Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
DEPARTMENT FOR
INNOVATION, UNIVERSITIES
AND SKILLS,
LEARNING SKILLS
COUNCIL AND
NATIONAL MANAGEMENT
SERVICE
19 MAY 2008
Q20 Mr Bacon: I take it these are
for individual prisons, are they?
Mr Haysom: Yes. This is also what
we have had to be very careful about not disturbing too quickly
because that would have a destabilising effect.
Q21 Mr Bacon: Can the NAO comment
on this? Is there a particular reason why some prison establishments
have so much more provision than others? Is it because of the
nature of the prisoners?
Mr Robertson: There is no reason
that we could discern. We subjected this distribution to a statistical
analysis, trying to take account of the type of prison, the people
in it and so on. There is no real explanation that we could find.
The only possible explanation I think, which I cannot vouch for
as an audited finding, is that the highest institution is a youth
offender institution and for younger people maybe there is more
education, learning and skills.
Q22 Mr Bacon: I can see why you would
not want to disturb it quickly because you could cause more problems
than you solved.
Mr Haysom: Absolutely, and we
need to work through this very carefully.
Mr Wheatley: Could I offer an
explanation? This does not mean that what we have been told is
not right, but the peak establishments are both young offender
establishments with juvenile wings so they have juveniles in with
additional funding and they are in full time education.
Q23 Mr Bacon: In paragraph 3.4 it
says, "Evidence that offenders had received any form of assessment
or screening was weak". It looks like 24% did not have learning
needs assessments; 76% did have. "The lack of evidence that
offenders' learning needs had been identified suggests that some
offenders may be missing out on the learning and skills opportunities
that they need." Presumably your ambition is to get to the
point where every offender has the learning and skills opportunities
that they need.
Mr Haysom: Yes, that has to be
our ambition.
Q24 Mr Bacon: How long is that going
to take?
Mr Haysom: We do need to be very
realistic about this. Phil may be best placed to answer this,
but there are all sorts of barriers to offenders coming in and
going straight into learning. Phil has already touched on some
of those and we need to understand them. This is a voluntary area
as well; that needs to be understood.
Mr Wheatley: There are practical
issues that get in the way of this but this does not mean that
we should not drive up the percentage. I do not think we will
reach 100%. It will include people coming in who are plainly,
to the average person, suffering from a mental disorder and are
really in some difficulties. It will include some very short stay
prisoners who are with us for a very limited time. It will also
include some who have been in before and been assessed before
and are reluctant to being re-assessed again because they have
previously done a sentence. There is a revolving door for some
of the short sentence prisoners who will be well-known to the
establishments. Some of those practical factors probably bear
on this.
Q25 Mr Bacon: Could I ask you about
transferring of records? This is a pretty basic point. It is referred
to in paragraph 3.29 on page 35 where it says, "The failure
to transfer records of assessment and learning and skills undertaken
can result in assessments being repeated and learning plans being
drawn up again". Just having the records follow a prisoner
round the system ought not to be that difficult, including his
or her educational records. Presumably if the prisoner is guilty
of murder or grievous bodily harm that is something that the next
prison where he or she goes would wish to be aware of, so the
records will be transferred around with them. Why can you not
also do it for education?
Mr Wheatley: You are quite right
in thinking that their prison record transfers with them. Provider
records which are kept separately—the education records—no
longer form part of the main prison record. They should, in my
view, be sent on.
Q26 Mr Bacon: Are they transferred
separately?
Mr Wheatley: They are not part
of the prison records.
Q27 Mr Bacon: What are they part
of?
Mr Wheatley: They are provider
records on learning held by the provider and not by the prison
therefore I think the provider should be in a position to be able
to move them. That is my view.
Mr Haysom: That is right, and
that is what I was responding to earlier in saying that we are
putting systems in place to achieve that. There are interim systems
in place at the moment which are not perfect but they were put
in as quick fixes to prove where we were and there is a new system
which is going to be trialled as of September of this year in
two regions, the North West and the North East, and will be fully
rolled out by August next year. It is a system that we are currently
building.
Q28 Mr Bacon: It sounds to me like
basically you have a prisoner arrive and suddenly somebody realises
the educational records are not there and you have to phone round
to get them.
Mr Haysom: We have been very aware
of this issue from the time we took on responsibility. We have
been very conscious to put in place the systems that we have.
As I say, they are not perfect. We have two approaches currently
but they are not perfect and that is why the new system is being
developed as a matter of urgency to put in place something which
has not previously existed.
Q29 Mr Bacon: Mr Wheatley, you mentioned
earlier the subject of motivating prisoners to take part in these
courses. Do the techniques for motivating prisoners include levels
of privileges which prisoners can only access when they have taken
part in or succeeded in certain courses?
Mr Wheatley: They do include the
privilege system.
Q30 Mr Bacon: Can you give us an
example of the sorts of privileges that would be denied or withheld
or allowed?
Mr Wheatley: There are three levels
in the privilege system: basic, standard and enhanced. These are
locally set schemes run by governors, not centrally mandated with
me saying exactly what has to happen in each establishment. They
are so different that it would be misguided to try to do that
kind of bureaucratic process. It is possible to use the incentive
scheme to incentivise prisoners to engage with their sentence
plan, which can include education. That has been challenged by
prisoners who say that we should not be using incentives to motivate
them to engage in their sentence plan and that has been robustly
defended. That means they can get access to a wider range of privileges
which typically will involve longer periods out of cell, better
access to visits, better access to telephones; the things that
prisoners value in other words. There is greater access to privileges
for those who are on enhanced. In my experience of running prisons—I
spent quite a long time working in them rather than just working
at headquarters—a lot of prisoners are very well motivated
to engage in education which really inspires them. It is a very
good way of doing time for a number of prisoners because whilst
you are engaged in improving your prospects in a way you escape
in your head and that is valued quite highly in prison. We do
not need to apply many privileges to get prisoners to engage in
education. However, that does not apply to all prisoners. We need
to be careful we are not using the privileges we have unnecessarily
to get people to engage in something that actually they value
quite highly and particularly work that links with training is
very highly valued by prisoners. I think that comes over in the
Report from some of the focus groups. For many prisoners we can
motivate them but there is probably a hard to reach group who
also find it hard, even when they are accessing education and
training, to make the best of it. They are the people who have
been particularly challenged at school and have often ended up
excluded; they are very difficult to work with in a learning situation.
Q31 Mr Curry: We are really talking
about members of the underclass here, are we not, to a large extent?
Mr Wheatley: In many cases yes,
but we have locked up some people who are anything but the underclass.
The vast majority will not be life's successes.
Q32 Mr Curry: Let us not be too pedantic
about it, but if you look at the description of the prisoners
which is contained in paragraph 1.2 on page 10 they have no qualifications,
they are not literate, they are not numerate; they were excluded
from school, they have played truant regularly; they have mental
health problems; they are from extremely unstable family backgrounds.
So it is pretty rough material to work with.
Mr Wheatley: The majority will
fit in that description.
Q33 Mr Curry: That means that their
attention span is probably very, very limited indeed.
Mr Wheatley: It will with a number
of them. Quite interestingly, in amongst this group are some really
quite bright people who have used their brains on crime. They
match your description in that they often have bad homes, they
have often used drugs, but they have got brains and they do engage.
You can engage them; they have quite long attention spans. However,
there are a number who are difficult.
Q34 Mr Curry: The reason I ask the
question is that my wife is a sculptor and some years ago she
did voluntary work in one of the prisons with prisoners. She said
the thing that was most frustrating was that they signed up and
they wanted to be Michelangelo by the end of the week.
Mr Wheatley: I recognise that.
Q35 Mr Curry: They were not prepared
to put in all the slow grind to develop the skill and then they
got fed up because they were not Michelangelo. They drifted out
and did other things. It became a sort of social event to break
the boredom rather than any real learning experience.
Mr Wheatley: What we have been
trying to produce by way of educational opportunities has been
nearer to the hard grind of learning. We have for some time, even
before we introduced these changes, been concentrating on basic
skills and probably moving away a bit from the way we used to
engage prisoners in education which was often round something
like an interest in art or sculpture and then hope they would
come to education from that. We have moved into a much more focussed
approach on basic skills.
Q36 Mr Curry: That is what skills
for life is, is it? It means reading and writing.
Mr Wheatley: Yes, and some life
skills like budgeting; things you need to survive in society.
Q37 Mr Curry: Vocational training
is skills for work, is it?
Mr Wheatley: Yes, specific skills.
Q38 Mr Curry: If you start with somebody
who comes from that sort of background and at the end of the term
that prisoner is going to be released, that prisoner is going
to be released probably without a home to go to or any sort of
supportive family; he is going to be released into a labour market
in which a lot of the lower paid jobs have been taken by people
who have come from abroad because they are better trained, better
motivated and they will work for less pay (employers much prefer
working with them because they are much more reliable than native
Brits might be). It is quite tough for that prisoner to think
that there is a pay back for the training; it is quite tough for
me as a tax payer to think I have a pay back for it.
Mr Wheatley: I think if we can
get people into work you have a pay back for it. We need to be
absolutely realistic about what the labour market is like. We
need to train people for the sorts of jobs they can realistically
get. I do not mean to be flippant about it, but it is no good
training somebody to be a bank manager who has a lot of previous
convictions. On the other hand, it is probably sensible to train
them for cleaning work. I was at Hull Prison on Friday; they have
a secure yard with a roof on it. They are training prisoners to
do scaffolding in that. Scaffolding you can do with previous convictions.
Scaffolding may seem a strange thing to do in prison but with
a lid on the yard it is very safe and there are a lot of jobs
in scaffolding. We need to make sure we train for what there is
and looking for what the shortfalls are in the locality.
Q39 Mr Curry: How do you match a
prisoner aspiration with a realistic assessment of what the prisoner
can deliver?
Mr Wheatley: For me that is what
offender management is about. It is about not saying, "We're
glad you engaged in sculpture and you might be Michelangelo"
when you can see they are not, but saying, "We want you to
settle down outside". Most prisoners actually do. At the
point they are in prison they do not want to perpetually keep
getting involved in crime, particularly crime that is not very
successful which is what most of them are involved in. We need
to work with them and say, "What can you realistically do
in this labour market?" In Hull, for example, we need to
know what jobs there are. There are scaffolding jobs in Hull so
that is a sensible thing to train people in. There are jobs in
the caravan building trade so that is a sensible thing to try
to give people some skills for. You have to be realistic about
where pre-convictions will make it difficult to get a job.
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