This could be a modern school anywhere in Scotland. The airy corridors festooned with colourful artworks, the genre-divided bookshelves with a sign reading “LIBRARIES ARE FOR EVERYONE”, the easy conversation between staff and students outside a paint-splattered studio, the background noodling of a young pianist wafting around the building.

Then you look outside the window and see the looming walls of discoloured concrete topped with barbed wire that ring this place of learning.

This is the education centre at HMP Shotts, a maximum-security prison in North Lanarkshire for men serving sentences of at least four years, but often many more. It is a place where they can study for the Nationals and Highers they never got in school - if they went to school at all - or even gain an Open University (OU) degree, in the hope of a better life when they are eventually released.

Shotts has the highest level of security in the three tiers of the Scottish prison system. The 540 or so prisoners, who are aged between 21 and almost 80, are not working towards imminent release; a more immediate target, for some, is a transfer to HMP Castle Huntly, a low-security “open” prison near Dundee.

It’s optional to spend time in the education centre, which is open from Monday to Friday, and only around a quarter of the prisoners do so. Of the three-quarters who don’t, some continue to rail against any notion of formal education; others might be more persuadable, but figure that if they still have many years in the prison system, they can leave it to another decade.

Better lives beyond custody

Prison education in Scotland - which costs £4.83 million a year, according to the 2023-24 Scottish Prison Service (SPS) annual report - has in recent years become more ambitious, coordinated and mindful of the complex issues often carried by prisoners.

A landmark was reached in January with the publication of Learning for a Better Future, and the fundamental question posed by this strategy from the SPS was this: “How can we provide a context for development and learning within our prisons that will enable people to have a better life beyond custody and increase the likelihood of desistance?”

But it looks back to go forward, including a section on prisoners’ experience of school. For example, it draws on a longitudinal study exploring young adults’ pathways in and out of offending, involving 4,000 people who were attending school in Edinburgh at around the turn of the century.

Research indicates that many people in custody “are likely to have had a disrupted education, and most will have been excluded from school”, while many who skipped or were excluded from school had undiagnosed learning difficulties.

The Edinburgh study found that 51 per cent of people who had been in custody were assessed by teachers at age 13 as having poor attention; 45 per cent were deemed “restive and overactive”, with a likely impact on “their capacity to concentrate, take instruction and follow through on tasks”.

While a positive experience of school buoys many people for life, for others, the memory of it leaves them “carrying feelings of stigma and shame about gaps in their general knowledge and basic skills”.

The SPS strategy also makes this stark observation: “For young people who have special educational needs and are excluded from school, this can be a pipeline to prison.”

It also highlights how crucial school can be if a pupil’s home is not supportive. Detailed “life-history interviews” with people imprisoned in Scotland show that “the negativity of experiences in school, particularly bullying, mirrored negative experiences at home of abuse and trauma”.

Generation-spanning difficulties

And problems often span generations, as “parents may also have had negative experiences of education” and, in such cases, will be “unlikely to support children or encourage them to engage”.

So what is the rear view of schools held by men serving sentences in HMP Shotts?

“I didn’t really do well when I was younger,” says 26-year-old Shaun.

He only lasted three months in S1 before “I got sent away to residential care”, where his education included “a bit of art” but he was “more interested in going out and playing football”. He is a talented footballer who, at youth level, played alongside several current Scottish Premiership stars.

This is his first custodial sentence, which started in June 2024. Knowing that many men around him have been guilty of murder “keeps you on edge a bit”. He “suffers really badly from anxiety and depression” and is self-conscious about his appearance, after an attack on him with a machete broke his arm and jaw, and left facial scarring.

But the Shotts education centre, where he goes to draw and paint, has become a place to thrive in a way that secondary education never was: “When I’m sitting painting art, I forget where I am - sometimes I forget I’m even in a prison.”

His first-ever portrait was a gift for his sister, a painting of singer Billie Eilish. “I’m not gonna lie, I found it very, very difficult, but when I was finished, I was so proud of myself,” he says - even more so when his sister showed the portrait on Facebook and had to field enquiries about where it had come from.

Research cited in the SPS strategy suggests that an “overarching principle for engaging the ‘hard to reach’ [in education] is to allow students more control and choice over their studies”. For Shaun, however, it’s not quite so simple, and he thinks teachers should also be aware that pupils will sometimes appreciate clear and very direct instructions, rather than being told to decide for themselves what to do.

“If they see someone struggling, just tell them [what to do] - don’t say, ‘Oh, you could maybe do this’ [if] all it takes is one line of highlight down the side to make things pop and stand out and give the 3D effect.”

Pushing pupils in the right direction

Another prisoner, 45-year-old Keith, says most pupils want to learn at school, but “I think some people don’t get the push in the right direction.” His advice to any educator working with challenging pupils? “Never give up on them.”

Primary school went smoothly for Keith, but things slipped downhill fast in his secondary school in the East End of Glasgow. Like Shaun, it wasn’t long before he was sent to a residential home.

At secondary school, he was always looking over his shoulder, as pupils were drawn from four different areas where fierce rivalries simmered.

“You couldn’t put the right input into education that you wanted, because you were thinking about other things,” he says.

He did gain qualifications at a further education college and had his own spray-painting and panel-beating business, but his problems mounted after the business failed.

Now, at Shotts, he is doing various courses of study, including National 4 maths, Higher-level English and a university access course in psychology. He has also had his writing published in the prison magazine STIR - a piece about the death of his father - and has been recognised in awards run by Koestler Arts, which encourages people in the UK criminal justice system to change their lives through the arts.

“In the space of time I’ve got in here, I want to do as much as possible,” says Keith, who, at the time of Tes’ visits in March, is hoping to move onto Castle Huntly soon.

He struggled initially with the academic writing for his OU studies, but “you get all the help you need” and he has found it “exciting because it was the stuff I wanted to do [at school] and didn’t get a chance back then”.

Keith would like teachers to know the impact they can have when they go the extra mile for a pupil who may often be difficult to work with and easier to ignore.

“It gives you a wee boost that people are recognising what you’re doing [in prison], but sometimes I think pupils outside would struggle to get something like that,” he says.

Adapting to neurodiversity

When Sarah Angus, SPS director of policy, talks about the new strategy’s aims, she echoes language often heard around schools these days - of being “more innovative” and “catering for a range of needs”, of the potential of peer mentoring and the need to understand neurodiversity.

Research feeding into the SPS strategy underlines the importance of adapting learning environments, whether in schools or prisons.

It points to the impact of changes for the better in schools: for example, schools that have given tablets and laptops to all pupils “benefit those…who struggle to spell and write, without singling them out”; relaxation or scrapping of school uniform that “supports pupils with sensory issues who cannot tolerate wearing the uniform”; and schools that no longer sound bells between classes have generated “a calmer atmosphere for all”.

Claire Cannon, team leader at the Shotts learning centre, works with “a lot of people who’ve had a negative experience of education” and tries to find ways to reach prisoners who show no inclination to visit the school-like centre. They may, for example, be persuaded to work on their numeracy if it can be tied in with a visit to the gym.

Even those who have come to the learning centre every day for two years may disappear for months, says Cannon, because “all of a sudden, the impact of their sentence has hit them”.

For her colleague Angus, like many a schoolteacher, a highlight of the job is seeing any sign of “commitment and excitement” around learning - especially when you know that it’s far from a given.

Henry Hepburn is Scotland editor at Tes

You can now get the UK’s most-trusted source of education news in a mobile app. Get Tes magazine on iOS and on Android