have got these interim arrangements.
Mr Barnham: It is easy to get
confused. I want to try and clarify this. For anybody who is engaged
in education, the Learning and Skills Council already requires
there to be an individual learner record and a learning plan.
The transfer of those things and the availability throughout the
system for providers has not been good enough in the past and
we ought to improve that, we ought to do that with an electronic
system so that somebody goes from one place to another and it
is clear how far they have gone in learning. That is connected
with, or ideally should be, and analogous to the overall offender
sentence plan which ought to set out everything that somebody
needs and all the interventions that are going on. The employability
contract on the other hand is a fairly specific idea that we floated
in the Green Paper last year which is where an individual is identified
as having a particular employability need which, if addressed,
could make a significant impact on the chances of not offending
anymore. So it may only be a minority of offenders. Where they
are willing to sign up to an intensive programme to address that
need with rewards attached to it, with a job opportunity at the
end of it perhaps, where they are willing to make that step to
sign up to what may be a demanding programme, the idea was to
have a contract to motivate them. It may be a piece of paper if
that is what people appreciate, it sets out what it is they are
going to do and what they will get in return for it. That is not
to say that they will not have the learner records elsewhere in
the system which anybody else would, but the contract idea is
a New Deal concept, "We will give you this help: you must
have responsibilities to meet that and we will address that in
a plan which we are going to set out to make clear what you do".
Q119 Mr Chaytor: Chairman, I am really
anxious to get to your Christmas party but if I could ask one
more thing about the contract. I have accepted that the contract
will be for a minority of appropriate prisoners but presumably
some of them will ultimately reoffend, it will not be a 100% foolproof
system and they may well turn up in prisons in other parts of
the country. Surely, if the contract is going to be a paper-based
system we are back to square one because we have still got the
inadequacies of transfer of records between prisons.
Mr Barnham: I do not think so
because their sentence plan will be on the system, their learner
record will be on the system: the things they have undertaken,
the programmes they have done, the achievements they have made
will all be recorded there. The fact that they may once have had
an agreement about their behaviour is there.
Q120 Mr Chaytor: The fact that they
have reneged on a contract they previously signed will not be
on the system.
Mr Barnham: I think it will be,
it will be part of the sentence plan.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: The
thing is the person who will continue with them is going to be
the offender manager. The whole point of having one offender manager
is that they do not get lost, you do not have to relearn. That
offender manager will remain responsible for them wherever they
may be and is supposed to be the glue which gives you your continuity
so you do not get lost. What offenders have told us again and
again is that in the past they did not know what the expectations
were, "What am I supposed to do? What does success look like?
What does failure look like? What is the clear message that I
have to take?" What we hope is that offender management gives
them that clarity, "This is your bit, this is our bit, this
is what will happen if you succeed, this is what will happen if
you fail", so consequences very clearly gripped.
Chairman: This has been a really good
session. We have learned a lot, we have asked some, I hope, hard
questions. There is a bit of me that wants to say, with great
respect to Phil, that there is a triumph of hope over experience,
but we hope that we can mull this over and come up with a report
based on this evidence session. Thank you very much and can I
wish you all a very happy and enjoyable holiday and Christmas.
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