A criminal waste
Anastasia De Waal, 7 November 2008
According to a report from the Common’s Committee of Public Accounts, moves to improve education amongst prisoners are failing dismally. The Times Education Supplement reports today that the committee of MPs have branded the body set up to reform prison education, the Offenders’ Learning and Skills Service (OLSS), as ‘having failed in almost every respect’.
The committee highlights the relationship between poor educational levels and criminal activity with the facts that half of those in prison have no qualifications, and even more significantly, 40 per cent have a reading ability lower than that of a competent primary school leaver. Yet in spite of the clear message this picture conveys, prison education reforms have been heavily hampered, say the committee, by endemic failures to provide consistent and relevant education to offenders.
The government has responded to the committee’s criticism by arguing that prisoner participation in training programmes has been raised by 10 per cent. Nevertheless, the low resulting 40 per cent participation rate continues to compare very poorly with counterpart figures in other industrialised countries. As, arguably, does our educational record for primary leavers, an issue at the heart of offending.
The sad fact is that the effects of poor schooling, particularly weak reading skills, are strongly related to failure in adult life. As the Committee of Public Accounts emphasises, this failure in turn is strongly related to offending. That governments, both past and present, have not succeeded in securing pupils with the basic 3Rs is a depressing reflection of failures in primary school education policy. That government, via the OLSS, has displayed such incompetence through apparent half-heartedness when it comes to offender education is criminal – hindering better futures not just for offenders, but also potential victims.
There is another aspect to this.
In October 1999, the Sunday Telegraph carried an article based on an interview with the then Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir David Ramsbotham.
In the course of his duties, he had had to visit all of the Young Offender Institutions in this country, and had been struck by the large number of “particularly bright” teenagers he had found in them – victims, as he saw it, of an educational system that simply failed to meet their needs – was not required to meet their needs – leaving them bored and frustrated, all too apt to turn to anti-social behaviour.
As the article pointed out, here were potential designers, programmers, inventors, scientists, etc, etc – an asset worth untold millions to this country, simply being wasted.
It may have been this thought which led the government to sponsor NAGTY – the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth – designed to help educate the very brightest students.
However, NAGTY has been under pressure from two sides – the feeling, amongst so many teenagers, that “it is not “cool” to be bright”; and the feeling, amongst so many teachers, that it is “divisive” and “elitist” to provide gifted children with an appropriate education.
This is not really an attitude this country can afford, particularly not when many Indian and Chinese students seem able to make better use of our educational system than we do.
Someone once said that “stupidity is the only crime that always carries the death penalty” – if not for individuals, then perhaps for the society that regards intelligence with contempt.
The author, Anthony Price, once doubted whether there was a French equivalent of the English phrase “too clever by half”. I suspect that there is no Chinese or Indian equivalent, either.