Lord Addington
Main Page: Lord Addington (Liberal Democrat - Excepted Hereditary)
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, for raising this subject from a unique perspective. I first encountered prisoners en masse when I worked for the Apex Trust about a quarter of a century ago. As a severe dyslexic, it was the first time in my entire life that I had found a group where my literacy skills were higher than the average. If noble Lords look at the prison population, they will find every conceivable educational problem they can possibly imagine by the barrel load.
The average prisoner has finished his formalised education before his 14th birthday. I have one wonderful statistic: that 60% of all prisoners in 2009 were discovered to have a reading age below that of a normal five year-old, if there is such a thing. You get every single problem there. People were saying that 50% of the prison population were dyslexic. They discovered that that is wrong: it is only 30%—only three times the average. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who is sat across the Chamber from me, will say something about speech and language. Language development is incredibly bad among prisoners. If you cannot talk or do not have listening skills, you cannot access the education system properly—you base that on other problems, social problems. The fact that anybody in this group has any literacy skills would be a surprise. We also know that bad education means that you are liable to get into the prison system, and that you cannot indulge in legal economic activity. There is a cycle here that is quite obvious to everybody. We have to do something about it.
However, when we talk about education, please let us remember, having identified all these difficulties and problems, that sticking prisoners back in a classroom is not going to work. It just isn’t: you do not know it, you cannot react to it. Chalk and talk—the teacher writes something on the blackboard, you write it down —is what I failed at for the first few years of my life. I got away. Some 42% of prisoners were excluded from school permanently. You have to individualise the approach.
The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, mentioned the fact that prisoners should be used in education. Some of the most successful education units in prison have been those that use mentoring. I believe that I am patron—I am afraid that one acquires various titles—of the Cascade Foundation, which deals with dyslexia and head injuries. Somebody goes into the prison and talks to and interacts with the prisoners. It means that you can have a conversation with somebody who is not in authority to try to get some sort of relationship and progress. Other programmes such as Toe by Toe, or the updated version, work on a similar system. The two groups argue which one is the best. It does not matter: mentoring helps. You have an interaction with someone who is not in authority and does not represent the thing you have failed at, which has defined your life until this point.
If you do not have somebody in the education system who knows how these problems work and can relate them to an adult, you are guaranteeing failure. We have to get specialists in this field to intervene. I see that my time is up, but I have made my point: standard education practices just do not work.