New research from the Sutton Trust reveals disturbing gaps in progression and earnings following post 16 education.
While qualified disadvantaged students in FE colleges are more likely to progress to higher education than those in sixth forms, the research also finds that the majority of students that leave compulsory education with a level 1 or 2 qualification had not gained any further qualifications a decade later. This was particularly the case for those that did not achieve 5+ GCSEs at key stage 4.
Researchers at the Centre for Vocational Education Research (CVER) followed the progress of two cohorts on young people to determine how their backgrounds and post 16 institutions impacted on their journeys to the workplace and higher education. One cohort completed their GCSEs in 2002/03 and the other in 2010/11 and students from both cohorts had their HE and employment status recorded at age 28.
Students were tracked through the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset, which links records from the National Pupil Database, the Individualised Learner Record and the Higher Education Statistics Agency with earnings and employment data from HMRC.
The report, ‘Going further: further education, disadvantage and social mobility’ defines ‘disadvantage’ as those entitled to free school meals. Findings compared and accounted for the larger prevalence of disadvantaged students attending FE colleges than sixth forms.
When comparing the outcomes of disadvantaged students, the report finds that those that attended a further education college were more likely to progress to higher education than those similarly disadvantaged that attended a sixth form institution.
Yet, regardless of setting, disadvantaged students were still less likely to progress to higher education than their more advantaged classmates.
Sir Peter Lampi, founder and chair of the Sutton Trust and chair of the Education Endowment Foundation, said that “disadvantage continues after the age of 16. Further education colleges play a vital role in providing a bridge between school and university or the workplace.”
On employment and earnings outcomes by age 28, the research finds that FE colleges are less successful at closing the disadvantage gap.
The gap in earnings between students that received free schools means and those that didn’t was larger for former FE college students than their sixth form counterparts. The earnings gap at age 28 was 11 per cent for those that attended a sixth form institution and 15 per cent for those who attended an FE college, the research finds.
In response to these findings, the Sutton Trust is calling for a reversal of underfunding of post 16 education, extension of pupil premium funding to 16-19 year olds and investment in education recovery and extending National Tutoring Programme to post 16.
Lampi continues “it is crucial that colleges are well-funded so that they can give the best support they can, particularly in the wake of the pandemic.”
Concurrent job: Deputy chief executive, Exeter City Council
Interesting fact: She started her career in further education, as an economics and business studies lecturer at City of Westminster College.
Cheryl Turner, Trustee, Central YMCA
Start date: August 2021
Concurrent job: Freelance FE specialist and senior research fellow, Learning and Work Institute
Interesting fact: She likes wild swimming and walking in Cornwall.
Brett O’Reilly, Head of innovation for construction technologies, NCG
Start date: June 2021
Previous job: Head of automotive and electrical installation, South and City College Birmingham
Interesting fact: He took three years out of his career in FE to be a full-time politician in Birmingham and spent a “brief spell” resolving a refuse workers’ strike in 2019.
Transparency of subcontracting deals in further education has “taken a step backwards” following devolution of the adult education budget (AEB), an FE Week investigation has found.
The Education and Skills Funding Agency publishes a list of declared subcontractors annually for nationally funded provision and tells prime providers to refer to it for due diligence purposes.
But a big chunk of subcontracted training is now hidden as eight of the ten mayoral combined authorities, which have taken control of the AEB for their region from the ESFA, publish no such information.
Just two of them told FE Week they release equivalent subcontractor lists for their areas. The eight that do not account for almost £600 million of public skills funding.
Those who don’t publish subcontractor lists include London, Manchester and Liverpool.
An experienced auditor working in the FE sector, who wished not to be named, said: “Subcontracting is the provision at highest risk of fraud, so transparency is critical.
“Oversight appears to have taken a step backwards since devolution and should be urgently addressed by all mayoral combined authorities.”
While the agency does continue to publish a list of subcontractors, it has reduced in transparency. It used to break subcontracted deals down by apprenticeship provision and other funding streams, but now only publishes deals for post-16 provision in general.
It also only publishes cumulative values of £100,000 and over.
The ESFA has embarked on a series of reforms to substantially reduce the amount of subcontracting in FE in recent years to tackle “poor oversight and fraud”.
They include a cap on volumes and a new externally assessed “standard”, which all providers will need to meet in order to subcontract agency funds.
The ESFA is also creating a new list of independent training providers – any provider not on the list will not be granted funding agreements or be allowed to subcontract with another provider who is on the list.
Six mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority began taking control of their AEB from 2019, followed by three more MCAs in subsequent years.
While they vary in the level of transparency, all require declarations for subcontracted delivery annually.
The largest authority with AEB is London, which controls £323 million annually. A spokesperson did not explain why they do not publish a list of subcontractors, but said “less than ten per cent” of its provision in 2020/21 was subcontracted.
The two MCAs that do publish lists of subcontractors are West Midlands and Tees Valley.
Liverpool City Region said it plans to introduce its own list this year.
Asked whether it plans to place any requirement on MCAs and the GLA to publish their own list of subcontractors, the ESFA said: “They are each responsible for the management of any AEB subcontracting arrangements in their respective areas.”
As the sector’s only dedicated newspaper, FE Week has an important responsibility to reflect the diversity of the FE and skills community. It’s my job as editor to make sure our readers can see themselves in our pages and that we do our bit to hold the sector to account for its diversity deficits, especially in leadership positions.
That’s why this is the first of what will be an annual diversity audit of FE Week’s pages. This is our first step to show our readers how we are performing in reflecting the diversity of the sector. As such, I am reporting our analysis now as a baseline, and we will publish our performance at the end of the year to our readers.
We are initially reporting how many women and people from Black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) backgrounds were visible on our front page, as opinion columnists and as people on whom we write profile interviews.
The number of BAME leaders in FE is ‘scandalously low’
The number of leaders from BAME backgrounds in our sector is scandalously low. Official participation statistics show that 23 per cent of FE students are from non-white backgrounds, and the Education and Training Foundation’s last published analysis of workforce data showed that BAME staff make up 15 per cent of the workforce. Despite that, it’s estimated that only 5-6 per cent of college principals and chief executives are from BAME backgrounds.
In our last full year of publication, 35 editions between September 2020 and July 2021, 112 faces appeared on the front cover of FE Week. Of those, 55 per cent were women and 18 per cent were BAME people.
Over that period, only 11 per cent of FE Weekopinion columns were authored by BAME writers. We will work hard to increase that this year; however, this does reflect the significant under-representation of BAME people in positions across the organisations from which we typically source expert columnists. Those organisations include the sector’s national bodies, trade associations, political parties and think tanks. This year, we have introduced “The Staffroom”, a new space for the sector’s front-line to write for us, and we have set ourselves an internal target for a BAME “Staffroom” writer every fortnight.
Our profile interviews are a great way of getting to know influential figures in our sector. Over our 2020/21 publication year, FE Week published 22 profile interviews. Four of them were BAME interviewees and 13 were women.
‘Join us in the open and honest conversation FE needs’
Visibility in our pages matters, and so do the issues and topics that we cover in them. FE Week is in a unique place to report on and investigate the progress of sector leadership bodies at improving representation within their own organisations and the impact they are having on the wider sector.
As well as being the place where the difficulties and challenges in diversifying the senior leadership make-up of FE and skills is properly examined and debated, FE Week can also be the place where progress and learning is marked and celebrated.
The quality of official information on the diversity of the sector’s workforce is poor. We have only a rough understanding of the gender and ethnic make-up of senior leaders in colleges, and we know even less about the people running training providers, and even less about other diversity characteristics, such as disability, sexual orientation and gender identity.
I hope others will join us in contributing to the open and honest conversation the FE sector needs to continue to have with itself to better reflect the communities we serve.
It includes a chair and team of six “leading skills and labour market economists” who provide independent “expert advice” on how courses and qualifications should align to the skills that employers need post-Covid-19.
Despite being launched 12 months ago, the DfE has not published a single set of board minutes for any of their seven meetings.
A department spokesperson said minutes would be published in “due course” – a line they have told FE Week for the past six months.
FE Week has attempted to contact individual members of the Skills and Productivity Board for information about their work, but they have been sworn to secrecy and told not to talk to the media by the DfE.
Sue Pember, a former top skills civil servant in the DfE who is now the policy director of adult education network HOLEX, said she had “forgotten about the board” because it has “been invisible”.
“I would have thought they would have asked us to contribute to the evidence on what is needed locally to support adults into new industries etc,” she added. “I’m surprised they are not publishing minutes or publishing interim reports.”
Toby Perkins MP, Labour’s shadow minister for further education and skills, is concerned about the secrecy surrounding the board’s work.
He said: “This is a government that has been plagued by insider meetings and crony contracts. This cannot be allowed to extend to other areas of policy making.
“At a time when skills shortages and post-16 education has been at the forefront of the political agenda, transparency about government policy making should be paramount. These minutes must be published without delay.”
Stephen van Rooyen, an executive vice president at international broadcaster Sky, was named as the first chair of the Skills and Productivity Board in September 2020, but he left the position because of “family reasons” in August 2021.
He has been replaced by Angela Noon, chief financial officer and executive director of industrial manufacturing giant Siemens. Noon chaired her first meeting with the board last month.
The board’s “remit for 2020 to 2021” was published in November 2020. It was told to prioritise answering the following questions over the next 12 months:
Which areas of the economy face the most significant skills mismatches or present growing areas of skills need?
Can the board identify the changing skills needs of several priority areas within the economy over the next five to ten years?
How can skills and the skills system promote productivity growth in areas of the country that are poorer performing economically?
Then education secretary Gavin Williamson said the evidence and analysis the board produces will play a “significant part in addressing the most pressing gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the labour market, helping to rebuild our economy post-Covid-19 and deliver a bold skills agenda”.
The government is oblivious to how many people from the first wave of its flagship skills bootcamps secured a job or received a pay rise due to unreliable data, researchers have found.
Sector leaders have warned this will ring alarm bells in the Treasury ahead of next week’s spending review, which will decide whether more taxpayer cash is invested in the programme.
A process evaluation report for the first digital skills bootcamps, which began delivery in six areas in England in autumn 2020 at a cost of £8 million, was published by the Department for Education today.
Researchers found positive results from qualitative interviews and analysis of management information: 81 per cent of participants successfully passed their assessments.
Most encouraging was that 48 per cent of people enrolled were women – a much higher proportion than seen in the digital workforce, which has reportedly sat at around 20 per cent for some time. The finding will help ease sector leaders’ fears about bootcamps becoming male dominated.
However, the researchers warn that the data obtained by the DfE from training providers did not cover all the bootcamps and “more problematically” did not consistently cover all of the geographic areas involved.
They therefore “cannot be viewed as an accurate picture of all bootcamp provision” and instead “offer an illustrative overview of the bootcamps that submitted full data”.
The data obtained showed that over 2,500 people applied for bootcamp courses and of these, 820 gained a place.
While characteristics of participants, attendance and completion data could be drawn from the sample, the researchers found incomplete data on job and salary outcomes, even though the DfE specifies this information must be captured.
The report said: “It seemed likely that these data had not been completed consistently (if at all) by providers, since there was no data on starting salaries and three learners were recorded as gaining a job.”
It added that employment outcomes could be reported up to six months following the start of training so this “may have represented outcomes not yet being achieved, or providers not yet being able to evidence them”.
The researchers carried out surveys with some bootcamp learners to get a better idea of their progress in the absence of reliable management information.
Concerningly, 81 per cent (56) of 69 respondents who had completed their course said they were not offered a job interview at the end of their course, even though this is supposed to be a guaranteed part of the programme.
Just nine per cent had been offered an interview with an employer, while ten per cent said they “did not know”.
The DfE previously told FE Week that bootcamp data will not be submitted through its individualised learner records (ILR) and instead providers will submit their own data through a form on a monthly basis.
Stephen Evans, chief executive of Learning and Work Institute, said bootcamps are a “good idea” but without “proper data we don’t know if they’ve succeeded in their aim of helping people into work”.
“That makes it more difficult to know if they should be rolled out further and to persuade the Treasury to provide further funding,” he told FE Week. “With the need for skills and jobs only increasing, the DfE needs a much more robust approach to gathering data so we know whether bootcamps are working.”
Some mayoral combined authorities that managed bootcamp contracts for their area even failed to gain consent from learners for their data to be used.
Simon Ashworth, director of policy at the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, said: “There are high expectations on providers to achieve good outcomes for unemployed adults.
“It’s shame that the dataset is incomplete, especially with a critical decision on whether to expand bootcamps expected as part of the spending review. The Treasury will want evidence to support this decision.”
The researchers’ report says the DfE must make “amendments to the data collection sheets given to the providers” to measure success of bootcamps, and officials must relay the “importance of clear, accurate and timely information”.
A DfE spokesperson claimed “robust” data collection on outcomes for wave one has been “ongoing from March to September 2021”. This data is “currently being validated and will be published by the end of November 2021” – a month after the spending review.
Prime minister Boris Johnson announced the first wave of skills bootcamps in September 2020, plugging them as part of his new lifetime skills guarantee. A further £36 million has been invested in the courses since.
The courses run for up to 16 weeks and are free to unemployed people, or where employed, their employer would pay a 30 per cent cash contribution.
Across the six areas in wave one, digital provision operated in all areas, and covered topics ranging from digital marketing, women in software engineering, cloud services engineer, computer-aided design (CAD), coding, cybersecurity, IT, social media and digital leadership.
Of the management information available, only 16 per cent of participants were already qualified to level 2 or below and 63 per cent were already in work or self-employed.
The DfE spokesperson pointed to the researchers’ learner survey which “indicated that nearly four-in-five (79 per cent) were satisfied with their course overall”.
However, only a little over two-in-five (44 per cent) survey respondents agreed that their bootcamp training and provision would be sufficient for them to apply for a job in their industry.
The DfE spokesperson said: “We are pleased that this early evaluation report shows that wave one skills bootcamps were well received by all stakeholders involved and that there is overwhelming support for skills bootcamps to continue.”
England’s “largest” NHS trust has been slapped down by Ofsted for taking on too many apprentices while failing to recruit enough tutors to train them properly.
In a report published on Tuesday, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust was found to be making ‘insufficient progress’ in all three areas of a monitoring visit undertaken in July.
Apprentices could not be supported effectively, Ofsted said
Inspectors slammed leaders at the employer, which has 386 apprentices, for a “failure to put in place many of the principles of an apprenticeship”.
Despite this, “leaders continued to recruit large numbers of apprentices, even though they knew they would be unable to meet all the requirements of an apprenticeship”.
At the same time, a “small number” of tutors were responsible for a “large number of apprentices”, so could not support all of them “effectively”.
A large majority of apprentices study the level 2 healthcare support worker and level 3 senior healthcare support worker standards, but others studied the level 3 team leader and business administrator courses.
Insisting the provider’s problems could not be blamed on the pandemic, the report highlights how “none of the areas for improvement identified at the previous inspection has been fully resolved”.
The trust, which boasts on its website of being the largest in England, was given a grade three in a full inspection report published in February 2020.
That report told trust bosses to “rapidly” reduce the number of apprentices “who leave before completing their apprenticeship or continue in learning beyond their planned end-date”. Also, they were advised to include employers more in the planning of apprentices’ learning and to ensure staff delivering functional skills courses use apprentices’ starting points to plan the curriculum.
‘Too many apprentices fall behind in their learning’
This week’s follow-up monitoring report finds that when apprentices do not attend functional skills sessions, leaders did not intervene quickly enough. This meant “too many apprentices fall behind in their learning and routinely exceed their planned end-dates for functional skills”.
Apprentices’ line managers “do not know” what they need to do to help apprentices apply skills and knowledge at work, because the provider’s assessors do not involve them in planning courses.
Leaders were criticised for not ensuring assessors and tutors use apprentices’ starting points to plan and develop apprentices’ English and maths skills and put in place actions for apprentices to complete their functional skills courses in a timely manner.
The provider has brought in new processes to improve the collection of apprentices’ starting points, including one-to-one meetings to determine what learners already know at the start of their programme, the report reads.
Leaders and managers had not ensured apprentices receive high-quality careers information, advice and guidance, it was also found.
“Most” apprentices told inspectors they have not had the chance to discuss progression opportunities, even though the large majority have “clear and aspirational career aims” to become nurses or operations department practitioners, working to prepare patients and operating theatres’ equipment for surgery.
Under Ofsted’s inspection handbook, providers, like Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, that receive a ‘requires improvement’ judgment should expect a full reinspection within “12-30 months”.
A spokesperson for Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust said: “We greatly value our apprenticeships and have worked hard to address the recommendations made by Ofsted.
“Initial progress in this area undoubtedly slowed at the height of the pandemic as we prioritised the delivery of patient care, but the trust has since implemented a transformation programme to address all of Ofsted’s concerns.”
An abundance of talent has been on full display during Colleges Week, with four colleges having won the national Share the Love / Love Our Colleges competition this year.
Bicton College, Cornwall College, Newcastle College and Orchard Hill College will each receive a £50 shopping voucher to share between the winning students.
Colleges produced cakes, signs and floral arrangements
For the event, which uses the hashtag #LoveOurColleges, Bicton’s students put forward a video of military and protective services students marching into the shape of a heart (pictured top).
The competition was part of Colleges Week, an annual celebration of the further education sector run by the Association of Colleges, which this year took place between October 18 and today.
Week was also marked with visits, campaigning and blog posts
As well as the competition, students, staff and sector cheerleaders have been marking the week with visits, campaigning, and written pieces.
Shadow education secretary Kate Green visited City of Westminster College on Wednesday to meet learners, tweeting to the college afterwards: “Huge thanks for a brilliant visit today. From public services to plumbing, our colleges are giving young people the skills and work experience the country needs for the future.”
Strode College’s entry to Share the Love Our Colleges
The National Union of Students and the British Youth Council held a digital day of action to kick off lobbying for several demands that are part of the union’s #NewVisionforEducation campaign. The demands include maintenance support for learners and investment so students can access digital devices.
The Department for Education has also published a blog this week called “5 Reasons to Love Our Colleges”. The reasons include the fact that they “provide flexible courses to fit around you”, with the blog stating: “Gone are the days where a long university course was the only expected route to success.”
Another reason is that colleges “offer exciting, varied and wide-ranging courses”, with the DfE referencing T Levels, apprenticeships and traineeships as examples of “up-to-date qualifications designed with the needs of learners and employers in mind”.
Duchy College’s entry to the competition
Colleges themselves have also been celebrating the week, with St Helens College hosting a breakfast for local schools’ careers advisers so they could be updated on campus redevelopments and curriculum changes.
City College Plymouth fired up its 3D printer, one of just five of its kind in the UK, to “create an anatomical heart offering a fun twist on the popular heart theme often seen promoted during Colleges Week”.
The opening of multiple new college buildings was also timed to coincide with Colleges Week, including City College Norwich’s £11.4 million digital skills building.
City College Plymouth’s 3D printed heart
Opening the “digi-tech factory” during Colleges Week was a “natural link to make,” according to principal Corrienne Peasgood, “as a key strength of FE colleges everywhere is our ability to move with the times.”
Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi visited Barnsley College on Thursday to open its new SciTech Digital Innovation Centre, where Zahawi paid tribute to a “truly inspirational team and students”.
Jon Collins, who is six months in as chief executive of the Prisoners’ Education Trust, explains how prison teachers feel cut off from their college colleagues
Perhaps it’s because Jon Collins, the new chief executive of the Prisoners’ Education Trust, is such a calm, precise and mild-mannered person that the scale of the scandal he describes in prisons sounds so shocking.
FE Week readers may not be aware, but you need sign-off from the Ministry Justice to go into a prison classroom – this journalist has tried unsuccessfully for six years to get it.
Setting aside the outrage that would follow if the Department for Education controlled access for journalists to colleges – there’s a safety aspect, of course, but it smacks more of a fervent desire to avoid scrutiny – the secrecy makes it difficult to understand what prison education really is like. There will be excellent practice, but it seems inexcusable not to be able to describe it.
But Collins, who is now six months into the job, is able to provide some proper insight. Of course, there have already been major leaks: back in 2014, the-then chief inspector of prisons said he was “very concerned” by the “extremely serious” situation in jails. By 2018, several prisons were described as in a “dangerous state”.
Then in November last year, the education select committee announced an inquiry into prison education, with Robert Halfon, the chair, particularly frustrated by the high proportion of prisoners with special educational needs who were neither assessed on arrival or properly supported during their sentences.
Collins presenting a Magistrates Association’s award in 2018
By last month, Ofsted and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons published a joint commentary with the devastating conclusion that “little improvement has been made” since the raft of reform recommendations from the landmark Coates review of prison education in 2016.
The bar could barely be lower: between 2018 and 2019, Ofsted judged only 38 per cent of prison education as good, 44 per cent required improvement and 16 per cent were inadequate. Compare that to FE colleges, where 68 per cent are judged to be good or better. And that’s before we talk about Covid.
Collins has seen a lot of the criminal justice system. He’s got a masters in it, has worked for NACRO, the crime reduction charity, for the Fawcett Society on women in prisons, was a director at the Criminal Justice Alliance and was deputy director at the think-tank The Police Foundation.
More recently he’s been chief executive of the Restorative Justice Council and before his current role, was chief executive of the Magistrates’ Association. It’s his first time working on prison education. He’s not a man given to hyperbole – but then, the subject doesn’t need it.
“It’s a very, very limited offer,” he replies drily, when I ask him what prison education entails. A brief overview: it’s usually level 2 English and maths (with no guarantee of GCSE provision, let alone A-level, T Level or BTECs), some “digital skills” training that doesn’t necessarily lead to a qualification (“it’s more just how to use basic equipment”, Collins says) and some English courses for speakers of other languages.
Prison education in HMP Bronzefield in 2017
The Prisoners’ Education Trust runs online courses – in 2020, the most popular was an Open University access module, followed by a business start-up course. But the numbers are tiny: 52 learners on the OU module and 47 on the business start-up course, out of a prison population in England and Wales of more than 79,000. Four providers are in charge of prison education, including two colleges: Milton Keynes College, Weston College, Novus and People Plus.
“Not only is it a very limited offer, but when you combine it with the way education is delivered, it’s extremely challenging for prison teachers,” Collins says. Classes tend to be three hours long, because moving people around the prison is difficult. Regimes can also be inflexible – inmates have to be in their cells at certain times of day.
“So you’re challenging teachers on how they can constructively use a block of three hours for people who have often not had a positive experience of education before.”
Teachers also face having to get prisoners who need a level 2 qualification to attend the non-compulsory classes, while “it’s very possible that people who have already got qualifications are doing the classes anyway to occupy themselves. One of the biggest challenges is how to engage and stretch these learners.”
It sounds like a nightmare. The surveys speak for themselves: 70 per cent of prison teachers are intending to leave in the next five years, a joint report from the Prisoners’ Learning Alliance and the University and College Union found in August. The teachers point to “no progression” and feeling like “hidden voices” in the teaching profession. What about Unlocked Grads? I ask, referring to the Teach First-style scheme that parachutes ambitious future leaders into prison officer roles. Is there something similar for prison teachers? Collins shakes his head.
“In terms of prison teachers, there’s not really a staightforward progression route in the same way […] there’s no equivalent to becoming a prison governor, if you’ve not been a prison officer. Prison teachers wouldn’t really go up via that route.”
Prison education in HMP Bronzefield in 2017
So despite the Coates review calling for more autonomous prison governors who prioritise education, Collins says the focus of most is not on teaching. This seems unsurprising if governors are mainly coming up through the prison officer route.
“Governors want good prison education, but for most, education is not their top priority. It’s about keeping people safe – and the challenge is how you can deliver good prison education in that environment. I’m really hoping the Ofsted review will give strong pointers on that.”
The challenges of accessing education have not gone unnoticed among inmates either. In the Chief Inspector of Prisons annual report for 2020-21, just 22 per cent said they could easily access education, while just 12 per cent said the same about vocational skills or training.
Prison learners also face various legal hurdles. At present, only prisoners within six years of release are eligible for student loans to cover tuition fees, a fact the Higher Education Policy Institute has said “beggars belief”.
“We think that rule should be removed altogether,” Collins says, pointing out that jail terms have lengthened, with the government last year scrapping automatic release half way through sentences for serious crimes.
“If you’ve got someone who’s come into prisons quite young on a long sentence, and you’re trying to think about how to use that time constructively, not being able to study for a degree doesn’t seem the most effective way of managing that.”
Would-be apprentices face similar hurdles with complexities around inmates being classed as employees. The government proposed a “prisoner apprenticeship pathway” in 2016, with close involvement from the Association of Employment and Learning Providers – but in 2019 the association was still calling for the pathway to get off the ground.
To top it off, prisoners sometimes turn their back on learning because they can earn money in a prison job instead, Collins says with a grimace.
Then Covid hit. The pandemic revealed prisons are in the “digital dark ages” in terms of remote learning, the Prisoners’ Education Trust has said. Launching its five-year strategy this week, it pledged to increase the number of inmates accessing its distance learning courses while calling for a “major investment” in digital technology in prisons.
Collins presenting in London in 2018
It criticised the government’s plans to roll out in-cell technology in just nine of 117 prisons next year. “But that mustn’t come at the expense of face-to-face education,” Collins says. “It must complement, not replace, face-to-face teaching. Many prisoners need a lot of support from prison teachers and officers to become learners.”
It seems that prison education, a bit like FE, is all the vogue right now. There’s a select committee inquiry, an Ofsted review, the 2019 Conservative manifesto promised a “prisoner education service”, and every justice secretary has made the right noises. But little has changed.
Collins is clear: “What’s currently on offer is as far as the money will stretch. If it’s going to be broader and better, that needs to be paid for.”
A complete revamp of the prison teacher career path, with better links between prisons and mainstream education, might also be long overdue.
“If you deliver education just for prisons, you end up with a one-size-fits-all approach,” Collins says. “But if prisons and colleges linked up more, then there would be access to a broader and more personalised curriculum. That’s one way you could move prison education closer to the mainstream.
“There’s also not a lot of thinking about how being a prison teacher fits into a teaching career. Could people do teaching in prisons as part of a more structured career?”
It’s a powerful suggestion. Distance learning is a commendable goal, but the Prisoners’ Education Trust is still trying to engage prisoners in institutions that largely don’t see education as the top priority. Perhaps Collins and others like him should be backing an exciting scheme akin to Teach First to support trainee teachers to the top in prisons.
Then, culture change might begin from the leadership down – and the scandal of our prisons, finally, will start to be resolved.
