Learning opportunities

It is common knowledge that our prison population is abnormally large, by any standards other than those of the United States. The US has given us the word ‘hyperincarceration’ to describe this excessive zeal for locking offenders up. We keep over 80,000 people behind bars, an increase of over 25 per cent in the last 10 years. Although young men make up the bulk, the figures include steeply growing numbers of women (doubling over the last decade, to just under 5,000 – two out of three of whom have dependent children), and prisoners over 60 have tripled. At any one time around 10 per cent of the prison population have serious mental health problems and simply should not be there.

How might we do better? I want to argue that education and training opportunities for offenders should be part of any more progressive approach, and one which would make better use of the £4.2 billion expenditure on prisons. But there is also a wider role for adult learning than just focussing on the offenders. The Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning (IFLL), sponsored by the NIACE, is investigating the issues as one of its major themes.

On the first point, it is brutally clear that most offenders have very poor educational records. 57 per cent of all those entering custody have no qualifications (compared with 14 per cent of the general population – itself not a happy statistic). 55 per cent were assessed at or below level one literacy. Schooling has generally failed them, and of course they’ve come nowhere near accessing post-school education or training. They have very little to offer potential employers by way of skills or qualifications.

It is fair to say that the Offenders Learning and Skills Service (OLASS) has so far had limited success. The Public Accounts Committee issued a harshly critical report last year, and just this week, two new reports from Ofsted highlight deficiencies in provision for both short- and long-term prisoners.

What might be done? For offenders, improving access to skills and qualifications is an essential step towards change. But provision needs to go beyond basic skills. It needs to tackle offenders’ personal development, including their mental wellbeing. Too much of the offer stops at a basic level. The OU is an excellent route for some, but too few can progress beyond level two.

Training should be a much higher priority, and geared more effectively to employment, if offenders are to stand a chance of gaining lawful employment on their release. Otherwise any investment in training within prison will just be wasted.

I said above that learning in relation to penal policy goes beyond offenders. Families are deeply affected. 150,000 children have parents in prison. There are some wonderful initiatives which address this problem, helping prisoners to learn with their children, mainly through small voluntary organisations. They need support.

But the relevance of learning goes wider. Restorative justice enables offenders to confront and come to terms with the consequences of their actions, as the Progress Policy Group on Crime and Justice point out in their recent report. It requires learning on their part, but also on the part of others involved – the victims, and those who run the system. This should be seen as an important part of community learning. More widely still, we need a more informed public debate on appropriate forms of punishment. It is surely not too naïve to argue that if more people understood the negative consequences of our current drift to hyperincarceration we would at least have a better chance of getting agreement on more progressive approaches which would pay off for all of us.

Sadly, society needs protection from a fair number of people, and prisons are there to do a job. But we get a very poor return on what we spend on locking people up. Spending more of the prison budget on better learning opportunities for all would be a good investment – from every angle.