Lord Ramsbotham
Main Page: Lord Ramsbotham (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, for initiating this debate, and declaring my interests as co-chair of the Penal Affairs All-Party Group, which incorporated the now defunct prison education group, and as patron of the Prisoners’ Education Trust, I realise that the Secretary of State for Justice has initiated a review of prison education, as other noble Lords have said, chaired by Dame Sally Coates, which has not yet reported. She is addressing the penal affairs group on 23 February.
When I was Chief Inspector of Prisons, I quickly became aware that education was the most important ingredient of successful rehabilitation, and therefore, by implication, reduction in reoffending. However, at that time, the Prison Service funded its own education, individual prison governors being allowed to make cuts in spending without any checks or balances, resulting in the most appalling imbalance between individual prisons in what was available per prisoner per year: £406 per young offender in Brinsford, £1,750 in Werrington in the same county, and £2,500 in Thorn Cross in Cheshire, for example. I therefore campaigned for the Department for Education to become involved, and for ring-fenced funding of a national syllabus for each type of prison, including academic, vocational and social skills education, speech, language and communication training and, not least, access to the arts. There resulted the competitive awarding to individual education providers of offender learning and skills service contracts, of which there have been four exercises in the past 10 years, with a fifth postponed from last year to this. This frequency has precluded long-term investment and caused avoidable instability, and I hope that the next contract letting will be delayed for yet another year to allow advantage to be taken of whatever Dame Sally Coates recommends.
Despite the importance of education, in view of the lack in recent years of educational proficiency of too many prisoners, of all ages and both genders, in addition to the instability of the contracting process, successive Governments have tinkered and micromanaged, rather than allowing individual heads of learning and skills to concentrate on improving local delivery. This has been compounded by cutting resources, not least the numbers of prison staff, who are needed to escort prisoners to and from classes.
I hope therefore that the Minister, in answering the Question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, will tell the House that in his plans for giving more autonomy to prison governors, the Secretary of State intends to furnish them with long-term educational contracts, which will enable local contractors to deliver educational training that is appropriate for prisoners from a particular part of the country, biased in favour of giving them the skills that will help them obtain employment on release.