In his new role as minister for prisons, James Timpson will be looking for innovative ways to reform the prison system, with a focus on improving rehabilitation and driving down re-offending rates. Skills development is self-evidently key to achieving that ambition, and one of our recent programmes offers an innovative approach that could be replicated system-wide.
At City & Guilds, we understand the life-changing link between skills development and social mobility, prosperity and success. Nowhere is this more the case than with our work in helping unlock the skills potential of the UK’s prison population.
When it comes to prisoners, the relationship between high-quality skills training, access to employment opportunities and community integration is obvious. At a time when employers are facing critical skills shortages and prisons are over-crowded, the economic and moral imperative to effectively and systematically strengthen that link has never been more urgent.
Re-offending costs the UK approximately £18 billion every year, and engagement with education and training has been shown to reduce re-offending considerably. Indeed, a report by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons in 2020 showed that the one-year re-offending rate among prison learners was 34 per cent, compared with 43 per cent for those who did not engage in any form of learning.
It’s deeply frustrating therefore that there remains a real gap in terms of high-quality in-prison skills and education programmes. Typical ‘success’ rates on these programmes are often cited in the 15 to 20 per cent range, which surely can’t be good enough.
To help address this, City & Guilds launched The Future Skills Commission for Prisons back in 2019, backed by a £1 million Big Ideas Fund. The fund works with UK charities, prison governors and local innovators to deliver transformative approaches to the delivery of skills both in and after prison.
One of the programmes to receive funding under this scheme is the work we do in partnership with HMP Highpoint. In 2022, through the City & Guilds’ Big Ideas Fund, HMP Highpoint opened their Rail Centre of Excellence.
The economic and moral imperative has never been more urgent
This state-of-the-art facility gives prisoners industry-standard training on rail infrastructure, and every successful participant is guaranteed employment on release – backed by leading employers from across the rail sector. Even better, the courses are funded via the DfE’s Skills Bootcamp initiative, creating a virtuous circle of funding into training into employment.
The results of this programme at HMP Highpoint speak for themselves. To date, over 75 per cent of our graduates are still in employment six months after release. As City & Guilds learner Ryan Hull explains, “When you live a certain lifestyle for so long it’s hard to break the cycle. This course offered me a different route away from that.”
We are now working to scale up this model dramatically, and we’re supported in this ambition by other donors. Most notably, colleagues at Clothworkers have donated funds that will help expand provision into exciting new areas such as signalling and telecoms.
We’ve also been hugely supported by our employer partners, including Balfour Beatty and Keltbray, who have contributed both employment opportunities and the high-quality kit that our learners train on.
The model that the team at HMP Highpoint have championed really does show the way for a more effective, impactful model of prison education. A model that truly unlocks the potential of the UK’s prison population, and helps keep people in high-quality employment for the long term.
That’s good for employers, for our criminal justice system, and for prisoners, their families and their communities. So as James Timpson sets out to fix our revolving prison doors, we hope he sees in this programme a key that he can copy.
Find more information on City & Guilds’ work within prisons here
Your thoughts