(1 day, 8 hours ago)
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Lord Storey
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the provision of education in prisons.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Timpson) (Lab)
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.
Lord Storey (LD)
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?
Lord Timpson (Lab)
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.
Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)
We will hear from the Conservative Benches next, then we will go to the Labour Benches.
Earl Attlee (Con)
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?
Lord Timpson (Lab)
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.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
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.
Lord Timpson (Lab)
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.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
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?
Lord Timpson (Lab)
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.
Baroness Bull (CB)
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.
Lord Timpson (Lab)
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.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
My Lords, among the challenges to successful education in prisons are excessive hours spent in overcrowded cells and the lack of internet access alluded to by the Minister. What plans do the Government have to address both those challenges in the context of prison education?
Lord Timpson (Lab)
There are some good reasons why we do not want internet everywhere in prisons, but 90% of the English estate now has digital learning in its cells in various ways: Launchpad or Coracle. My vision is that we need to go much further with that, as well as offering a much wider curriculum on iPads or computers in cells, because that is an increasingly popular way for prisoners to educate themselves.
Lord Sandhurst (Con)
My Lords, as we have heard, today is my noble friend Lord Attlee’s penultimate day as a Member of this House, so I take this opportunity to thank him for all his hard work and wish him well.
The manifesto pledged the Government to work with prisons to improve offenders’ access to purposeful activity. Last week the Minister informed the House that access to in-prison education can reduce offending by up to nine percentage points. Why then has the Minister approved a prison education settlement that will cut core national education in prisons by 25%?
Lord Timpson (Lab)
The noble Lord is correct that it cuts the actual provision: the budget we have has gone up, but you just get less value for money. This comes back to my aeroplane theory: I want the aeroplane—that is, the classrooms—to be full. However, we are doing more than that. We have a working-week trial in five prisons, where prisoners will be out of their cells for most of the day. This comes back to the point that we need to run stable regimes in our prisons, so we can have a regular drumbeat of education and purposeful activity. That can make the difference between people getting the skills they need and them leaving prison with no skills—and, when they leave with no skills, it is pretty obvious what happens.