Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
DEPARTMENT FOR
INNOVATION, UNIVERSITIES
AND SKILLS,
LEARNING SKILLS
COUNCIL AND
NATIONAL MANAGEMENT
SERVICE
19 MAY 2008
Q40 Mr Curry: A prisoner is more
likely to be motivated—presuming they do not want to end
up back in prison—if they think there is a realistic prospect
of employment which they can then hold down.
Mr Wheatley: Yes.
Q41 Mr Curry: What is the process
whereby you try to find where the jobs are, you try to match a
prisoner to a job, you try to see that process through?
Mr Wheatley: From a prison point
of view and from the Learning and Skills Council point of view
Mark may want to say something. From a prisoner's point of view
governors are working closely within their area to find out what
is happening. Let us use Hull Prison as an example; I happened
to be there on Friday. The governor of Hull Prison is working
with local employers, with the local employers' forum, he is working
with the local authority and the probation service; they are also
reaching out to Yorkshire Forward which is one of the development
organisations that operates slightly outside their area but they
also draw on the Yorkshire area. They are looking at what is happening
in their area, what they can realistically do, given the facilities
at Hull, which will increase the chances of somebody getting a
job and breaking free of crime.
Q42 Mr Curry: Why would Tesco want
to employ somebody who had been in prison when there are already
Job Centre schemes to try and get people who have been long term
unemployed into levels of employment?
Mr Wheatley: I do not want to
comment on Tesco because I do not know what their view is on employing
ex-offenders. I think we have to be realistic about who will employ
ex-offenders and the sort of work they can go into. People do
not usually worry on building sites about whether somebody has
previous convictions; they do worry about whether they have the
right ticket and the right training to do the job. Making sure
that people have got that and can get into work is something we
can sensibly do. I think quite a number of employers are not anxious
to employ anybody who has a record, some for very good reasons
but some could actually be more adventurous. Again, you have to
be realistic about the risks that an employer takes on, hence
the close work with local employers: this is what we have in Hull,
you have skills shortages; if we turn people out with these skills
are you interested? It has to be almost at that level. It is not
possible to do it from London because the labour markets are quite
different.
Q43 Mr Curry: What do you train female
prisoners to do? What is your perception of where the opportunities
in the job market are for female prisoners? Not scaffolding, I
expect.
Mr Wheatley: So far as we have
specific training for women, we are particularly looking at the
hotel industry, organising events, working in catering jobs.
Q44 Mr Curry: Is the profile of female
prisoners and male prisoners very broadly the same?
Mr Wheatley: No, there are differences
between the two. There is a likelihood that more of the women
will be primary carers—that is obvious enough—and
that affects what kind of work they can do. There will be an increased
use of drugs amongst the women's population; there is a higher
rate of mental health problems amongst the women we have in prison.
To a certain extent that is because of the way courts use imprisonment
for women but it does mean there are differences. Unlike the male
establishments where, looking again at Hull, most people will
be going back into the Hull postcode area or into Yorkshire, the
women's prisons, because they are serving a wider area because
of the smaller number of women's prisons, the governor of a women's
prison will be serving a much wider area and will find it not
as easy to work on local job markets as somebody running a male
prison.
Q45 Mr Curry: When we are dealing
with this and related fields, we often move into a universe of
fancy where we keep talking about jobs saved and jobs safeguarded
and jobs created. All of this is, of course, very significantly
guess work. It states at paragraph 2.22 on page 24 that there
is academic research which shows the relationship between skills
and the increasing likelihood of their being in employment. How
do you measure your success? How do you measure what the capital
we have spent on your training gives in the shape of somebody
not re-offending or finding a job as opposed to other factors
like perhaps having a family to go back to out of prison?
Mr Wheatley: In terms of individuals
we are seeking to measure what is happening or understand what
is happening by following up a large tranche of offenders over
a period of time and looking in detail at what happens to them.
We are doing a very detailed research of a significant number
of offenders coming out. That is a long term piece of research
which will not produce its final results until 2012. In terms
of how we measure whether what we are doing makes a difference,
we use the annual figures of re-offending which, amongst other
things, compare the rate of re-offending compared to the predicted
rate of re-offending for a tranche of offenders who are released
in the first quarter of each year. That is a pretty good measure
of what is happening. That measure has been broken down by sentence
length. In the published figures I have it by sentence length
and it indicates that if you have prisoners long enough to work
with them we are making a difference to their re-offending. This
is increasing year on year as we roll out a number of interventions,
including improved education and skills. That is how we measure
whether the package is working; the individual bits will need
the detailed research. That is the best way of doing it.
Q46 Mr Curry: You said that that
is quite a long way away from getting the results. Between now
and 2012 are there likely to be any hints coming forward?
Mr Wheatley: There are hints coming
forward and there is a series of smaller research which continue
to confirm that getting into employment is protective, that some
of the things we are doing increase the chance of prisoners getting
into employment. However, they are not at the level where I could
put absolute faith in them as really solid bits of research. The
indicative information supports what we are doing. The really
solid information, which is the re-offending information, says
that we are making improvements in all sentence lengths, but at
the level of the under 12 month group—going back to the
question you asked earlier—all that we are doing is that
instead of having a negative effect we are now not having an effect;
we are making them 0.5% better but I would not want to rave about
that. With the longer sentence people we are making a difference
in all the sentence groups: one to two years, two to four years,
four years and over.
Q47 Mr Curry: Is it challenging for
a prisoner to admit that he or she is functionally illiterate
and functionally innumerate and to put themselves forward for
a course to be taught to read and write, for example?
Mr Wheatley: It is, and again
that is one of the reasons for working to motivate people. There
are other schemes that we are operating outside what we are looking
at here. For instance we offer what is effectively a peer mentoring
system backed by prison officers which helps prisoners to learn
on their own. That has advantages for those who do not want to
access education. A manual and some assistance from other prisoners
backed up by prison staff is quite effective as a taster for getting
them involved in better education. So we are trying to tackle
this on several levels rather than just through the formal education
programme. We also try to include in some of the work we are doing
not vocational work but ordinary, straightforward work, motivation
to try to persuade prisoners to learn to read and write. To give
an example, if you are working in the gym actually working out
the schedule for five-aside involves you adding things up and
writing, and that can be used as an opportunity to train people
rather than just relying on formal education. Some of the best
work helping offenders is done by prison officers or instructors
in some of the ordinary workshops in ordinary domestic routines.
Q48 Mr Curry: It should lead into
it.
Mr Haysom: Perhaps I could just
build on that because you have taken a very important area here.
One of the things we can very usefully do by working together
is to find ways of assessing people's skills in the workshops
in prisons and then we can feed that into qualifications. That
is an amazingly valuable thing for an individual. If we can demonstrate
skills to a level two, you will recall from previous appearances
I have made here that at a level two you are more likely to stay
in work, to progress in work and to have a sustainable employment
and therefore more likely to avoid re-offending. If we can assess
to a level two through that workshop approach that could be a
very, very important step forward.
Mr Wheatley: It is a question
of motivating and enthusing. To give another example, a workshop
that was making concrete blocks—a good, solid man's work
as they saw it—with some instructors who were very good
with the prisoners and they actually sat down and did a class
as part of what they were doing in basic skills. They were not
part of the education team but they were trying to motivate people
to learn to read and write and basic numeracy. They were quite
successful and that then gave them the confidence to go into more
formal education.
Q49 Mr Curry: If somebody gets a
good GCSE that is a red letter day, is it?
Mr Wheatley: We are dealing here
with people who have not been successful in education. They have
been life's failures so far as the formal education system went.
It is quite interesting, when you do present qualifications, how
important it is to the offenders. They are actually very pleased
indeed to get that recognition.
Q50 Mr Davidson: I have to start
off by recognising the difficult nature of the groups you are
dealing with, but I wonder about the extent to which that is used
as an alibi for not achieving a great deal. I am not entirely
clear what the place of the Offenders' Learning and Skills Service
is in all of this. I am looking at paragraph 2.2 where it talks
about the unresolved tensions between the various desires, and
the final sentence, "In practice, full agreement has not
yet been reached on the primary role of OLASS for offenders in
custody". I take that to mean that nobody really knows what
you are meant to be doing. Given that you have been there for
a while, is that not a bit of a difficulty?
Mr Haysom: I think it would be
unrealistic to think that you could work in this area and for
there not to be tensions between the different partner organisations.
There are different jobs to do, different primary objectives within
the different organisations. However, I do not think this has
proved to be a barrier. Looking back now and reflecting on it
it has actually proved to be quite a creative tension because
I think it has focussed us on the thing that we share, which is
a belief that we can all contribute to avoiding re-offending.
Q51 Mr Davidson: The fact that they
are saying here that "full agreement has not yet been reached
on the primary role of OLASS" suggests to me that nobody
actually agrees on what you are meant to be doing.
Mr Haysom: I think we do.
Q52 Mr Davidson: Why does the National
Audit Office write this and you have agreed it?
Mr Haysom: As I said earlier,
this was an early Report, it was written just a year into the
whole Service. There has been a huge amount of progress during
that year as I have demonstrated. We do share a common objective
and that is contributing to avoiding re-offending. That is what
reunites us.
Q53 Mr Davidson: If there is a conflict
between your needs and the needs of the prison service as a whole,
then who comes off worst? Am I right in thinking that it is almost
always you?
Mr Haysom: I think it depends
what it is. I think we would bow to the prison service on many
occasions.
Q54 Mr Davidson: So that is a "yes"
then basically.
Mr Haysom: It depends on the circumstances.
Mr Wheatley: Perhaps I can put
it in some sort of context. The money comes via the Learning and
Skills Council and in my experience people with money have clout.
The idea that I always win is not what I recognise, nor do I see
this as competitive either. We are running prisons and we are
dealing with a number of different needs. For instance, I have
to get some very long sentence prisoners through their long sentences.
Some of them will represent a horrendous risk to society and can
expect to be released; some will represent a horrendous risk to
society and will never be released. Some of those prisoners will
get some form of education which allows them to survive better
inside, which is a real issue for me as I have to get them through
their sentence without them committing suicide and hold them humanely
and give them no more than they are entitled to.
Q55 Mr Davidson: I understand that
there are tensions. The fact that the primary role of OLASS has
not yet been clarified does cause me to be a trifle concerned.
Looking, for example, at 2.4 there is the issue for me about what
priority is given to those with the greatest needs. I can understand
completely—I have watched episodes of Porridge so
I understand these things—how it could be satisfying to
take people who are already relatively well educated and put them
in a classroom; it keeps them amused, it keeps them out of your
hair. On the other hand, those who are probably in greatest need
and those who would benefit most are probably those, as many of
my constituents are, with literacy and numeracy difficulties,
who are much more difficult to deal with. I am not clear from
this that there is a priority given to those who are in greatest
need and not a priority given to those who are the easiest to
deal with. There is a whole number of things in here that strike
me as targets having been set, those working the system can quite
easily meet them by how they respond. There are difficult targets
in numeracy and literacy, but if you just set targets about filling
classrooms, you can always wheel out a few obliging souls to do
that.
Mr Haysom: I do not recognise
what you are saying. I do not think we are going for soft options
here. If I refer you to page 22 and chart seven you will see there
are very clear priorities being developed and we are not ducking
any of these difficult issues at all. I referred earlier to achievement
rates improving and those achievement rates are driven by vocational
skills and by literacy and numeracy. These are not soft options.
Q56 Mr Davidson: What about paragraph
2.15 where it is talking about the contractors: "Payments
are made irrespective of offender take-up, offender attendance
rates and whether offenders progress, complete courses or achieve
qualifications".
Mr Haysom: Which is what we were
talking about earlier, and if you recall what I said then was
that when we took the Service on we were putting in place a system
that maintained stability, which was not perfect but we had to
learn the way through. In the next contracting round we will be
addressing these issues. Nonetheless we still have achieved between
the partners and particularly with providers some very encouraging
progress in terms of more offenders engaging and more offenders
achieving. There are more offenders taking part in learning and
they are actually getting qualifications which are going to help
them with their lives.
Q57 Mr Davidson: In terms of those
who have literacy and numeracy difficulties, I understand the
point about those who are there for very short periods but I think
you exaggerate that maybe for effect. If offenders are in prison
for less than a year I would have thought that you could make
a substantial impact upon literacy and numeracy difficulties.
I get the impression that that is not at the top of your list
of priorities.
Mr Haysom: I do not know where
you get that impression from because we are making a difference.
We could not be achieving the results that I keep referring to
if we were not doing precisely that. One of the things we have
really worked hard on—by that I mean the provider communities
supported by all of the OLASS partners—is understanding
how you do make a difference when there is a relatively short
amount of learning that can take place for an individual offender,
compared to what they would expect to have in the mainstream.
They have really tailored their activity to be able to deliver
the results.
Q58 Mr Davidson: The Report that
we have says, among other things, that only one fifth of prisoners
assessed as having very low levels of basic literacy and numeracy
skills had enrolled on literacy and numeracy courses. That is
not quite a ringing success, is it?
Mr Haysom: No-one is suggesting
it is at all. Phil spoke about this at some length.
Q59 Mr Davidson: How bad was it before
then? If you only have a fifth enrolled now, what were you doing
for people before?
Mr Wheatley: The only counter
for that is that for time we have been focussing on basic skills
as the prime thing we educate in. That was the previous target
that we, as a prison service, had when this was provided by contractors
who worked directly for the prison service. That was our main
target. At that point we were producing about 10% of the basic
skills qualifications that were being produced across the whole
country. We are major providers of basic skills training. That
does not mean that we cannot do more.
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