I'm the winner. And as Callum's already described, I'm I did.
I was here to do my Masters few years ago now.
I'm currently doing my doctoral research, Royal Holloway.
But the research that I'm primarily going to be discussing today is with my collaboration with Prisoners Education Trust,
which are an organisation and the charity that supports learners in prison and through through policy influencing and increasingly research,
but primarily through giving grants for distance learning. And yes, so it's getting a little bit of an overview.
I understand that I might be coming at this from a slightly different angle from how we've been talking about vulnerability
and various other and resilience and all of the factors of mental health and wellbeing that we've been talking about today.
And I'm kind of there's two elements to my presentation.
Firstly, I'm kind of seeking a discussion for how we can bring together ideas of wellbeing
and education and other supportive and mental health implications as well,
and in a way that I don't have the answers for. So that's definitely a discussion that I'd like to come from you.
And then I'm also going to be talking about projects that we were doing with Prisoners Education, Trust, alongside the University of Cambridge,
which used a concept of learning culture and developing learner agency and co-production with staff to engage the hard to reach.
And this is a model that I think that probably will be able to see some connections with in a
lot of the engagement issues that we might be seeing in other areas around criminal justice and.
Yes. It's just going to get complicated, isn't it?
So, so very, very briefly, education provision in prison for those who may not know much about it at the moment,
and I'm very much saying at the moment, because it may be about to be completely flipped on its head in a few days and which I'll get to the bottom.
But it's currently led, it's privatised by the centre, not a good skill service.
They hold contracts with different providers that run it in each prison.
And very, very briefly, the skills something agency holds, the the money, the purse strings and 80% of the funding is targeted at the low GCSE level.
And that does largely speak to some of the needs that we do see the educational needs in prison.
But there's literacy and numeracy.
Basic, healthy, really, really strong focus on that can be very exclusionary to those that don't fit within this idea of needs.
Those are higher and have higher education aspirations and but also those that aren't looking to do literacy or CRT.
And so I'm going to talk a little bit in a moment about options for learning outside of class.
But just very briefly, if you aren't aware of the case review, which is an ongoing review into education in prison at the moment,
they're going to be they're going to be releasing that report very,
very soon, like in a couple of weeks, I believe, which is looking at ways that we can really,
really broaden and widen access to education in prisons and provision.
And it fits very much, I think, with the autonomy, governance and autonomy that's happening with prisons and at the moment.
Okay. So again, very, very briefly and this is quite simplistic conception, so don't attack too much.
But when we talk about the purpose of education in prison,
which is fundamental because it defines everything that we're trying to do when we're in there,
what we want to see outside there are believe there are some post-release tensions.
On the one hand, we have policy provision that still largely,
like many other things in the criminal justice system, looks at the reduction of reoffending as a conception.
And of course, there are many benefits to this. But my argument is that by looking at reducing re-offending much,
we are working towards personal deficits and looking at educational needs and this narrow conception of employability,
which I referred to in a moment. And also it really risks individualising and responsibility for offending behaviour and removing the
structures around why somebody may find themselves in that situation educationally being failed by schools,
etc. And I contrast this to concepts that that leans a bit more closely with conceptions of the systems.
So instead of looking at personal deficits, we can be looking at building strength, the asset based model.
Instead of looking at educational needs, we can be looking at educational aspirations.
And and this Hopkins research recently has demonstrated that by only 11% of people in prison that states that learning is not for me.
So therefore we've got up to 90% of people that want to be potentially maybe engaged in education.
So that's interesting.
And we're also looking at towards a wider conception of employability, looking at vocations, looking for what people want to be doing careers.
And also, we need to be understanding the learner identity in prison.
Okay.
So to explain a little bit more about prisoners education, trust, and despite having said that, I'm not going to talk about reducing your funding.
And we do. It is is everybody or is anybody aware of the Ministry of Justice data lab service say this is so and in 2013 I think it was
the Ministry of Justice put out this analytical service for third sector organisations that work with people in prison.
And what you can do is essentially submit your data for people that you've worked with and they were able to do the job,
match analysis with the police, national computer and see for two years post one year post reoffending rates.
So essentially it was trying to match is trying to be able to see if you have any impact on funding rates.
So we have a really large sample because we've been giving grants to people about 29,050 thousand.
The match control group, we were able to match the attrition rate when you took it down to 200,000.
But what we found and unlike many other charities,
but this is largely because one of the issues with this is the big numbers that were required, which we had, but a lot didn't.
But we found that the those that did receive a grant from the Business Education
Trust seemed to have about a quarter reduction in their funding post-release.
And I'll come back to why that's interesting in a moment,
because we have these mechanisms of why we believe education may be relevant for the systems very simplistically,
which is what the reducing reoffending concept brings in,
is the simplistic employment model that we develop somebody's skills and knowledge,
potentially their qualifications, they'll go and get employed and then stop re-offending.
But we're thinking about maybe it's a bit more complicated than that and that learning can develops concepts of agency and identity,
self-worth and resilience, and that may be what the mechanism is that leads us to the systems, but also the process of applying to prisoners.
Education trust means that people write a letter, and if we can, which we largely do, we will give you the courts,
we will give you money, and we'll say We believe in you and we trust you and we want you to do this.
So there may be something in this process of affirmation and alongside the learning and the agency that we believe and may, as I say,
that may to the systems and how all of these concepts that we associate with learning
may be related to this wider concept of emotional well-being within the prison.
And so these are some of the concepts that I just wanted to push out to you before and what we were able to do with that data, lab data,
and because we have some big numbers and we were able to actually separated by course type and we saw some things that we weren't
really expecting to see because and one of the and most of the grants that we give are for courses that are formalised and accredited,
etc. But one thing that we have here, the arts and hobbies,
that's just a £50 grant that we can give to anybody who is interested in having a £50 grant to do some arts and hobbies in school.
And there's no qualifications attached. There's no learning attached whatsoever and set learning attach.
And and so we weren't expecting that to have had an impact on reoffending rates.
But actually we found that it was in comparison to our accredited courses that came back inconclusive.
So we thought, hmm, what sort of mechanisms are we talking about here?
I just wanted to I mean, I don't have any answers for this and please don't take away from this that okay, fine.
And stop accrediting courses in prison or giving courses in prison because that's hopefully not the learning that that that we
believe this is but there may be something about if you're worried about unlisted credits that actually has a negative impact,
it would be more down to statistical side rather than the actual conclusion that one works into one does yeah yeah we spent an
accredited is sorry that you come from this and obviously better than yeah no but what what we what we were weren't expecting.
Is I mean, we did actually have a larger group size for arts and hobbies than for the apprentices.
However, we weren't expecting to see any statistically significant impacts of the arts and hobbies, which may be quite cynical on our part, actually.
But we think I think that might be quite interesting when we're trying to think about the sorts of mechanisms that we should be measuring,
when we're talking about education in prison, and if reducing reoffending is necessarily,
you know, the ultimate thing that we should be judging everything by.
And also, just a little bit, how much time would like a house?
You've got 10 minutes. Okay. Okay. So and also just to link in some of the some of the wider outcomes that are very clear from from the literature
about how we can apply education and look at it a bit wider than it is education as a coping mechanism.
I'm sure none of this is going to be shocking to anybody,
but education is seen as a coping mechanism by many prisoners, and it's used as a tool to avoid prison ization.
And it's a protective factor against self-harm.
Suicide and violence is the only really 1015 and smaller intervention evaluations have demonstrated that it can support
positive contributions to family life and lots in many ways increases in self-esteem and shifts in life narrative,
an increased sense of agency and improved mental health.
And yeah, so just to give you a little bit of data that we had from Prisons Education Trust,
which was a survey that we sent out and via a newspaper that goes out in prison, we have friends and 43 responses to this.
And we found that 69% said that their learning had improved their ability to cope with prison, and 40% said that it improved a lot.
And in responses to really open questions like any other, any other,
anything else you want to add, we found this constant, constantly recurring theme.
This is something that we see in a lot of our correspondence,
this link between so having the opportunity to use my time productively in prison has saved my sanity.
I think I'll be on anti-depressants at the very least without it.
And keeping my mind occupied helps to lessen the frequency and severity of my bipolar episodes.
And this, in turn, means I more able to cope with the stresses of prison life.
My studies may well have saved my life. And these these maybe these aren't necessarily the most extreme things that we hear.
This is quite semi representative of, say, some of our correspondence.
An education gives me a reason to wake up in the morning and break. Okay.
Right. So in a summary, these are some of the links that these are some of the wide outcomes that I
think that we should be thinking about when we're talking about education and,
and well, also learning and links for wellbeing and present.
And but one of the things that we think we might be able to implement with this is by
mobilising culture and we think that by developing positive learning cultures within prison,
we'll be able to impact much more easily and readily on these and wiser outcomes for learning,
rather than much more and much more formalised and rigid that we may see if it's removed to an education department.
And just to talk you, this is where I start talking about this other project.
And so.
It's so true and a literature review and also through correspondence and and discussions and
roundtables with third sector organisations about what's a learning culture in prison may look like.
We came up with these dimensions that we were trying to ultimately trying to measure.
And so we are looking at empowering, say by empowering we were looking for an environment where prisoners are encouraged by
all SAT staff to have a say in their learning and personal development in the prison.
And inclusive and inclusive is the extent to which staff encouraged prisoners to positively engage in some sort of learning.
And we mean learning in a very wide sense here and celebrated their achievements when they did so very significant and aspirational.
We had three aspirational.
We're focusing on how well the culture encouraged prisoners to imagine a positive future for themselves, engaging and relevant.
So the extent to which prisoners are aware of available learning opportunities and also how varied,
interesting and relevant they are and to their future plans.
And also, I'm safe. And by safe we mean physical safety.
We mean psychological safety. We mean feeling safe.
And so this was our original conception of a learning culture.
And we wanted to create an intervention whereby we were able to use this concept of a
learning culture and develop something which is co-production with prisoners and staff,
working together to develop this concept of learner voice and increased agency within the prisoners.
And we wondered, we wondered whether or not that would be able to impact on this prison wide learning culture.
So just to explain a little bit more about what I mean by learner voice as forming part of Islamic culture and learner voices,
the involvement of learners and potential.
And so those that may not be engaged in learning or anything else within the prison and in shaping their learning opportunities available to them.
And this may be a familiar. That picture.
There's but I don't know if you can see, but we're talking about moving from this process of reform to consultation to involvement,
collaboration and ultimately empowerment. So in order to create this intervention and we had a tool kit that was created from best
practice around the prison about the ways that prisoners were developing their line of voice.
And we created three training sessions, one with staff only, where we go in and train about the concepts of the voice.
And then we'd go back and then we'd leave. And then we'd come back a few weeks later.
And we worked with staff and prisoners together. We invited prisoners at that stage, and that was where we started to come up with an action plan.
And the whole premise of this was that prisoners and staff would be discussing the needs of their particular
prison and coming up with something for that particular prison that could take them further up that ladder.
And then we would leave them to get on with it and then come back and launch the activity.
So this was our intervention. We ran in eight different prisons, which were particularly selected for that breadth of function, age, gender.
We tried to cover as much as possible within our prisons and from start to finish,
and we were looking at around about six months from when we first went in to afterwards.
And so sorry. The main thing I'm missing out here is that what we what we were trying to support prisoners and
staff in doing was creating this project that was going to reach out to those deemed hard to reach.
So that's those for the purposes of this research, we were looking at those that were engaged in purposeful activity on a regular basis.
So the final projects, the eight of them came up with, one of them came up with Atlantic Council.
Obviously, quite a democratic process. Another one, which is a women's prison,
came up with this idea of rebranding that Education Department because all of the posters on that Education Department were of men.
And they found that actually that meant women were engaging.
They didn't relate bizarrely.
And then we also had this prisoner newsletter that was about sharing good practice and sharing positive stories around the prison.
And interesting. We're going to talk about this.
I've got a couple of minutes in a moment about the prison that used education and skills champions and
resting on this horizontal communication between selected representatives and prisoners across the prison.
And then Prisoner Information Desk, which was ultimately a desk on every wing,
which has information about everything that was going on around the prison, how to access all the different types of services,
such as housing searches and drug support, where to go for if you want to book a family visit,
all of those sorts of things, as well as education, health opportunities, all of these things.
But they were all in the prison and they were managed by a one staff member and one prisoner.
And. In order to evaluate the changes in the learning culture.
We all methodology we we developed a survey in order to measure those dimensions that we previously discussed.
We had one for staff and one for prisoners. We run them out across the whole prison pre and post workshops and before and after the whole project.
We also held observations throughout all of the workshops.
We had interviews with staff and prisoners before and afterwards and also focus groups with prisoner participants at the end.
And so we wanted to capture the change in the learning and rehabilitative culture from course by staff and prisoners,
and also catch any engagement of those within the prison that were previously not engaged and.
Ultimately, our findings led us to this three cluster model and we are ultimately at the end of our session,
we didn't really give them much time to allow us to embed,
so we weren't really expecting to see many results, particularly in our Cross Prison survey.
We were quite pleasantly surprised and we did have some prisons out of the way that weren't able to get this project off the ground.
And we were expecting that. And we have challenged them, the resistors and.
And then there were also those prisons that were able to get the projects off the ground and were really doing really positive work.
And our qualitative evidence demonstrated that very readily.
However, we weren't able to get any statistical significance in the changes in the survey feedback.
And then finally we had the visionaries and enthusiasts who both qualitative and
quantitative evidence demonstrated a shift in learning culture across the prison.
And after we'd been working with them through these few months and the characteristics that we found would
determine where a prison SAT was how committees and staff and prisoners both were throughout this entire process.
In some May and some of the resistance, we found that this inconsistency and I mean,
that's another point that this inconsistency between with staff will turn up and
there'll be somebody different that every time nobody knew where they stood. And so commitment to have a really significant, effective communication.
And by effective communication, we meant horizontal and vertical.
It was very, very significant that it all kind of came together and we had buy in from the government and staff on the ground.
Staff on the ground and in a prison can make or break any innovation you're trying to push.
And if you have the governor's mind as well, that can ease that up immediately.
And we saw that that really distinguished between these two and consistency in approach something I think I really just before and also the level of
control and autonomy that was given to prisoners that was really fundamental
in separating where in all three customers of these prisons were situated.
Okay. Very briefly, I want to talk you through just one case study.
And because I've only got one minute left and this is in this particular prison,
they they really were very successful in engaging these hard to reach and in a way that we didn't really see so much in the others and in this prison.
This was the learning and skills champions prison. And from the very, very beginning they had staff from senior management and they had offices.
They had people from around the prison were engaged in our project and but they also had
prisoners engaged in the project and they invited them along very early on in the process.
And they came up with this idea about learning and skills champions,
because it came from one of the younger prisoners in the institution who felt like he wanted to represent younger prisoners.
And we also had somebody from PE who wants to represent the gym,
and we ended up with somebody who was representing every activity that was
happening in the prison and different groups and what they did in that role.
Actually, let me step back one second. They had an extremely high rate of people just staying behind their doors at the beginning of the day.
Some every time they'd come get unlocked, they had maybe about 40% of their prison just would not engage.
They wouldn't even go to gym, which is big. They that was really negative culture in engagement.
But with these 12 men, all their job was was to go onto the ring and just have some heart to heart something.
I mean, why why are you doing this?
And are you aware of these opportunities that are available and the time span that we had between our second intervention,
where the prisoners were present and they started this project and when we came back was maybe a few weeks and they
managed to have 80 extra people in engaged in education or in some form of activity in the prison that previously went.
And they've been tracking that. So that was very useful to us.
So what we took from that was very much about the relationships between the staff and the prisoners was very non-hierarchical from the very beginning.
But more than that horizontal relationship between prisoners spreading the word to other prisoners was really fundamental and very,
very quickly make this change.
But primarily we had some really fantastic outcomes measured in terms of the levels of fulfilment that those that were engaged in the project.
Took from the project. And so in terms of conclusions, trying to pull this together,
I think that engaging these hard to reach should be the responsibility of the combined efforts from groups and individuals around the prison.
And this should not ever be an individual penalised for not engaging.
We are also concluded that the possibility to influence learning culture across a wide space
in a short space of time is possible even when working with a small group of innovators.
And I don't say that effective communication commitment level of co-production,
prisoners and staff working together and mRNA appears significant in the success of this projects.
Okay. Look here.