Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
DEPARTMENT FOR
INNOVATION, UNIVERSITIES
AND SKILLS,
LEARNING SKILLS
COUNCIL AND
NATIONAL MANAGEMENT
SERVICE
19 MAY 2008
Q1 Mr Williams: Good afternoon. Today
we are considering the CAG's Report Meeting Needs? The Offenders'
Learning and Skills Service. Our principal witness is Ian
Watmore, Permanent Secretary, Department of Innovations. Perhaps
you would introduce your colleagues.
Mr Watmore: Yes, of course. Mark
Haysom from the Learning and Skills Council; he is the Chief Executive
there. Phil Wheatley is now the Director General of the National
Offender Management Service within the Ministry of Justice.
Q2 Mr Williams: The prime policy
objectives as I understand from the Report are to reduce re-offending
and to improve employability. If we go first of all to Mr Wheatley,
why is it that you do not know what impact the learning and skills
provision has on re-offending?
Mr Wheatley: Trying to work out
which of various interventions—there are a number of interventions
we are using on prisoners—made the difference is very difficult
in research methodological terms. For an offender arriving with
us they may well have had a very good personal officer who formed
a good relationship with them and offered them good advice and
they respect it; a probation officer who assessed them from the
outside who made some impact on them; they have done an offending
behaviour course which was a good offending behaviour course and
they cooperated with it; they have de-toxed while they were with
us and then done a drug treatment programme; they have also done
education. Trying to find the methodology that works out which
of those interventions have the effect is difficult. I can tell
you that as a result of the various interventions and the increased
funding we have had—including increased funding for education
and skills training—there has been an improvement in the
rate of re-conviction, particularly for prisoners who are serving
over 12 months, in other words people we have had long enough
to work with. The mix is producing an improvement comparing actual
pre-convictions with predicted re-convictions.
Q3 Mr Williams: Can we turn to you,
Mr Haysom, with a somewhat similar question on the other arm of
the policy. Why is it that your Department does not even collect
information on whether offenders are improving their learning
and skills and going on to employment? This information is not
available; is it impossible to obtain or is it something you are
trying to develop?
Mr Haysom: That is exactly right.
We are collecting more information than ever before so we know
an awful lot more about offenders and their learning and we know
what they are learning and their achievements. We know how they
are progressing when they are learning within the establishment
that they are being held in. What we cannot do at the moment is
track them beyond that when they come out into the wider community.
We are working on a system which enables us to track their progress.
Q4 Mr Williams: I can see there are
statistical problems but it does make it impossible to judge effectiveness.
Mr Haysom: It is very early and
I wanted to say by way of answering some of these early questions,
this is a really helpful Report. It is very timely but it is very
early in terms of the Offenders' Learning and Skills Service.
Q5 Mr Williams: It seems only the
other day you were here for the last Report.
Mr Haysom: It certainly feels
like that for me. It is very early into the life of the Service.
The work was actually undertaken shortly after the first year
of the Service and at that stage we were still bedding in a lot
of the new approaches to it, but we were a bit poor in terms of
data at that stage, understandably because the data simply was
not there. What we now have is a lot more data because time has
gone by and as we go through this hearing I may take the opportunity,
if the Committee permits me, to update you in terms of some of
the progress that has been achieved. Particularly with the new
systems that we are trying to put in place there has been good
progress. You will have noted in the Report that it talks about
the fact that there was a very urgent requirement to put systems
in place that would enable us to track learners as they move through
the system, and particularly as they move them between different
prisons within the system. We have put in place some temporary
measures which have enabled us to do just that. They are not perfect
but they are an awful lot better than they were before. We are
now building a system which will be trialled from September in
two regions, the North East and the North West, and that system
will enable us to track offenders within the prison service but
importantly it will also link into mainstream further education
so it will actually develop a learner record from which we will
be able to understand what happens to them beyond their immediate
learning.
Q6 Mr Williams: Mr Wheatley, serious
literacy and numeracy problems are defined in the Report as the
"ability of nine year olds and under"; that is a very,
very low starting point. Why is it that about four-fifths of prisoners
who are in that category are not even taking courses?
Mr Wheatley: There are certainly
very low levels of literacy as the Report makes clear and we also
know that many of the prisoners arriving with us have a history
of not attending school regularly and indeed many of them have
a history of being excluded permanently from school at some point
in their past. They are not people who have accessed education;
many of them come in with substantial problems that make it difficult
to access education—mental health problems and particularly
drug abuse problems and major work often goes into de-toxing people
or coping with significant mental health problems—so not
everybody is immediately able to access education nor indeed when
stabilised appropriate for education or skills training. As we
engage in getting people into skills and education we are looking
for people who are going to volunteer and be compliant and make
the best of the opportunities. Quite a number, particularly of
our very short sentence prisoners, simply do not match that. If
you look at the prison population, a large number of prisoners
churn through over a very small period of time; they are either
in on short periods of remand or in on very short sentences. There
is a smaller number who stay a long time and who probably much
better match the sort of provision that is really going to make
a difference to their education.
Q7 Mr Williams: Is there anything
further you can do to motivate them?
Mr Wheatley: I think there is
and I think that is part of what we are trying to do, particularly
through offender management. We are trying to motivate offenders
who are in prison in order to engage with what is available and
trying to get them to want to make a difference to themselves.
That is part of the work we are doing as we develop offender management
using personal officer schemes in particular to try to motivate
offenders to take up what is available. We are using what is available
and we are making sure we use it properly.
Mr Haysom: It might be helpful
if I just add to that that we are enjoying some success in terms
of engaging more and more prisoners in learning. We now have detailed
information about the first year of the Service which is 2006/07
and we now know that 82,290 learners engaged with learning at
that time. That represents 53% of the total number of prisoners
that were in custody during that year. We know that we are growing
the numbers of people engaged so we know on an average monthly
basis that prior to the Learning and Skills Service about 30%
of offenders were engaging. In the first year of the Service that
grew to 36% and is now running at 38%. We are really seeing more
and more offenders engaging. I do not want to sound complacent
here or that it is a job done, but it is quite encouraging and
I am sure that Phil will echo that. It is encouraging that more
and more learners are actually engaging and some of the things
we are doing are working.
Mr Wheatley: That indicates that
we are making progress and we are making use of what is available.
It is the substantial government investment in learning and skills
that has enabled us to expand what we have on offer in a way that
is actually producing, along with the other interventions, reductions
in re-offending for those who are in prison long enough to use
them.
Q8 Mr Williams: Mr Haysom, why is
it that the quality of learning plans are so poor as described
in the Report? One third do not specify what course the prisoner
should be on; less than half recorded progress.
Mr Haysom: This again was a really
helpful intervention from the NAO because it has highlighted something
that is a bit concerning in terms of our work. One of the things
it has highlighted is that we need much greater clarity over what
we mean by learning plan. What is very clear is that those providers
who returned the forms at the request of the NAO did not quite
understand what a learning plan was so they returned what we would
call a guidance plan on which you would not expect to have a lot
of the information you have just referred to actually in the Report.
It has highlighted there is an urgent need for us to get greater
clarity into this whole area and to make sure that learning plans
are as robust as they should be. Again I would stress that this
was early on and we have worked hard at this and there has been
progress. I do not think we could have achieved the kind of improvement
that we have seen that I have already spoken about unless that
whole area is becoming more robust. What is encouraging—if
I can just throw some more numbers at you—is that not only
are more learners engaging, they are achieving more and that is
so, so important. We know that in the first year of the Service
there was an achievement rate of 43.5% which was okay but it did
not compare terribly favourably with the broader FE achievement
rate of 66%. It is now running at 55% so already, because of the
quality of what is being delivered, we are seeing some significant
progress there. You have to say that the learning plans must be
contributing to that.
Q9 Mr Bacon: I would like to start
with Mr Wheatley. This is a question the Chairman asked us to
ask because he cannot be here today. What practical use are your
programmes for prisoners serving 12 months or less?
Mr Wheatley: I think for the very
short sentence prisoners the programmes that we have have little
impact and are not easily accessed; they are simply not there
long enough to access them. That is one of the reasons why very
short term sentences have no measurable effect on re-offending
and we never claim they do. The most we are able to do is do some
initial assessment of people; we can sometimes signpost them into
other ways of improving their education outside of prison. Somebody
who is doing, say, a one month sentence will only be with us for
two weeks and if they have been with us for three or four days
on remand that is even less.
Q10 Mr Bacon: So the answer to his
question is not a lot.
Mr Wheatley: Yes.
Q11 Mr Bacon: Mr Haysom, you said
that there was some confusion as to what learning plans were.
This was by the contractors whose job it is to provide the teaching
in the prisons; they were confused about what a learning plan
is.
Mr Haysom: They are also contractors
who provide information, advice and guidance, so they are doing
two parts of this. At this stage of OLASS we did not actually
have a consistent approach to learning plans across the piece.
One of the things we have taken from this Report is an urgent
need to put that in place.
Q12 Mr Bacon: Looking at paragraph
2.25 on page 24 it talks about the providers who returned data
and it says, "The data we did receive showed that the extent
to which an individual offender could leave off and then take
up the same course after transferring between establishments was
often limited, even where provided by the same contractor".
You might have thought there would be a problem if they were different
contractors, but surely the same contractor is going to have the
same modules on offer.
Mr Haysom: No, and you go to something
very important in terms of the Report and in terms of our engagement
with this whole new Service. You will have read in the Report
that the curriculum offer that has been put in place in the early
stages of OLASS is not the curriculum offer that we would wish
to put in place going forward. We had to take some cautious, considered,
pragmatic steps when we got involved in this work. Some of those
steps were to lock in the hours of learning that were taking place
and the nature of learning that was taking place in different
establishments. It was not possible to make all the changes we
would have wished. The future is all about having a core curriculum
which enables people to start a course in one institution and
to carry on with that, their learning plan having gone with them
to the next institution and they can pick that up as they transfer.
That is the future; that is what we are working towards. We have
work underway on that; we have some trials underway in different
parts of the country with clusters of prisons working together
to develop that core curriculum.
Q13 Mr Bacon: Could I ask you to
turn to page 18? In paragraph 2.4, halfway down, it says that
"there is confusion about where scarce resources ought to
be targeted". Would you like to comment on that and say whether
the confusion has now been cleared up?
Mr Haysom: We are in the process
of clearing that up. Again, when we took over the Service, there
was at that stage no focus on priorities and there was no understanding
of what were the priorities and how we should target our scarce
resources. You will have noticed in the Report references to our
prospectus which was published in September last year and the
prospectus laid out a whole approach to managing the provision
to meet need. We are putting in place a whole series of reviews
which will look at demand, at employer need, at the curriculum
that should be provided, at priorities and at the nature of the
institutions as well and the facilities they have and try to match
those in a targeted way. That is what we are trying to move to.
Q14 Mr Bacon: You have said a couple
of times that this is very early days, so to speak. You have been
going in your new form since July 2006; you were recast because
of the serious weaknesses that have been identified hitherto.
You have been going for a couple of years and yet this Report
can still say that "there are currently no data on the true
level of need and demand for learning and skills provision at
each establishment or in probation areas". A second ago you
were talking about the need to find out what courses are needed.
What is so difficult about finding out what is needed?
Mr Haysom: I do not think it is
that difficult. I think what we have to have is a careful approach
to managing that, and that is what we have. We entered into a
contractual round for a fixed number of learning hours when we
first got involved in the Service in 2006. The next round is in
2009 and we are developing these plans to introduce at that stage.
Q15 Mr Bacon: You bring me neatly
onto paragraph 2.15 which is on page 23 where it says, "Teaching
hours are defined in terms of the hours spent by employees of
the provider delivering courses" (which I suppose is fair
enough, it seems the easiest way to count teaching hours). "Payments
are made irrespective of offender take-up, offender attendance
rates and whether offenders progress, complete courses or achieve
qualifications." In your next contractual round that will
start after this one finishing in 2009 is over, will you be addressing
these points? Will you be trying to incentivise the providers
to have higher outcomes?
Mr Haysom: That is absolutely
right; that is exactly what we will be doing. We will be targeting
and rewarding providers on the basis of engagement and achievement.
Q16 Mr Bacon: Why did you not do
it to start with?
Mr Haysom: As I said, when we
took over responsibility in this area we wanted to go about this
in a careful and considered way.
Q17 Mr Bacon: Essentially, from July
2006 onwards, you were transferring the status quo ante and then
trying to work at it rather than introduce a brave new world.
Mr Haysom: Yes, there is a bit
of that. I think the last thing we would have wished to have done
is go gung-ho with this and gone in to try to change the world
overnight. I am not sure that would have gone down terribly well
at all. We needed to learn this whole area; we needed to work
this out; we need to build partnerships and relationships; we
need to find out what works and what does not. We have been spending
the time very constructively and that is why I can share with
you the progress that has been achieved. Although at the moment
we work on the basis of contracted hours of delivery we have actually
made some good steps in terms of learning all of those things.
We have introduced equity in terms of the funding methodology
that sits behind that; we have used the last contracting round
to introduce high quality providers who are delivering the results
that we talked about and so on. This is not an area that we wanted
to come into afresh and within months try to change everything.
We needed to build experience, knowledge and skills. That is what
we have done and we have actually created a very encouraging platform
to build on. I genuinely believe that.
Q18 Mr Bacon: On page 21 in figure
six there is a very obvious blip at one end of that chart. This
is the distribution of the annual teaching hours per prisoner
allocated to providers. What is the explanation for that peak
at one end of 80 hours and only ten or 12 hours at the other end?
Mr Haysom: I cannot give you an
explanation for that.
Q19 Mr Bacon: It is very marked.
Mr Haysom: Yes, it is very marked
and the spread there is very marked. This again is part of what
I am talking about. This is the inheritance, this is what we have
had to work through and understand.
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