The provision of prison education is not good enough and budgets have not kept pace with rising costs. I am determined to improve the quality of education by driving up classroom attendance, expanding access by embracing digital learning and strengthening partnerships with employers such as Morrisons, FirstGroup and Marston’s to provide training and jobs on release. Work to improve reading in prisons is a priority and I am pleased to let your Lordships know that Lee Child is our first prison reading laureate.
My Lords, I am sure we can all agree that education will play a crucial part in trying to reduce the incredibly worrying reoffending rates. The Minister has been very kind in giving me detailed responses to Written Questions. I am sure Members will be concerned and worried, in relation to our education programme providers, that at Feltham 60.2% of education programming was not provided and at Wetherby 44.9% was not provided—and so it goes on. Can the Minister assure us that the programmes will be fully provided by the contracted provider? Will we get a rebate on the money that was not provided? Finally, do we have any means of inspecting the quality of provision and the quality of delivery?
I thank the noble Lord. He is absolutely right and I am looking at this on a daily basis. I walk past too many classrooms in prisons that are not full. Some are only one-third full. If I owned an airline and my planes were one-third full, I would not be doing very well. Recent Ofsted inspections have been encouraging, but we need to make sure our prisons are far more stable. When they are 99.9% full, the priority is not education, unfortunately, but it should be. It is a combination of having more stable prisons, working with our education providers to create a more stable environment to get more men and women out of their cells into education, and developing in-cell digital learning.
My Lords, I pay tribute to the work of the Minister, but can he explain why we continue to release prisoners early without requiring or securing a measurable improvement in literacy and numeracy?
This is the final question that the noble Earl will be asking me, because today is my 600th day in the job and his penultimate day in your Lordships’ House. I thank him very much for his contribution. There are too many people coming in and out of prison, especially in female establishments. The average number of days spent in a female prison that I have been to recently is less than 45, which is not enough time to give people training. The staff we have in our prisons do an incredible job educating men and women. Anna Fellingham, who is the librarian at HMP Frankland, was recently praised by the inspectors for her creative writing courses for all abilities. It is the time that our educators spend with prisoners in stable prison environments that is going to make the difference. We want people to leave prison not just being able to read and write but having the skills for a job on release, so that when they get out, they do not come back.
Does my noble friend agree with me and the University and College Union that this is the time to make a clean break with the outsourced delivery of prison education and to bring it back in-house to be run by the Department for Education, for the benefit of prisoners and as a public service rather than for profit? Hundreds of jobs look like being cut and we hope this would stop that. Can he make an intervention to ensure that we do not lose more prison educators, whom we clearly need? I thank him for the warmth with which he speaks about prison education, but we need to keep them in and it should be an in-house service.
My noble friend knows we have had a mixed model of education in our prisons for nearly 30 years. What is important is that we support our educators and support staff in prisons by getting prisoners out of their cells into classrooms so they can do the fantastic work that they do. For me, the focus is on the right kind of support for the right prisoner at the right time. Prisoners and prisons differ, so we need to make sure we target it in the right way. But when we talk about education and we think about classrooms, we also need to think about workshops, because getting skills like dry-lining, bricklaying, and painting and decorating is just as important in many ways, and probably more important to many prisoners, as going to the classroom, which many of them had a bad experience of when they were younger.
I was encouraged by the Minister’s previous comments. I was going to ask about vocational education and whether the impact of that is being measured. Clearly, all education matters. At a recent visit to HMP Styal, I was particularly impressed by the work of The Clink, which sadly has shut after 10 years. How can the Government invest better in partnerships in that vocational sphere?
I thank the right reverend Prelate. Styal is my local female prison that I have been going to for probably most of my life, so I am well aware of the challenges but also the opportunities there. The partnership model is something that I have been doing for 25 years, encouraging businesses, volunteers and charities to go into prisons, work with prisoners and give them skills. I am pleased that a number of companies are opening up workshops—Iceland, for example, has recently set up establishments—but, unfortunately, we have 72 workshops that are vacant at the moment. One of my priorities is to fill those workshops, not just with organisations coming in but with internal prison industries. We manage to make everything in a prison cell apart from the TV, the duvet and the pillow, so there are more things that we can make. We are trying to do more work across government to make things, give people skills and help the economy.
My Lords, the Minister will know that neurodivergent people are disproportionately represented in prisons; a 2021 review found that the figure was up to 50%. So educational needs are higher but, unlike in mainstream education, there is no incremental budget to deal with this. What are the Minister’s Government doing to empower tutors to meet the special educational needs of prisoners with neurodivergence, so that they can come out of prison equipped to live a life without crime? Will the Government commit to solving the complexities of data collection? Without understanding the scale and nature of the problem, it will be very difficult to address it.
I shall address those two separate points. Data collection is something that challenges me every day, along with vetting. As someone who has run a business where I had all the information at my fingertips, I find it frustrating, as I know other colleagues do, that we do not get all the information we need to manage—but that is something that I am working on.
On neurodivergent prisoners, we have made big strides in appointing neurodiversity managers in prisons, but also in focusing not just on classrooms but on the environment where prisoners are. Some of the most inspiring work that I have seen in prisons recently is on autism wings, where staff are heavily trained to support these often vulnerable and challenging prisoners. When they do, the prisoners’ behaviour completely turns around and they go from being challenging, often violent prisoners to being those who really engage with the regime and get the skills they need.