I’ve recently taken part in two events to do with offender learning. The first was organised by the Prisoners’ Education Trust, whose director Pat Jones was very supportive when we pursued the theme of crime and lifelong learning in the Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning. The trust is working on a ‘learner voice’ initiative that seeks to involve learners more in the development of prison education, helping them to express their views and helping providers to respond to them (see http://www.
prisonerseducation.org.uk/). It’s an important previous patterns of behaviour? These are longer-term questions, and can only be answered by longitudinal research. (I declare an interest as Director of Longview, whose function it is to promote longitudinal research). Only by tracking ex-offenders and seeing what happens to them after their release can we get a grip on how far what they learn in prison really affects their prospects, and reduces recidivism. Yet tracking ex-offenders has all kinds of difficulty associated with it, as you can easily imagine: the sheer logistics of knowing where they are and what they are for life outside Learning way of improving the service, as well as of motivating students and potential students. The initiative is funded by a consortium of three charities, and in the advisory group we discussed how it might be evaluated. Evaluation is an issue of increasing importance, for charities as well as public funders. Everyone agrees it’s important, but it’s not so easy to decide how to do it appropriately – in other words, to measure what should be measured rather than what is easy to measure. In the case of offender learning, there are thorny issues to be confronted when deciding on what is appropriate in terms of evaluation. The first is how much to focus on what the learners achieve in the way of learning, as distinct from what effect the learning has on their rehabilitation. Even assessing the learning is not easy, where this involves some very personal issues of self-confidence, self-image and so on. But let’s assume all the learning objectives are satisfactorily achieved. Ideally, we would then like to know what this led to, especially when the offender is released from prison. Does it enable them to reintegrate into society, to find a job and move away from their doing, of maintaining contact and then of confidentiality.
Maintaining links The same issue came up the very next day when I visited HMP Belmarsh, a high- security prison in South London, as part of a meeting organised by Safe Ground. This admirable project concentrates on helping prisoners maintain links with their families, and especially on fathers staying in touch with their children (
http://www.safeground.org.uk). Upwards of 40 per cent of male prisoners lose touch with their families, and you can imagine the consequences for them and for their families, especially the children. (The single most startling statistic for me in the whole Inquiry was that two out of three boys with a father in prison end up in prison themselves.) The Family Man/Fathers Inside initiative puts on 10-week courses in over 20 prisons around the UK. Through drama, creative writing and other exercises the prisoners learn to build trust and communication skills, first with each other and then with their families. A family support officer works from the other
30 ADULTS LEARNING SPRING 2012
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