Reoffending Prison(Provid)er

Civitas, 18 January 2011

After a year of industrial unrest, damning assessments, and accusation of falsifying records, the country’s largest further education college has once again come under fire. The Manchester College (TMC) now faces an investigation by the Skills Funding Agency over its offender learning at HMP&YOI Reading, after a whistleblower alleged that the education provider regularly receives overpayments of public money.

The “strong and informed” source alleges that classes described as not taking place due to “prison restrictions” did in fact not run as TMC failed to provide a tutor. In addition, the college failed to carry out many compulsory “diagnostic topics”, such as basic literacy.

Rob Wilson, MP for Reading East, whose constituency covers HMP&YOI Reading, has approached Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt and Skills Minister John Hayes. Hayes has referred the case to the SFA for further inquiries.

TMC denies any wrong-doing, championing itself as a “powerful voice for offender learning”. However, an Ofsted inspection carried out shortly before TMC replaced Milton Keynes College rated achievement and standards as ‘good’, and the IMB reported 1,321 inmates attending classes; by March 2010, this had plummeted to 641, and the IMB report repeatedly condemned various aspects of provision as “unacceptable”.

It is debatable whether TMC should have won the competitive tender at all. The IMB notes that a key reason for the decision to award the contract to TMC was that the college was the “[l]owest cost provider”, which, the report claims, “given the economic climate was on the face of it understandable”. Yet neither OLASS nor the SFA had properly determined whether TMC was capable of expanding its offender learning provision.

The recent claims should perhaps then be no surprise. Indeed, the report found that ten months after TMC took over, the Governor at Reading still did not have access to the contract. “How can the Prison Service (PS) be expected to ensure that prisoners….receive the correct entitlement to a key rehabilitation service”, the report rightly challenges, “when they are not allowed access to the contract that underpins the service?”

Nonetheless, TMC cannot be blamed entirely for the shortcomings. The IMB highlights a catalogue of institutional barriers to learning, many of which plague the entire prison estate. The facilities at Reading are “limited”, a problem which TMC, despite substantial funding in addition to the original tender, could do little to remedy. Moreover, with a chronic population churn, the type of prisoner incarcerated at the institute is increasingly unsuitable for sustained learning provision and current rehabilitation strategies. If TMC, or any other OLASS provider, is to achieve effective rehabilitative interventions, it must have the necessary time and continuity with prisoners – a sea-change which would require fundamental institutional reform.

IMB chairman for HMP&YOI Reading, Gordon Ross, remarked that “inmates who have volunteered or signed up for education are having to stay in their cells”, and rightly commented that this “in itself is poor and not leading to future behaviours we would like”. Provision requires offenders to be brought to classes, which in turn depends on prison officers being available to escort them. TMC cannot fairly be held responsible for staffing shortages elsewhere in the institution. Education providers can take innovative steps to reach offenders, such as teaching on the wings, however, this is far from adequate; wings are not quiet places, conducive for study.

Similarly, the prison was unable to meet its “out of cell hours per day” KPT (key performance target), undoubtedly hampered by the national recruitment freeze. More concerning still is that this daily target was only 8.4 hours, and in the fourth quarter of the year covered by the IMB, actual achievement fell to merely 6.6 hours. This is clearly insufficient – both for TMC to provide effective learning, and for offenders to gain the motivation and self-discipline that is vital for successful resettlement.

TMC is now meeting a far higher proportion of their targets, and it must be hoped that this trend continues. Yet without comprehensive structural overhaul, OLASS providers will continue to struggle to reach inappropriate targets with insufficient institutional support. Under the flaccidity of the current regime, it should be no surprise that ex-prisoners are reoffending – and with so little engagement and activity, perhaps it should equally be no surprise that inmates are rioting and rebelling against staff.