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Rehabilitation of Prisoners

: We need to do better. Work is not the only positive activity. For a number of prisoners, education is a critical part of positive activity. We have made real progress in making education more work-like. It is important to recognise that most people in prison fell out of the education system. If education is education-like, such prisoners have absolute expertise in taking no notice of it because that is what they have done all their lives. If we just offer them education that looks like education in schools, it will slide off the sides. So we have been trying to use education that is like work to engage prisoners. For example, I saw in a prison that I visited not long ago a build-a-kitchen project. It was designed to help young offenders meet their basic skills requirements in literacy and numeracy, but they were not told that. They were told that they could get on to a popular scheme—there was a waiting list for it—to learn how to build a kitchen. Young men quite like the idea of learning how to build a kitchen, and, in the process, they were able to acquire key stage 1 and 2 qualifications. In addition to work, we are improving education by making it work-like. People have asked whether we are meeting targets on purposeful activity, or whether dropping programmes meant that we had conceded that we were failing. The outturn in 2004–05 was 24.2 hours. Everybody knows that this year, to date, there has been a substantial increase in the number of people in prison—that has been a subject of this debate. However, the average increased to 25.4 hours during that period. I agree that that is not enough. Nevertheless, it is a significant percentage increase at a time when the system is under a great deal of strain. It is a 5.8 per cent. improvement on 2003–04, so we are going in the right direction. I do not believe that we can offer a nine-to-five day in prisons. In fact, I do not want to make that the focus of how we deliver programmes. We need to focus on more purposeful activity, on work and on real skills that will enable people to be more employable, and we need to build relationships with employers. However, if the only way that we can succeed is by offering nine-to-five employment, that will create significant strains on prison regimes. I am interested to learn of prisons—and they exist—where the regime has been adapted to enable prisoners to do real work on night shifts. We are capable of adapting, but we cannot have that as the core target. If we do, we will be less inventive and make less progress.