Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to improve the (a) availability and (b) quality of education for adult prisoners.
We set out our intentions to reform prison education in the Education and Employment Strategy, published in May last year. Our new education programme, designed to improve the quality of prison education and give prisoners a better chance of gaining employment on release, commenced on 1 April. Prison governors are responsible for education provision in their prisons. They control the education budget, decide the curriculum, and have helped to choose the main providers. In addition, our prison education Dynamic Purchasing System allows governors to commission specific, short-term education provision to meet specialised learning needs of individual prisoners, and to commission training to address employers’ particular requirements. This will help prisoners to take full advantage of employment opportunities on release. 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 a better mechanism for governors to manage performance. We do not hold data on re-offending outcomes in relation to education engagement in the form requested, and could not obtain it without incurring disproportionate cost. |