Oral evidence: Prisons: planning and policies, HC 309Monday 10 November 2014
Oral evidence, 10 November 2014.
Witnesses
Rod Clark, Chief Executive, Prisoners’ Education Trust, Dr Julie Mills, Association of Colleges, and Keith Smith, Interim Chief Executive, Skills Funding Agency, gave evidence.
Chair
Mr Clark, Mr Smith and Dr Mills, we are very glad to have your help this afternoon. There is a strong possibility that we could be interrupted by a Division, so we will get cracking. I invite Mr McDonnell to begin.
John McDonnell
The Ofsted report in December on further education and skills was pretty damning about the standard of provision of education and training in prisons. As the providers working with NOMS, what are you doing to turn this around?
Dr Mills
My role here is to represent the Association of Colleges, but I am the principal of one of the three colleges who provide education and skills training in custody. The short answer is that we are all working very hard to improve it. There is some evidence that shows improvement happening in terms of both the quality of provision within the custodial environment and certainly the nature of provision that students now experience. The curriculum now focuses very strongly on employability, and the range and quality of qualifications that students are able to engage with and pass has improved. Qualification success rate, which is quite a blunt measure but an important one, is increasing rapidly. The Ofsted inspections and judgments, certainly during the last academic cycle, were also significantly improved from the previous year, both in terms of leadership and management—which is a prison and a provider issue—and the quality of teaching, learning and assessment as well as those outcomes for learners. There is lots of activity around that and lots of focus on bringing employers closer to the curriculum, developing programmes and activities that mean students are better prepared for employment when they are released.
John McDonnell
Does anybody else want to pitch in?
Rod Clark
In a sense I am in the privileged position of not being a contracting party to the mainline delivery of education in prisons. We are a charity and the main thing we do is to support the delivery of distance learning. We also bring together a number of organisations from across the sector in the Prisoner Learning Alliance. The thing that we are doing is to work with them to come up with prescriptions, blueprints and ideas for how education can be improved. We produced a report last year which looked at a number of those areas—about the way the prison education system needs to focus more on the outcomes that it is looking to deliver; about how it needs to join up more effectively; and about how it really needs to build the values of education into the way the entire prison operates as an institution. Those things can be done without huge additional resource. It is about making the system more effective.
Keith Smith
I am not a training provider. I represent the Skills Funding Agency. We are the body responsible for the funding of aspects of the OLASS provision in prisons.
John McDonnell
On a point of detail, do you know what progress has been made on finding an alternative provider for OLASS in London?
Keith Smith
We had a provider who, on their own commercial decisions, decided to withdraw. That was a decision that they made a couple of months back. Since then we have instigated an open tendering process. We are in the process of that, and we are very close to making a set of decisions and recommendations for an alternative supplier.
John McDonnell
What is the time scale?
Keith Smith
The priority is to make sure that we keep continuity of service, but we would hope that a new provider is in place, if not at the end of this calendar year, very early in the next calendar year.
John McDonnell
What have the implications been with regard to A4e’s withdrawal?
Keith Smith
Implications in regard to what?
John McDonnell
In terms of funding arrangements.
Keith Smith
The first point I should make is that there are no implications for the continuity of service. The delivery of the OLASS offer continues to be made and we have agreed arrangements with A4e for them to keep delivering that until a new provider is put in place. The operational aspect of the programme is still very much happening day to day.
John McDonnell
Would there be any additional costs as a result of continuing the existing provision and looking for a new provider?
Keith Smith
We have agreed with A4e that clearly there are some costs for them in relation to the extension and continuation of that agreement. We are agreeing those with A4e on very much a cost-by-cost basis. I should stress that the underpinning structure for them receiving funding is exactly the same as for all the other providers. It is funding on a per course or per learner basis, and that is very much the methodology that is used to fund the whole of the OLASS programme. Sitting suspended for a Division in the House. On resuming— In the absence of the Chairman, Mr Llwyd was called to the Chair
Mr Llwyd
I have been asked to take the Chair. We will now continue with the sitting. When we were rudely interrupted, Mr McDonnell was showing his skills at questioning people.
John McDonnell
We were talking about improving the service itself. Can you explain what have been the main direct and indirect effects of cost savings on education provision within prisons?
Rod Clark
We have seen evidence of the sort of things that you were hearing about in the session with your earlier set of witnesses. Where there are restricted regimes, it means that prisoners are locked up for much more of the time, up to 22 hours a day. That means they cannot get out to education. We have had prisons where they have effectively closed education for the summer. They have made it much more difficult to get to workshops. Even when you are not running a restricted regime, if you are short on staff, it puts more pressure on the people who have to support the system in other ways to ensure that the right people get to the right classes. You really don’t want to be running a class in which it is a random pick and mix as to who is going to turn up from one day to the next or one week to the next. All those sorts of problems have been very real. It has been tremendous the way that education providers and prison staff have been working their socks off in order to overcome those problems.
Dr Mills
I agree. In terms of the impact on quality there are two really critical things for us. One is making sure students get on to the right course at the right level. That is about information, advice and guidance and, in prisons, allocation—the role of allocating prisoners to education. Then, when that has been done effectively, it is about getting students into the classroom or getting the workshop to take place. As we have heard, staff shortages can impact on both those aspects. We have been working in prisons to try to address some of those issues by looking at what work the education team can take on to resolve some of the blockages. For example, in partnership we might take on the role of allocation—a member of the education team does it—which frees up the prison staff to address something else. It is about partnership working, and both sides understanding the importance, prioritising and then trying to find some creative solutions to the problems.
John McDonnell
Since the changes to the system of funding prisoners taking courses at level 3, has there been any noticeable drop-off or reduction?
Dr Mills
Yes. We do not have a large level 3 provision now, because of the requirements for that to be funded by a loan. It is much more difficult to predict and we need to work together to improve the process for applying for loans because it is very bureaucratic and does not encourage people to take it forward. I think Rod will probably have experienced that more directly than we have.
Rod Clark
Yes. I am in the fortunate position of sitting outside the contract but observing what has gone on. The introduction of advanced learning loans for anyone over 24 to do an FE level 3-type course has certainly had an impact, and has made it more difficult for education providers in prison. There is also the issue, which is one of the unintended consequences of the structure of the OLASS 4 contract itself, that, because it rewards people who complete courses and then achieve qualifications at the end of the day, it is simply easier to make that work in a prison if you focus on areas where it is going to be relatively easy to get high volumes and put people through relatively quickly, so that you can get them through a course before they are shipped out to another prison or something like that. All of that tends to move you towards levels 1 and 2. We find that very often the only provision that really is available for level 3, for seriously doing something like an AS-level, is through distance learning that we fund. That is something that we are very keen to work on. This is something we have also heard from prisoners directly. In the autumn of last year we ran a survey through the Inside Time prison newspaper and got 340-plus responses from prisoners about the issues that they saw to do with education. Almost half of them were saying that there was just not enough learning of a sufficiently advanced level available within their prison as they would like to see. There is an appetite there; it is an appetite that between us we have to find a way of meeting.
Dr Mills
I visited HMP Gartree recently, which is a life establishment. It is a very live issue in there. It is a different type of community with a different type of student needs and ambitions. It was interesting; I felt that in the end I had almost turned into a bit of a salesperson in terms of having quite a detailed conversation about a loan, about what that means and when you would pay it back. For that community, many of whom have not been out for some time, as a society we were having to change how we viewed the funding of education. This was an issue for everyone. Definitely, the culture was not to take a loan, for that student group.
John McDonnell
How do you feel that the drop-off has impacted upon rehabilitation?
Rod Clark
The first thing is that we know that education works to help people rebuild their lives in a way that takes them away from crime. We have been fortunate to be able to do research looking at the recipients of our grants, working with the Ministry of Justice statisticians to see what happens to their reoffending rate, and look at the comparison between those people and a matched group of prisoners with the same characteristics—age, nature of offence and all those sorts of things. That research is published by the Ministry of Justice. It showed that, compared with the reoffending rate of the control sample, the rate of reoffending of recipients of our grants to do distance learning is over a quarter lower. We know it helps people through a whole host of mechanisms, some of which will be towards getting better employment or giving them chances of employment, and some of which will be to do with building a new and more positive identity rather than just a criminal identity. The first thing is that, yes, education really does work and it does help. Therefore, if it is not available, that becomes a problem. Certainly when it comes to employment, there is a great deal to be said for not only being able to address the remedial needs that lots of prisoners present with around basic literacy and numeracy; we also know that in the labour market once you begin to get level 3-type qualifications it begins to give you something you can really do something with in the labour market. That is especially important for prisoners given the disclosure requirements that rest on them. It is very tough out there. We know that prison destroys employment, and we need to do everything we possibly can to redress that.
Chair
Does the creation of resettlement prisons present a good opportunity for the prison system to provide integrated end-to-end educational provision across the estate? How would that best be achieved, in your view?
Dr Mills
That question has one easy answer and one more difficult answer. It does provide an opportunity, absolutely. It is about how we work together to tie up a range of interventions in a way that is joined up and not siloed. The risk is around silos from the CRCs and from the NOMS ESF funding. There is the OLASS 4 funding and other pockets of activity that go on. Having a very clear set of responsibilities for each of those providers, which dovetail but don’t overlap, and having a very clear and simple focus for who has oversight of the offender journey through the gate and into an appropriate activity on the outside, is the bit that we all need to work together to deliver, because it has great possibilities.
Rod Clark
I very much agree with that. There is clearly potential in having a system in which there is a player on the block who is interested in the overall outcome of somebody desisting from crime at the end, and looking to manage the interventions that then support them in custody in order to achieve that. Once you have people closer to the community into which they are going to be released, there is more potential for making constructive use of release on temporary licence so that people can get into an educational course whilst still in custody that they can then continue in their local community, and bridge that gap, particularly in the very difficult period through the gate. There is clearly potential. My concerns are the inevitable ones that you get when you have another major disruption to the system and a whole new set of players. As Julie said, joining up across the system is incredibly important to get that to work, and we are now introducing another player, as well as the importance of the work programme provider, the NCS provider, the education provider and the offender management systems within the prison itself. Getting that to work is going to be a major challenge.
Chair
Can I press you on that? In your view, is the Transforming Rehabilitation agenda going to improve education and training for prisoners? How should the “through the gate” educational provision be co-ordinated between the CRCs and prisons, especially for the short-term sentenced?
Rod Clark
My worry about the Transforming Rehabilitation changes is that you are introducing a whole lot of new licence requirements for a new batch of prisoners that did not have licence requirements in the past. You are asking your CRC provider to supervise those requirements as a core part of the contract they deliver. We know that there isn’t any more money around, so they have to find a way of financing that activity within the overall contract price. Whatever the allure of the theory of the CRC provider being able to do all these constructive things—spending hours talking to OLASS and NCS providers about what is happening around individual prisoners, how they move through the system to different prisons and how they arrive with the right skills to then get them connected to employment; all of that is wonderful in theory—my real worry is that the resource pressures on them are going to be such that they will really be just focusing on delivering the contractual minimums around the licence requirements. The worry with those, of course, is that, as soon as you start breaching people through those licence requirements, you increase the prison population and you make the situation worse. Yes, there is potential but I see very large risks as well.
Chair
Surely there is going to be a problem with the short-term sentenced prisoners.
Rod Clark
Exactly. They are the group where you are introducing these new requirements. We will have to see whether there is really scope for a CRC provider to play a very constructive role in working with education providers on that in a very short time. It is the job about joining it all up that is going to be the challenge.
Chair
Should the CRCs be involved in the provision of education in non-resettlement prisons?
Rod Clark
One of the things that has to be got right is what happens to prisoners while they are in a non-resettlement prison. If that time is simply wasted educationally, you have missed out on a massive opportunity. It is easy to see that the right theoretical answer is that you have a plan for that prisoner from day one, and they go to a resettlement prison which is perhaps selected because it offers the things that prisoner needs—the right educational opportunities or the right work opportunities, whatever they are—in order to use their time constructively while in custody. They then get received into a resettlement prison in a constructive way. It would be a lovely model if the CRC provider were the person that is concerned about that. Quite a lot of long-term sentence prisoners are not going to come back to the CRC provider until after their contract period has expired, so it is going to ask quite a lot of them to show a great deal of interest in long-term prisoners. It would be wonderful if they did it but it is rather altruistic. As I say, I am concerned about whether they really will have the resources to do all the good things that we might like to see, looking at it as a system as a whole. If it is not the CRC holding the ring, it really does demand that the governor takes some real responsibility for managing that linking up across the system.
Keith Smith
Obviously, from the OLASS point of view, we already require providers to look at provision whilst they are in prison as well as on release. One of the big changes to the current regime from the old regime was that the strategy for that localisation was much more important. That is why, when we commission, and currently still deliver, the OLASS provisions in prisons, it is the governor who acts as the commissioner. We have set up structures where the governor is basically holding the training providers to account, in terms of saying what they need and when they need it, so that we then have confidence that the pattern of provision put on locally is what that governor is determining. If the governor is not happy, that is when we look to take action. Whatever happens on the short-term side of things, there is still going to be the provision of the OLASS work, which is still focused not just on the identification of long-term needs such as English and maths—the literacy and numeracy type of area—but a really strong assessment of the vocational requirements and how that is going to link to the local labour market and the local jobs market. All the incentives that we are putting into training providers are to continue to encourage that to happen.
Chair
The rather strange policy of what has become known as the book ban was, mostly, lifted last week on 7 November. Did it have an appreciable detrimental effect upon education during its period of action?
Dr Mills
We did not see that in terms of the programmes that we are delivering and the students that were working with us. There was nothing that was specifically related to their education provision.
Chair
Would I be right in thinking that much of the work you do with prisoners is on electronic media anyway?
Dr Mills
Some is, but certainly it is resourced within the department through—
Chair
You provide that.
Dr Mills
Yes.
Rod Clark
We certainly had prisoners writing to us saying that they had not been able to access books. This particularly comes in when you are talking about people who want to study at higher education levels and want to do background reading. We have been arguing all along that the governor really ought to be given more discretion to take a sensible decision about people in that sort of position, and enable them to get the books. There is still an issue about the route for getting books. You can buy lads magazines through approved suppliers in prison, but getting a book delivered from Amazon still appears to be a part of the issue that has not been resolved. I personally cannot see the security risk involved in that.
Chair
When I was a lawyer—I still am a lawyer for that matter—years ago I remember defending a fellow who had a book taken off him because it was too political. It was Plato’s “Republic”, so things have been a bit dicey for some time.
John Howell
Overall, how can educational opportunities best be provided to prisoners alongside opportunities for work?
Dr Mills
It is about partnership and integration, and really understanding what the shared objectives are of any purposeful activity. Where we are seeing it work best is when there is a senior leadership team in the prison, and indeed, in the region, through the local governance structure that Keith described, where they absolutely understand what we are trying to get from it. In those places it would not be an issue that a student spent part of their workshop time developing skills or working towards an accreditation, because the overall ambitions are understood and shared. For example, in one prison we worked from, when a member of my team delivered to the senior leadership of the prison what OLASS 4 is, how it worked, what the objectives are, what the targets are and what makes a difference, we saw our delivery increase by over 10 percentage points because everybody got it and was working together. We are able to work more creatively as a cohesive team within the prison to look for better opportunities. It is like any change programme; it is about taking the time to explain the vision as to where we are going and get people onside.
John Howell
Does education have a lesser status in working prisons?
Dr Mills
Not exclusively. As I said, it is about the understanding of the wider staff team as well. On the ground, in prisons, it possibly is not understood by all prison staff how much the education and training provision has changed; they will see the same people, probably in the same locations, but what they won’t know is that they are doing very different things to very different standards. There is a bit of an education role across the whole establishment.
Rod Clark
There certainly are some fantastic examples of work coupled with education, such as the Railtrack courses where people are given qualifications which almost take them straight into a job on release. Those are wonderful examples, and there are some great examples, in any workshop, of being able to embed things like literacy and numeracy education as part of that. There is also some work that goes on in prison that is low skill, repetitive work and it is very difficult to see how it is really giving you many skills, or much that could possibly be of use to you when you get released. The real challenge is to combine work and education in a really constructive way. One thing I would mention is distance learning-type courses or correspondence-type courses, which of course can be done in cell to a large extent, alongside work. The issue about parity of pay is important. I mentioned the survey that we did of prisoners through Inside Time. Around half of them said that one of the barriers to learning was that there was less prison pay offered for being in education than there was in work. Some of that low-skill work is doing little to help that individual prepare for release. Rewarding them in a way that gives them parity of reward in terms of prison pay would be a way of helping them to do more constructive things that are going to help them become more effective in future life.
John Howell
Mr Clark, would you like to expand on the proposals for learning prisons to exist alongside working prisons?
Rod Clark
It really is a simple message: why should there be a distinction between a place where people can do work and a place where they can learn? The best examples of educational achievement in prison establishments are where there is a real commitment from the leadership team, picking up on Julie’s points, and where there is a belief in educational values running right the way through the prison and where every opportunity is taken, whether it is use of the gym or use of the workshops, contact from individual prison officers supporting education as a goal, or the establishment of ways for prisoners themselves to engage in talking through prison councils or learner voice bodies to take some control of their own learning. There is potentially a hugely precious model within our grasp if we can get those different factors and that leadership working together.
Dr Mills
And if you can get key local employers to support you and be part of that journey. We are developing academies sponsored by employers. Greggs is a good example working with us at HMP Drake Hall, which is part of the female estate. We run a Greggs academy and they actually come in and do some of the training. It is an absolute partnership. The prison has had to be flexible to allow us to do that. The exiting students are guaranteed an interview for a job; in fact, we have had our first two to secure employment as a consequence of that. That adds yet another layer of value to the work-education-employer link.
John Howell
Presumably you would like to see greater flexibility in the system so that people worked during working hours and then had access to education after that. Have any of you done cost implications on what would be involved in that?
Keith Smith
Could I make one point in terms of the question? Perhaps one of the things we are trying to achieve is not to separate education from work quite as much as you are suggesting. One of the key strategic goals we are trying to achieve is, as I said before, how we can understand the labour market requirements and skills requirements that employers say are needed and how we can best deliver those to people in prison. When you look at the best apprenticeship models, they are about enabling people through their work to gain underpinning skills and knowledge, but also having a way of recognising and validating that through a formal qualification or a formal programme. What we are looking for are increasingly more opportunities where you can bridge the work that people are doing, or the practice of work, with how you actually do skills acquisition and skills learning alongside that. Rather than seeing it as what education programmes we put people on and then what jobs you can get them to do, you want to try to bridge those things to make them more meaningful and complementary. That is where we are doing more and more work to understand how the delivery of services in prison can immediately lead to somebody on release moving into an apprenticeship or a traineeship, which is again an extension of the model within prisons, and is as much about work experience as the continuation of skills training. That is where I think the OLASS providers do a really important job. What they are doing is interfacing with the services or the skills requirements that are happening within the prison itself and then trying to engage with those prisoners on release to see them through the continuation of those skills programmes.
John Howell
What are the cost implications?
Keith Smith
It is very much about how you set it up. As a model, it is potentially cost-neutral. Government is already investing in skills. It puts a skills budget there. It is investing in services in prisons. The efficiency issue is how that structure is set up. You will see, as Julie said, that there are already models that are very effective and efficient with resources.
Dr Mills
Our learning, in terms of cost-effectiveness, has been about the types of roles we need to have, both in individual prisons and then regionally as an organisation. We started off with a particular model of employer interface and an organisational structure that we thought could deliver it, and we have changed it. We are investing much more in front-line staff, who are engaging outwith the prison, talking to employers and trying to broker those relationships. We have to do that within our funding envelope. That is what I mean about partnership being the key thing. We have to work effectively with the prison and its leadership team to make sure that that is done in a joined-up way.
Rod Clark
There are a number of things we could do that really do not involve additional cost. One is to make use of the sorts of opportunities that the community and voluntary sector are making available to support education—for example, the use of distance learning in particular, which is an opportunity to have greater flexibility to study in cell and outside the normal working week. One is to make more use of prisoners themselves, who provide a real potential resource for supporting education and supporting colleagues doing it. Another is to make use of the ICT infrastructure that has already been put into prisons at considerable expense, and making available the content so that it can be used to support a broader range of learning, and ideally to do some thinking around the contract so that Julie’s colleagues in the OLASS providers can run courses that use that ICT potential within the same cost envelope for the overall OLASS 4 contract.
Dr Mills
That is very helpful. My caveats would be twofold around that. Historically, evening classes have struggled to be attractive to students, so in terms of a straight staff to numbers of people engaging, there is not a track record that demonstrates that is an effective use of time getting people off the wing and into education. The use of technology is a really important thing and we could be doing much more with it. That stores up a cost for the future though, whereby the IT estate needs refreshing, and that needs to figure in terms of the cost implications to take it forward.
Chair
That completes our session. On behalf of the Committee, I thank you very much for your time and the very helpful evidence you have given. Dr Mills, Mr Smith and Mr Clark, in light of the fact that this session was rather truncated because of House business, if you feel you wish to make further points, please write to us; they will be appreciated. We have had very good evidence, but if you need to add anything, please do so and feel free to write. Thank you very much. Oral evidence: Prisons: planning and policies, HC 309 19