More, Different and Better

Before I got involved with Offender Learning, or should I say when I was an unsuspecting member of the general public, my views on learning in prisons and opportunities for offenders in the community were at the very least skewed and at the very most totally off the beam. I heard somewhere once that you could do a degree in prison, in fact I have friends who include it as part of their career planning, and I believed it. I was bemused at the concept of paying for ‘criminals’ to learn. Surely we are only making them better ‘criminals’.

I never knew though that a significant percentage of people in the criminal justice system have low educational attainment levels or that there is a prevalence of mental health, learning difficulties and disabilities, drug and alcohol misuse among offenders. Neither did I know that many offenders are themselves, in fact, victims of abuse. Like the rest of Joe Public I was interested only in the sensationalism of criminality and not the root causes of it.

However, over the last few years I’ve been privileged to have interviewed, visited and spoken to a range of practitioners delivering outstanding teaching and learning within prisons. Their job is not easy as they work in settings where the primary aim is not to deliver learning and skills; they also work with some of the most disadvantaged learners around.

I have seen a growing number of good partnerships between prisons, providers and organisations supporting the wider needs of offenders.  And I’ve spoken to offenders and ex-offenders for whom learning has made a significant and positive difference to their lives. Some of their stories have been published in Our Time to Learn, highlighting the ongoing challenges faced by offenders in learning and how they were able to overcome them.

Each year, during Adult Learners’ Week, we also hear from a number of ex-offenders about the positive transformation learning has made to their lives. This year was no exception and a particular story that resonated with me was Sam Riley’s – whose short film is embedded below. Sam had a very negative experience at school, left with no qualifications and spent 25 years in and out of prison for gang and drug related crimes. He finally decided to break the vicious cycle he was in by taking up learning in prison. Starting with basic literacy and numeracy skills, Sam continued his learning journey when released, by volunteering with young offenders and by training to teach non-contact boxing to young people in the community. Sam is still working at youth centres and teaches young people to box. He plans to progress to a Level 3 Youth Work course and then a degree so he can one day manage his own youth centre.

Now I know why we are paying for  ‘criminals’ to learn. It’s not to make them better criminals, in fact the impact of access to good learning opportunities for offenders is quite the opposite – it makes them less likely to offend. Or as we say in the sector, learning reduces recidivism.

Those in the sector also talk about the seven pathways (nine for women) to resettlement or reducing re-offending. I say there is only one: Learning.