Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he is taking to increase the (a) availability and (b) quality of offender learning and skills in prisons.

We set out our intentions in the prisoner Education and Employment Strategy, published last year. In April 2019, the new prison education contracts commence. The services these contracts deliver have been chosen by prison governors to ensure that the learning available to prisoners is both relevant for their own development needs and linked to labour market information, supporting employment outcomes. The new contracts, and increased local and national management of the education providers, will provide better and more immediate information on the quality of the service being delivered and provide better levers for governors to manage underperformance.

In addition to these main contracts, our prison education Dynamic Purchasing System allows prison governors to commission specific, short-term education provision to meet niche and other learning needs their prisoners have, or to commission training to address employers’ bespoke training requirements. This will allow prisoners to take advantage of labour market opportunities on release.