Prisons: Education

Lord Sandhurst Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.