Prisons: Education

Lord Hanningfield Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Hanningfield]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to help improve education standards in United Kingdom prisons.

[Lord Hanningfield (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for having obtained this short debate on education in prisons. Perhaps I should have added “in England”, but, until I heard some of the Scottish debate, I was not aware that education in prisons is devolved to Scotland and Wales. The noble Lord, Lord German, will speak later and he might tell us a bit about the Wales situation. At the moment, a review is being carried out by Dame Coates on education in prisons. It will report later this year and I hope that this short debate might have some influence. I congratulate Reading Ahead and the Prisoners’ Education Trust on all that they do to improve education in prisons. Later this week, there will be a debate in this House on the future of prisons. I hope that this short debate might influence that and that the Minister, when she responds, might be able to say that.

I think that all noble Lords are aware that I have been in prison. I will speak a bit about my experience there. As many will know, I also have lifelong experience in education. I was chairman of Essex Education Services for many years, chairman of the Council of Local Education Authorities and regional chairman for the Further Education Funding Council. After the terrible shock of being sent to prison, I thought that I had better try to do something with myself. I spent a lot of time researching and talking to fellow inmates about how they got there and their own situations. I found that many of the young people—I did not talk much to the older ones—were unable to read and write. I have since been told that the illiteracy rate in prisons is more than 50%. Many people asked me to help them. They brought me letters, particularly solicitors’ letters and legal letters, and other things, and asked me to read them to them and to help them understand what was in them, which I was only too pleased to do.

My experience of education in prison was rather ridiculous. I was initially given a 2+2=4 type test. When I was moved to an open prison, I was given the same test. I said that if possible I would like to improve my IT skills. I thought that I would try to do something. I heard nothing more at all, which was a common experience for many people. Education in prison is outsourced and, if it continues to be outsourced, it needs a different specification of what it can do. Education in prison needs to be brought up the agenda enormously. It is an opportunity missed. If only young people in prison could learn to read and do simple mathematics, that could help them to have a career when they get out.

The life of crime of many young people starts very often with an obsession with fast cars. They start with the minor example of pinching a car but graduate to much more serious crime, including burglaries et cetera. That is why I would like to couple my comments on education in prison with vocational training. A quite sensible young man in prison for a first offence had been obsessed by cars. In an open prison, people do a lot of external work and his main external work had been cutting grass and the like. However, when he was given a placement in a garage to train to repair cars, anyone would think that he had won the lottery. His excitement at going to a garage to learn more about cars for a possible career in that area was absolutely fantastic. That is why I want to couple my comments on improving education in prisons with vocational training. We know that the situation is the same in the outside world. We know that education generally has moved to more vocational training for young people. I hope that all speakers today will talk more in that vein, and about how we can improve education and vocational training in prison. It is right at the bottom of what happens in prison at the moment.

In an open prison particularly, the inmates do all sorts of things that help to run the prison. I was in a prison on the Isle of Sheppey. It was a quite well-run place and a lot of inmates did a lot of the work in running it. One could use some inmates for some of the training and education in prisons. Instead of just involving them in reception areas and so on, their talents should be used. If we cannot afford to spend more on prison education, perhaps we should rethink what we do in prisons and train a few more people to do more, which would help these young people get somewhere. Education is right at the bottom of the profile in prisons now. I hope that the contributors to the debate will talk a bit more about how we can raise the profile of education and training in prisons.

As noble Lords might imagine, I found my initial days in prison very difficult. I wish I had been able to have this debate before, but noble Lords will understand that it is quite difficult for me to talk about it. I found it extraordinary. For example, general knowledge is absent in a lot of prisoners. Hardly anyone had heard of the House of Lords. I am not really surprised at that, but so many people asked me, for example, where it is and what it does. Someone imagined that every Lord has a castle, because they asked me if they could borrow mine for a rave. It is quite an extraordinary thing.

Some of these people in prison are fairly intelligent and they could have a much better future if only we could do more for them. We need to think about how we can do more in both education and training in prison. I hope that the contributions to the debate will add to that.