Prison Reform Trust response to the House of Commons Education Committee inquiry ‘Education: are prisoners being left behind?’ – January 2021

But the current provision of education in prisons dramatically fails that test, and the gap is widening as learning in the community is revolutionised through digital technology and, in particular, access to the internet. [...] There is a danger that the prevalence of certain characteristics within the prisoner population (relating to educational disadvantage), and the (often overstated) constraints of operating in a secure environment, lead to the assumption that prison education is a specialism to which different standards apply. [...] Whilst it is obviously right that the commissioning process for education in prisons should be informed by an analysis of the most common characteristics of prison learners, and that one of the objectives of that commissioning should be to support rehabilitation, the scope of what education is for in prisons goes well beyond that. [...] Others will no doubt provide the committee with more recent evidence, and the evidence review on neurodiversity in the criminal justice system, commissioned by the Lord Chancellor and currently being carried out by the inspectorates of prison and probation, will be helpful to the committee’s work. [...] The ministry has yet to produce the plan requested by the Justice Committee, and a “reconfiguration” exercise, planned on the back of a previous government promise in 2016 to build 10,000 additional prison places became predictably mired in uncertainty when that programme was effectively abandoned in order to bail out the ministry’s budget shortfall.