The education of young offenders looks set to improve drastically with the government’s announcement of Secure Colleges, where the current average of 12 hours a-week learning will double. Toni Fazaeli explains how it might affect FE staff and providers.

We welcome the government’s recent proposals to refocus the culture of youth custody from detention to learning.

Secure colleges provide an opportunity for a revolution in the rehabilitation of young offenders, but, as the Prisoner Learning Alliance’s latest report, Smart Rehabilitation, clearly highlights, learning provision must be outcome-focused, joined up and value-driven.

Of the very small minority of young people who commit crimes, around 1,300 are currently serving a custodial sentence, almost three-quarters of them in one of Her Majesty’s young offender institutions.

Proposals announced by the Ministry of Justice in Transforming Youth Custody seek to gradually replace the current secure youth estate with new secure colleges, while taking measures to improve the quality of education and training and resettlement arrangements for those young people currently in custody.

Young offender institutions deliver, on average, only 12 hours of learning a-week, despite being contracted to deliver 15 hours, and this is set to be nearly doubled to 24 hours under the new proposals.

Young offender institutions deliver, on average, only 12 hours of learning a-week

We have more than 1,500 members who teach in prisons, and our response to the ministry’s consultation last year on introducing secure colleges was informed by the views of teachers and trainers directly involved in offender learning.

Despite public expenditure of between £65,000 and £212,000 a-year for each place in young offender institutions, secure training centres and secure children’s homes, nearly 75 per cent of young people leaving custody reoffend within one year.

The main difference between secure colleges and existing forms of youth custody will lie in their culture.

Secure colleges are to be places of learning first and detention second. So the decision about who will run secure colleges is an extremely important one — there should be one lead provider overseeing education and custodial functions, as opposed to the current arrangement whereby separate contractors manage these processes.

The winning provider must demonstrate a high-level understanding of effective teaching and learning strategies for the most hard-to-engage young people. We believe that local FE providers should be in the lead.

Teachers and trainers told us that those seeking to run secure colleges, and those preparing to bid for new and renewing Olass (Offenders’ Learning and Skills Service) contracts later this year, should major on offering excellent quality teaching and learning.

Significant barriers to improving education and training in youth secure estates currently include lack of access to up-to-date equipment, facilities and resources (even something as basic as internet access), according to almost all (98 per cent) of the respondents.

The key message from our research is that working with young offenders in a teaching and training capacity is a highly specialised role and always involves working with young people who have highly complex emotional, social and learning needs.

This was recognised in the ministry’s commitment to a professional qualifications framework for custodial staff who work with young offenders. It is frankly unbelievable, however, that the same commitment was not made to ensuring that there will be qualified, highly skilled and specialist teachers and trainers, given that theirs is such an important role in securing successful outcomes and improved life chances for young offenders.

There are some real practical and systemic issues for policymakers to consider. How accessible is the local college or provider offer for a young person leaving custody? How strong is the relationship with local youth offending teams? On average, most young offenders spend 110 days in custody, so they need provision that is local, tailored to their needs and available outside the traditional academic calendar.

Thankfully, the number of young people committing crimes and receiving the last resort of a custodial sentence is falling.

Our job now is to work out how, together, we can cultivate a passion for the power of learning in the hearts and minds of every young offender.

Toni Fazaeli, chief executive, Institute for Learning, member of the Prisoner Learning Alliance

Pressure group Stonewall’s annual list of the top 100 lesbian, gay and bisexual-friendly employers included just three FE and skills-related institutions. Wanda Wyporska looks at what the sector can do, and is doing, to stamp out homophobia.

When austerity bites, equalities work is often seen as a luxury, and certainly cuts to the FE sector are biting, as colleges struggle to do ever more work with ever fewer resources.

However, promoting equality and diversity is at the very core of what colleges do, since they are at the heart of their varied communities.

Colleges are likely to have staff and students from the local communities and in turn, they provide a safe environment for often vulnerable students to not only reach their potential but also explore all sorts of issues.

We know from our members that homophobia, biphobia and transphobia all raise their ugly heads from time to time in various situations and locations.

The trade unions in the sector have equalities and legal experts who are happy to help and advise members as well as colleges, in working together to draft policies, agreements and develop good working practices.

Swift and effective action reassures lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people that homophobia is taken seriously

The Association of Colleges and sector unions negotiated the Joint Agreement on Guidance on Equality in Employment in FE Colleges, which is an excellent model policy.

However, despite lots of good practice in a variety of areas, problems remain both in the classroom and the staffroom, which is why we support the Stonewall campaign highlighting homophobia in the workplace.

Yet the solution to tackling homophobia is relatively easy. Swift and effective action reassures lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people that homophobia is taken seriously by the college.

Celebrating LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) History Month each February, establishing an LGBT support group or network, and of course, good policies, regular training and effective monitoring, all play a part in creating an LGBT-friendly environment.

The ‘nothing about us, without us’ mantra is key here; there must be discussion with LGBT staff and students.

Luckily, in this digital age, there are many organisations and resources available.

The Forum for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Post-16 Education (www.sgforum.org.uk) has a variety of excellent resources on gender variance, the intersection between faith/religion and belief and sexual orientation, a gender identity equality e-resource and of course, the 12 steps to advancing sexual orientation and gender identity equality.

There is also help available from the Skills Funding Agency’s (SFA) Equality and Diversity Innovation Fund (EDI), managed by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (Niace).

Project Empower, a free one-hour e-learning tool developed by Doncaster Group Training Association and Pinnacle Training Solutions, has been used by more than 3,000 FE staff since its launch in 2011.

Huntingdonshire Regional College’s project, To Monitor Or Not, created an inclusive and tolerant environment in which lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender learners felt comfortable to share their personal experiences.

Monitoring is always a sensitive issue, and again there is advice on this from members of the forum on its website, both from the perspective of students and staff.

Monitoring for its own sake is a mere tick box exercise, what is important, is what adjustments are made as a result.

More challenging, perhaps, is work around transgender adults and the EDI is supporting Blackpool Council Adult and Community Learning, to develop a research project led by transgender adults. They aim to make the voice of transgender people heard in the development of adult and community learning and develop trans-friendly teaching and learning practices.

Undoubtedly there are areas of bad practice, there are people with prejudices in colleges, as there are in society at large.

However, most colleges are keen to support learners and staff, to maximise attainment, ensure equality of opportunity and to support and promote good relationships between those with protected characteristics and those without. As the Stonewall campaign says ‘Lots to do’.

Dr Wanda Wyporska, equalities officer, Association of Teachers and Lecturers

Adult literacy and numeracy levels in England came out badly under the scrutiny of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A parliamentary inquiry was therefore a must, says David Hughes.

I am very pleased that the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee is to hold an inquiry into adult literacy and numeracy.

This recognises how pressing the issue is and is a positive and welcome response to the recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report on adult literacy and numeracy.

The OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) suggested that England’s performance lagged behind that of many of its economic competitors.

It is heartening that there is continued cross-party consensus about the importance of adult basic skills; it is less heartening that we are still needing to discuss it and struggling to actually address the scale of the challenge.

There have been many inquiries over the last decade, from the Moser report in 2001 to our own independent inquiries in 2009, chaired by Dame Mary Marsh and Lord Boswell.

The real challenge for us to debate is how we persuade government that investing more money will address the enormous scale of this challenge

These and more have helped move things forward, but the scale of the challenge has swamped the recommendations.

What is clear is that improving adult literacy and numeracy will take a generation; in fact, the problem is made tougher every year when young people leave school with low levels of literacy and numeracy.

So, we can probably all agree that quick fixes are not enough, even though they may be welcome.

The real challenge for us to debate is how we persuade government that investing more money will address the enormous scale of this challenge.

I say this because all of the evidence shows that the large numbers of adults with the most to gain from learning the fundamental skills of literacy and numeracy are the very ones who have missed out from government investment over the last decade.

Providers have been successful in supporting people to achieve the formal qualifications which earn the funding. The result of this, though, is that too many people at pre-entry or entry level have been overlooked.

My reading of the situation is that there is a good understanding of this and of the social and economic rationale for investment but there is little confidence that more investment will help those most in need.

The Select Committee inquiry gives us an opportunity to discuss this again and provide ideas and evidence of how increased investment could be used differently to make an impact.

I am hoping to hear about innovative practice, outreach examples and ways to motivate people into learning.

I am also keen to hear about the problems in the funding and regulatory systems which hinder reaching people with the lowest levels of literacy and numeracy.

We have recently started on a pertinent piece of work with the Esmee Fairburn Foundation and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills looking at the development of a broader life skills curriculum, including family learning, delivered as part of a programme of study.

The intention is that, with colleges and providers, we can develop a more flexible programme of study which is attractive to adults with low basic skills.

We want to explore how a more flexible offer can attract adults who are not interested in maths or English as a starting point, but who may be attracted to other things such as financial literacy, health, using technology and how to support children in learning.

If we can show that this reaches different people we can make the case for more investment with more flexibility; both would be great, even one of those would be nice.

Our life skills curriculum is just one of the many creative ideas and approaches I am hoping that the Select Committee will hear about, consider and support.

Let’s flood them with evidence, passion and ideas and use this as a forum to shift the funding rules and regulations so that we can support people who can gain so much from learning the basic skills.

David Hughes, chief executive, National Institute of Adult Continuing Education