Prisons: Education

Baroness Blower Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.