Prisons across the country are slashing education funding. According to the Guardian, public money for prison education courses is being reduced by almost 50 per cent. As a result, basic English and maths courses are being scrapped. This appears to breach Labour’s 2024 manifesto commitment, in which they promised to ‘work with prisons to improve offenders’ access to purposeful activity, such as learning’.
If the government hopes to save the justice system from collapse, then it needs to bring down reoffending. The Sentencing Bill and the coming reforms to the court system will significantly reduce the use of imprisonment, and Labour hope that jails and probation will be able to help more offenders reform. Cutting prison education budgets runs directly counter to that goal.
Learning in prison matters because we know that good prison education reduces the chance that an inmate will reoffend after release. Education, qualifications and skills make it easier to get a job, earn an honest wage and stay out of trouble. Basic skills teaching is particularly important, with around 60 per cent of prisoners having a reading age below that expected of an 11-year-old. Cutting teaching which might address this will only make our reoffending crisis worse.
More advanced qualifications can also be difficult to access. I know a man currently in prison who has secured funding from the Prisoners Education Trust (PET) for a construction qualification which would help him find stable employment after release. Unfortunately, the prison system is making it impossible for him to sit the relevant exams. Lack of staff, or lack of interest may be to blame.
Jon Collins, chief executive of the PET, told me: ‘Prison education can reduce reoffending but is chronically underfunded and upcoming budget cuts will only further damage services that are already struggling. There is no point in talking about the importance of rehabilitation while simultaneously cutting budgets for the services that can deliver it.’
The Ministry of Justice insisted that ‘it would be wrong to report that the overall budget for prison education has been cut’, although they also said that because of recent changes to education contracts, and how funding is allocated, ‘prison-level budgets cannot be directly compared’. It seems as though even the prison service itself can’t clearly answer the extent to which prison education budgets have fallen or not.
The Ministry of Justice did note that ‘despite financial pressures, we have secured investment in new roles such as Heads of Education, Skills and Work and Neurodiversity Support Managers’.
While any new investment in prison education is welcome, I doubt more managers are the best use of scarce funds. In many jails, most prisoners spend 20-22 hours a day in their cells, due to a lack of purposeful activity, or the absence of staff to run it. If the prison service is adding to education teams, then front line teachers would be far more useful, and cheaper than managers.
There are some hints that the government is trying to reduce waste. For many years prisoners have grumbled that every time they move jails, they’re told to do the same basic maths and English competency assessments again before they’re able to access any other education or work opportunities. Each such test costs the prison service money. Now the government intends to create a new ‘Learning and Work Progress Service’, which should reduce the need for such wasteful repeat assessments.
We may yet see another capacity crisis
It’s very thin gruel. The Sentencing Review, which originally promised to deliver a Texas-style ‘earned release’ scheme under which prisoners would be released early only if they completed education and training programmes, has been softened into a system where it seems that any inmate who stays out of trouble will be released at the earliest opportunity. Unfortunately, given the lack of access to education, the prison system probably could not have made early release conditional on study.
The government needed to be ambitious and focused in their approach to the justice system. Reoffending must come down to avoid prisons running out of room again. With these counterproductive cuts to education budgets, and August’s news that the prison building programme is now ‘unachievable’, the goverment’s room to maneuver is shrinking fast.
As a result, we may yet see another capacity crisis before 2029. If we do, then Labour’s repeated line that ‘this government inherited a prison system in crisis’ will prove no excuse.
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