Emma* is a functional skills manager across a number of providers. She’s been going into work during the coronavirus pandemic, but things have been different; she doesn’t have any face-to-face contact with her students, and can only speak to them over the phone.

Some of those students are really struggling, like 24-year-old Alex*. He is desperate to get his qualifications and move forward with his life, but his mental health - which was already poor pre-Covid - is worse than ever. He spends 23 hours a day looking at the same four walls, doesn’t have access to a laptop - or even the internet - and so completes all his work on paper via packs, which Emma puts together for him.

Many of these details will sound familiar to people working in the further education sector, but there is one crucial difference here: Alex is an inmate at a Category C prison and Emma is a prison educator. And while the past year has been disruptive for everyone in education, for those teaching and learning in prisons, it has been particularly challenging.

This matters. A lot. Research by the Prisoners’ Education Trust (PET), a charity that offers long-distance learning, found that taking part in one of its courses reduced reoffending by 25 per cent.

Out of 100 people leaving prison, 82 PET learners lead crime-free lives in the year after they get out (compared with 75 in a similar group). The chances of finding work are increased by 26 per cent, with 39 PET learners finding work within their first year of release (compared with 31 in a similar group).

In short, prison education improves employment prospects for those leaving prison and reduces reoffending, therefore benefiting society as a whole. But since the start of the pandemic, the practicalities of providing this type of education have not always been factored into policy by those calling the shots.

Last June, the Ministry of Justice released a National Framework for Prisons that set out five stages of Covid-19 restrictions. The most severe of these was total lockdown, including “no time in the open air, all meals served at cell door”.

When the nation entered lockdown at the start of 2021, adult prisons were placed in stage four, which meant education had to take place remotely. This posed a problem for prison educators like Emma, because the digital technology that remote learning requires simply isn’t available in prisons.

“Prisoners are massively disadvantaged when it comes to remote education. In the community during Covid, we’ve seen provision adapt, but prisoners have really missed out because they haven’t been able to access digital technology at all,” says Francesca Cooney, head of policy at PET. And it wasn’t just the prisoners who were finding things tough.

“At the end of March, when the first lockdown started, prison educators were basically excluded overnight because they weren’t considered to be key workers,” she continues.

“Anybody who was in the middle of doing assignments, exams or courses got lost, and there was no structure to put in place to support that at all.”

Another issue has been that the picture varies so much from prison to prison, with access to education largely dependent on the decisions of individual prison governors.

“There is a level of local discretion. There is some desire, not among teachers but possibly among some prison staff, to stay locked down and to be as risk-averse as possible. Among others, there is a desire to push the boundaries and to try to get as many activities and services available as possible,” she explains.

But even among those who are willing to push the boundaries, provision has varied, with some doing a better job of meeting students’ educational needs, she adds.

For instance, Emma describes how governors at her provider were initially only thinking in the short term. In the first lockdown, her teams were told to simply provide distraction activities, such as puzzles, crafts and reading materials.

In August, as restrictions eased, Emma and her colleagues were told they needed to start providing courses.

But curriculum plans for prisons - which are often highly vocational - are usually set in stone once contracts with providers have been signed and are therefore inflexible. So while teaching a vocational course remotely has been challenging for all further education staff, for prison educators - who have little curriculum flexibility and whose students have no access to technology - it’s been impossible, says Emma.

“It’s a square peg in a round hole. We’re trying to deliver courses that are fundamentally designed for face-to-face teaching through a work pack. It’s not just English and maths but practical courses like barbering and painting and decorating. All we’re doing is theory,” she says.

“At least in a college, there is virtual learning and interaction. We’re on a loop: we prepare work, we send it to them, they do it, they send it back and we mark it. No one could call it teaching - not in any world - and it de-skills us and devalues us as teachers, too. You can’t put our courses on a bit of paper; it just doesn’t work like that.”

Most prisoners do have phones in their cells on which they can call family and friends. So, could staff educate students on the phone? The short answer is yes, but the picture here is complex.

For security reasons, educators cannot ring inmates’ phones from home; they have to ring from within the prison itself. In many prisons, there is often just one phone connected to the in-cell system and it has to be shared between departments. And when teachers are managing to speak to students, it’s tough to engage them with education, says Emma.

“When you talk to the students, they just want to chat. Our students are very engaged with what’s going on in the outside world, politically and socially. They watch the news all the time but they don’t have a place to discuss that, and it worries me,” she says.

“So when we can ring them up and talk about their work, actually, they want to talk about much more than that.”

Psychological damage

Cooney isn’t at all surprised to hear this. She says prisoners are frustrated, fatigued and bored with the current situation, and warns of the serious repercussions on their mental health.

“It’s not the same as working at home in an office or a spare room. You’re working in a room which is tiny, and has a bed, toilet, small desk and chair in it. That’s what they’re in for 24 hours a day,” she says.

“When there was a total lockdown in prisons, adults were in their cells for 23 and a half hours a day. For most people, it’s still the same, not for everybody, but for the majority of prisoners. We know it’s incredibly psychologically damaging; it has a huge toll on people’s emotional wellbeing and mental health.

“And in terms of activity, it affects education outcomes, the ability to resettle successfully and get the qualifications you need to get a job, or involvement in interventions which might help you with your offending. It’s having an absolutely massive impact on people.”

The importance of prison education is not only apparent once people leave prison, though. It gives inmates a goal to work towards while inside, too.

Each prisoner is given an improvement plan with a number of steps to work towards. This could include elements such as anger management, victim awareness and, of course, education and training.

If a prisoner can show they are working proactively towards their plan, they are given the opportunity to move to a different category of prison; for example, from a strict category C (for those who are deemed likely to make an escape) to a category B (an open prison with more freedoms). But, Emma says, many of her students have been unable to work towards their plans at all during the past year.

‘No room for personal growth’

So, what needs to change? Is it as simple as providing in-cell technology to facilitate access to education and pastoral support? Or is wider reform needed?

In the short term, Emma and Cooney both agree that there needs to be a major investment in digital infrastructure to enable remote learning now and in any future periods of lockdown.

Julian Stanley, the chief executive of Bounce Back, a charity that has a contract to deliver vocational education in prisons, says conversations he has had with the Ministry of Justice show there is appetite from the government for change here.

“People are really keen to engage and the only barriers to that are the degree to which digital implementation can happen in prisons,” he says. “The sooner there’s more capacity to do digital work safely - whether that’s through videos, DVDs and, hopefully as time progresses, in-cell - that will speed up education and training hugely.

“I don’t get any sense that there’s not a desire, politically or in organisations, to make that happen. I think the question is about how and making sure that these things actually have the resources behind them inside prisons to do that.”

Indeed, in the Budget in March, chancellor Rishi Sunak confirmed that there would be extra funding given to prison governors specifically to be spent on “in-cell activities and extra technology”.

But Marianne Quick, the University and College Union’s prison officer, says change needs to go further, and that the government must recognise the huge importance of prison education and start to prioritise it properly, as with other forms of education.

“If the true purpose of prison is rehabilitation, then education is absolutely essential to make that period of time as purposeful as possible and as meaningful as possible, and to be able to break a cycle,” she says.

“Some say the opportunity to learn in prison is the last chance at education for prisoners but, actually, for many, it’s their first chance. Prison education should be treated exactly the same as access to education anywhere else.”

For Emma, long-term change should include giving prison educators more of a say in what is taught.

“A lot of the education is so employer focused, and there’s no room for personal growth, or self-improvement or critical thinking. We’re in this process of ‘qualifications equals employment equals rehabilitation’, and it’s not as straightforward as that,” she says.

“I worry about how that will work now because of Covid. We’ve got links with employers but they’re often in the hospitality industry and, obviously, it’s going to be a real challenge for our students.

“There’s got to be some wider innovative thinking now about how we address the situation and give prisoners skills that can be adapted for multiple workplaces.”

But before any wider reform can take place, Emma says that the first thing the government needs to do is ensure that all prisoners have the means to access good-quality mental health support, as this is a prerequisite, not only for accessing their education but for them to be able to capitalise on their learning later, too.

That support is perhaps even more important now than it has ever been, because the prospect of leaving prison in the midst of a pandemic is bound to make many prisoners anxious.

“About a month ago, I spoke to one young man on the day before he was being released. I asked him how he felt about getting out. He said: ‘I’m really, really frightened. I don’t know what I’m getting out to’,” Emma explains.

“They’ve got no frame of reference. For us, we can engage in the news and form opinions. But they don’t have the opportunity; they have no idea what the world is like now.

“After being shut in cells for so long, with no interaction with us, and with no frame of reference, it’s frightening for them.”

Kate Parker is an FE reporter at Tes

*Names have been changed. This article originally appeared in the 2 April 2021 issue under the headline “How lockdown shut down learning behind bars”