28/11/2022
Police Oracle
The Ministry of Justice has today announced a new app to improve the literacy of people in prison and give them a better chance of finding work on release.
The app was developed as part of an innovation challenge run by the MoJ within its Prison Leavers Project. Called “Turning Pages Digital”, the app was jointly developed by tech company Yalla Cooperative and the Shannon Trust – a charity which will be familiar to a large number readers from the many years it has spent pioneering literacy programmes in prison.
The Shannon Trust was founded by Christopher Morgan in 1997 following a series of letters with a life-sentenced prisoner, Tom Shannon, in a penpal scheme run by the Prison Reform Trust.
Reading Tom’s letters, Christopher learned about prison life and the shocking levels of poor literacy among prisoners. In 1995, the letters were put together in a book titled, ‘Invisible Crying Tree’. The royalties from the book were used to found the Shannon Trust. One of the key success factors from the beginning of the charity was its insistence on a peer mentoring approach. Throughout its history the motto has always been “by prisoners for prisoners” – with those who can read teaching those who can’t.
In 2015, the charity launched its "Turning Pages" programme in every prison in England, Wales & Northern Ireland, with a series of five easy to follow manuals. One of the reasons for the Shannon Trust’s success is that the person mentoring the learner doesn’t need any specialist training. All they need is motivation and a small amount of free time. 20 minutes, 5 times a week is said to be the optimum but those learning to read still make great progress with fewer sessions.
Turning Pages uses a “synthetic phonics” approach – a method of teaching English reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words.
Another reason for the success of the approach is that Turning Pages is interactive; learners build and practice their skills working through a range of different activities. Progress checks are built into each manual so learners and mentors can be confident that new skills have been embedded.
It is that early feeling of making progress which engages new readers and gives them the motivation to keep going. As these progress checks are completed Turning Pages reading books become available. These have been written to match the reading skills that learners have covered so that they are given the chance to put their new skills into action and experience the joy of reading for pleasure from early on in the first manual.
The programme was formally evaluated by Birmingham City University, who found very positive results in improved reading skills.
Yalla Cooperative has helped digitise the Turning Pages programme, making it available as an app for people in the community. The app will be trialled with 300 people on probation in Kent, Surrey and Sussex from this month, encouraging them to improve their reading skills as a key element of their desistance journeys.
The MoJ has also launched another app today which has the same objective of helping prison leavers. The “My Journey” app was developed by Swansea University, tech firm Legal Innovation Lab Wales, and Welsh reducing reoffending charity Include UK. It links offenders with community-based support services that are vital to keeping them on the straight and narrow. It is being tested with 300 prison leavers from HMP Swansea and HMP Parc.
HMPPS is currently re-commissioning and overhauling prison education and it seems likely that the new system will place more emphasis on literacy and, in particular, on linking educational provision with the needs of employers.