24/01/2023
Police Oracle
The latest blog by the Chief Prison Inspector Charlie Taylor focuses on the decline of prison education.
Every time they inspect a prison, inspectors assess its progress against four areas – safety, respect, purposeful activity and rehabilitation and release planning – and award a score: four for good; three for reasonably good; two for not sufficiently good; and one for poor.
Purposeful activity has consistently been the worst performing area since these four tests were launched in 1999, but scores have dropped even lower since pandemic restrictions were lifted. The last English prison to score more than two for purposeful activity was Bronzefield in January 2022, and, so far in this reporting year (starting in April 2022), more than a third have been assessed as poor.
The importance of prison education
Mr Taylor argues that education in prison has two important functions that help both the prison and the public to be safer. Firstly, prison should be an opportunity for prisoners to spend their time productively and to acquire the skills they need to go on to lead successful lives – it should give them the qualifications and the sense of achievement that will help them to behave both in jail and in the community.
Secondly, many people in prison have missed out on large chunks of their school education, dropping out (or being excluded from school) in the early years of secondary education. We also know that a large proportion of prisoners have specific learning difficulties, and a report by the Prison Reform Trust suggested that 25% of prisoners have an IQ of below 80 and a further 7% below 70. These issues are compounded by other factors such as mental and physical health difficulties. For most prisoners there are large gaps in their learning, and therefore they lack the skills and knowledge to be able to find and hold down jobs when they are released. Additionally, those who have been branded “failures” at school may feel that their chances of succeeding in a law-abiding career are slim.
Four causes
The Chief Inspector identifies four primary (inter-linked) reasons for the decline of prison education:
1. Education is not a priority in prisons
Prison governors are less concerned about getting a low score from the Inspectorate in purposeful activity than they are for those in safety or respect. This reflects the priorities of a prison service that focuses on safety and security above, and often to the exclusion of, other areas of prison life. In an estate that is beset with difficulties – low staffing levels, overcrowding, crumbling jails – education does not get the attention that it deserves. Ministers might get sacked if there is a riot or a high-profile escape, but their jobs do not depend on whether prisoners are learning anything or not.
2. Prisoners don’t attend the classes that are on offer
Recent inspection reports are full of comments about classrooms which are mainly empty. When prisons started to open up their regimes again after the pandemic, there were strict restrictions on the number of students allowed in each class. In many establishments, attendance remains at these very low levels. Staff prioritise getting prisoners to essential work such as kitchens, waste management or the staff canteen over those who are signed up for education, which is often cancelled. These regime curtailments mean that both teaching staff and prisoners become demotivated by the uncertainty about who will get to education on any one day.
3.The curriculum is not suitable
Ofsted has repeatedly highlighted the inadequacy of the curriculum in jails. In a recent inspection of a reception prison, where prisoners rarely spent more than six months, inspectors found that many of the courses that were on offer took a year to complete.
During the height of the pandemic, the only education most prisoners got was a pack delivered to their door; the quality was poor and unsurprisingly most prisoners did not engage. Unfortunately, education packs are still seen in some prisons as a substitute for face-to-face teaching with the unwarranted expectation that prisoners, despite all the difficulties they have had with education in the past, will find this a useful way to learn.
4. There is no clear accountability for the quality of education.
Mr Taylor says that the lack of accountability is at the heart of the problem of poor quality prison education. Prison education is contracted centrally by the Ministry of Justice, with four main providers in England who cover almost every prison. This makes resolving local issues bureaucratic and slow, since anything of a more substantial nature needs to go through the Ministry of Justice. The Chief Inspector says that this leads too often to a “grudging acceptance of the status quo”, particularly as education is not a priority for the central prison service.
Conversely, education providers are deeply frustrated by the inability of jails to get prisoners to workshops or classrooms consistently. It is a near impossibility to run a service when you do not know when or which prisoners are going to attend, so it is no surprise that providers struggle to attract enough high-quality staff.
Conclusion
The MoJ is currently in the process of re-commissioning prison education but Mr Taylor argues that a centralised approach will never be effective. Instead he advocates for a “radical solution” that reduces central control and gives both power and accountability to prison governors.