The Learning Prison - Question and Answer
What does The Learning Prison report conclude?
How realistic is any of this in times of fiscal squeeze on services?
What is the Prison Learning Network?
Recommendations
What does The Learning Prison conclude?
Politicians need to treat prisons as a core public service requiring modernisation consistent with other areas. This includes: giving practitioners and prisoners a stronger voice and enabling them to drive innovation, raising aspiration for prisoner outcomes and increasing the use of ICT.
Advances in prison learning and skills have been made in recent years but further significant improvements require a “common sense” approach based on evidence and reason, not opinion.
Prisons could do much more to increase public safety through rehabilitation if we could put aside a dysfunctional policy debate that puts government on the defensive and leaves practitioners and prisoners without a voice.
How?
- Transformation of the technological infrastructure of prisons. This must be underpinned by standard security protocols and focused around enhancing offenders’ employability in a world where being able to use technology is now seen as a basic skill.
- A step change in ambition for the numbers of ex-offenders securing work. The report suggests ‘second chance’ national and local employer-led coalitions aimed at increasing the number of ex-offenders in work.
- Wider community engagement. As well as better evidence, this could be achieved through developing area-based learning for prisons using similar approach pioneered by the RSA in relation to schools in Manchester.
- Greater user engagement: effective and appropriate engagement of users in the delivery and design of prison services. This will deliver greater efficiency and complement rehabilitation programmes aimed at building skills and increasing personal responsibility.
- Dramatically strengthen the evidence base on what works to reduce reoffending and closely associated risks.
How realistic is any of this in times of fiscal squeeze on services?
The prison service is not currently an efficient use of public money. We are spending more each year in locking more people up. What the RSA’s work suggests is that we should be getting more return for our money in terns of public safety.
We need a debate that is more honest about the choices: we can continue to build ever more new prisons but without strengthening prisons’ rehabilitation role, the evidence suggests this is not going to make a significant impact on reducing crime.
There are ways of reducing costs including for example involving business in transforming the use of technology in prisons.
What is the Prison Learning Network?
The Prison Learning Network was launched by the RSA in March 2008 to explore and to champion the huge pool of experience of innovative and often effective work that takes place across the prison estate but is seldom shared within the profession, let alone with the public.
The Prison Learning Network has benefited from having an advisory board of senior prison staff and education providers, working with experts drawn from academia, non-governmental organisations.
We commissioned working papers for six different working groups that involved over 100 people.
The Learning Prison aims to reflect the views and experiences of the people involved including the discussions we held with prisoners. The project was part funded by the Bowland Trust.
Technology
The multiple benefits of enhancing technology use in relation prison learning justifies the aim of ensuring that its use be bought up to and go beyond that which is available in mainstream learning. Strategy should include:
- The engagement of the public and the participation of the best technology companies and employers. Costs could be reduced by inviting the latter to test products and build sophisticated ICT skills where possible and appropriate.
- An overarching e-learning framework for offender learning and skills incorporating all delivery settings. This should include all learning provision owned and sponsored by the MOJ, NOMS, BIS, private sector prisons and the LSC and should be charged with outlining the benefits, both of participation in learning and skills and the role of technology in enhancing those opportunities.
- The development of standard security protocols for equipment use across the estate alongside a requirement for prisoners to have access to up-to-date and industry-standard ICT equipment and software applications.
- Four drivers should underpin such an approach: the ‘double digital exclusion’ of prisoners; the speed of technological change that could make recent progress made in prisons obsolete; the need for innovation and investment; public assurance and future proofing the system.
- Establish a Centre for Rehabilitation and Crime reduction: a high profile organisation delivering objectively trusted and rigorous research, not advocacy on behalf of prisoners or victims of crime.
- This should use success criteria based on the number of crimes prevented and specific reduction of risks to reoffending but ensure that methods are flexible enough to recognise value added, innovation and user engagement;
- Adopt a sufficiently high level of evaluation (we suggest that following Lawrence Sherman’s model of Scientific Methods Scale level 3 that has the advantage of being internationally recognised and enabling comparisons with models abroad).
- Develop a common metric of cost and crimes prevented and establish ways of aggregating evidence locally, regionally and nationally.
- Inject a sense of urgency into the employment needs of ex-offenders through ‘Second Chance’, national and regional coalitions focused on crime reduction through employment.
- This should include some focus on particular skills areas and options for ex-offenders (such as how we support enterprise and self-employment) with broader emphasis on our shared responsibilities and benefits of social mobility and crime reduction.
- Put further pressure on public organisations to proactively open their recruitment to ex-offenders and engage organisations involved in promoting the cause of ex-offenders but who do not themselves employ any ex-offenders.
- Develop a Second Chance Awards Accreditation Scheme that would assess, recognise and promote initiatives aimed at increasing offender employment.
- Giving greater priority to promotion comes with its risks but is a key component to fostering a more informed and positive discourse about prison services as a core public service.
- The current workforce reform agenda has yet to address many of the skills needed for personalisation. Key skills – in particular those pertinent to personalisation and ICT – should be addressed wherever possible through current workforce reviews.
- Support work in the community needs where possible to engage and include the learning needs of the whole family. Families can provide much needed support while prisoners are inside and on their release.
- Build the evidential case in order to underpin expansion of peer schemes that utilise technology, involve the community and serve to change public perception of the role of offenders in enabling others to change their lives.
- The existence of prison councils in most provide a starting point for a national review of user engagement involving staff and prisoners.
- The RSA is currently piloting user-centred drugs services, working with a range of agencies in one geographical area. Consideration could be given to looking at some of the more innovative user-centred initiatives like this one, which works with people with relatively serious and complex needs, to assess whether or not they work and could provide lessons for a more locally based, user-centred approach to prison resettlement.
Aspiration
A target of level 3 in line the Leitch Review of Skills (external link) and the Government’s target for most of those having 'intermediate' skills to be qualified at level 3 rather than level 2 by 2020. It has been suggested that in the short term a minimum of level 2 literacy, numeracy and ICT qualifications should be embedded within staff qualifications. We suggest a more ambitious target of level 3 where possible.
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