Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate his Department has made of the cumulative years experience of teachers working in prisons in (a) 2010 (b) 2015 and (c) 2018.

The information referred to is not collected centrally.

Responsibility for education in adult prisons in England transferred from the Department for Education to the Ministry of Justice on 1 October 2016. Prior to that, prison education was managed and delivered by the Offender Learning and Skills Service (OLASS) under contracts held by the Skills Funding Agency.

From 2016, revised OLASS arrangements placed responsibility on the OLASS contractor to ensure that competent and appropriately qualified staff were in place to deliver and assess learning delivered.

New education delivery contracts in England are now in place: these were procured in succession to the OLASS arrangements that expired at the end of March. The new contracts require that all suppliers must operate a range of human resource and supplier personnel development arrangements that focus on establishing and maintaining a cadre of high-quality personnel capable of delivering an outstanding service