Written question asked by Oliver Heald (Conservative) on Monday, 27 June 2011, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Wednesday, 29 June 2011. It was answered by Crispin Blunt (Conservative) on Monday, 4 July 2011 on behalf of the Ministry of Justice.

Prisoners: Literacy

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice if he will commission research into the reading ability of prisoners; and if he will make a statement.

Answer: There are no current plans to commission research into the reading ability of prisoners.However, in 2010 the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, working closely together with the Ministry of Justice, did commission a scoping study to explore the feasibility of undertaking a survey of prisoners and offenders in the community to examine their literacy and numeracy levels. The study concluded that while it would be possible to measure the skills levels of adult custody and community offenders as well as young offenders in custody, robustly sampling young offenders in the community would be difficult.Neither the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills nor the Ministry of Justice currently have funding set aside to undertake a basic skills survey of offenders in the current financial year. However, this work will be considered against other policy priorities in future research-planning rounds.

Secondary information