Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps she is taking to ensure that prisoners receive the education they need to ensure a reduction in reoffending.

We are clear that our prisons must become places of discipline, hard work and self-improvement, for offenders to improve their maths and English and get a job on release

Alongside our work to boost staffing numbers, these reforms will help offenders turn their lives around, reduce reoffending and create safer communities.

Our recent White Paper on prison reform described how we have already stripped out unnecessary rules and governance from our education contracts to allow governors more oversight and control of existing services. Over the coming months, we will make prison governors fully responsible for education provision in their prisons once existing contracts end, commissioning the services they think are most appropriate in their individual prison. This will allow governors to decide how to structure their educational regime, and who delivers it, while following a core common curriculum set nationally which will focus on maths and English.

To support this, prisons will create a personalised learning plan based on an assessment of need on reception, integrating it into the individual’s sentence plan, and we will use the same awarding bodies for particular types of provision to enable continuity of learning if prisoners move elsewhere. To ensure the quality of education delivery in prison improves, we will make sure that those providing that education have the right skills and capabilities to do so.

The White Paper Prison Safety and Reform set out a suite of performance measures through which governors will be held to account for outcomes in their prisons including educational progress made by prisoners. We will compare levels of attainment of maths and English on release with those at the start of custody, and look at the number of qualifications, or other accredited and work-focussed activity, prisoners complete. In future, we will develop measures that assess individual progress against milestones in a Personal Learning Plan.