Prison History for New Learners Inside and Outside the Prison

Higher education is transformative for prisoners. Research conducted by the Ministry of Justice has shown that prisoners funded by Prisoners' Education Trust (PET) to participate in higher education are, a year after release, 25% less likely to reoffend (September 2015) and 26% more likely to be in employment (July 2018). Recent years have also witnessed new developments in the provision of education at all levels to those behind bars. Over the last four years, Prison-University-Partnerships (PUPs), arrangements made between governors and university academics to run courses for prisoners alongside university students have proliferated. The 2016 Coates Review of Prison Education declared that 'education should be at the heart of the prison system'. Through the new Prison Education Framework (PEF), a product of the Coates Review, from April 2019 prison governors will have the freedom to commission courses from educational providers which they believe best meet the needs of their prisoners.

However, these developments are accompanied by new challenges. Courses offered through PUPs foster a taste for learning, but are hampered by problems of progression. Few award credit to prisoners for their learning. With the exception of one, none offer enrolment on degree programmes to serving prisoners. Because PUPs rely on the initiative of individual academics often with existing relationships with prisons, typically just one or two courses are offered to prisoners, nearly always in the discipline of criminology and social policy. An alternative, longstanding pathway for prisoners into higher education exists through the Open University (OU), but current higher-education funding arrangements in England, which preclude the use of loans for access courses, do not facilitate exploratory steps into higher-level learning for prisoner learners.

This project, which builds upon an existing relationship between the PI and PET established as part of the AHRC-funded project, 'Educating Criminals in 19th Century England', will explore new models of cooperation between higher education providers to better serve the needs of prison learners. Specifically, with the assistance of former and serving prisoners, we will develop a new open educational resource (OER) on the history of prison education in the British Isles. The OER will be designed for and, through PET's Prison-University-Partnerships in Learning network (PUPiL), be promoted to those academics with PUPs to support the courses they deliver in prisons. Inclusion of the OER in the OU's level one module, 'Make Your Learning Count', will demonstrate how links can be made between PUP and OU courses to ensure that prisoners gain credit for their learning through a route which is coherent and supportive of progression.

Furthermore, with accreditation from the Chartered Institute of Continuing Professional Development, and through existing networks cultivated by PET, the PI and the OU, the OER will be promoted to prison governors and education officers as a valuable tool for staff development in the context of their new responsibilities under PEF, as well as to staff in prison reform charities, and those in probation and aftercare services. As PET and the OU remain the leading UK institutions for the promotion and delivery of higher education in UK prisons, their coincidental, milestone anniversaries in 2019 will be used to promote the OER to the wider public.

The primary beneficiaries of this project will be prisoners who wish to explore the possibility of enrolment for higher educational qualifications while in confinement. For those prisoners in institutions with an existing Prison-University-Partnership (PUP), this project will help to diversify the curriculum on offer and will open new pathways for progression into qualifications. In other words, it will help to ensure that those prisoners who take a PUP course will be able to gain credit for their learning through the Open University (OU) if they so wish. For those prisoners in institutions without a PUP, the development of new online educational resource (OER) specifically for the penal environment will increase their access to higher level learning and provide new options for progression into a degree programme.

Existing systems at the OU which monitor the progress of students from OERs to registration and qualifications will allow the precise impact of this project on the issue of progression to be measured. Automated systems which are built in to OERs (such as computer marked assessments and screen-time monitoring) will enable us to gather data on prisoners' engagement with the learning materials. Further feedback will be derived from those prisoners who participate in a pilot presentation of the OER through feedback forms and a face-to-face workshop organised by the PI.

A second group of beneficiaries will be those who work closely with current and former prisoners and whose roles would benefit substantially from a greater awareness of the history and value of prison education. We will arrange for the OER to be accredited by the Chartered Institute for Continuing Professional Development and then upload it to the OU's Open Learn platform. We will use existing contacts and networks which PET, the PI and the OU have collectively cultivated among prison governors, prison reform charities, and organisations involved in the delivery of probation and aftercare services to promote the OER as a tool for staff development. The advent of the Prison Education Framework in April 2019, which gives responsibility to prison governors to commission educational courses which they believe will benefit their prison population is likely to increase demand for additional training in the longstanding aims, methods and outcomes of prison education.

The joint milestone anniversaries of the OU (50) and PET (30) provide an opportunity to promote the OER amongst a third group of beneficiaries: the wider public. The delivery of the OER through Open Learn will make it available to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Millions of users access free educational content available on Open Learn every year. Public opinion is critical to the provision of education in prisons in democratic states. 2019 provides an opportune moment to raise awareness of the benefits of prison education in order to secure its future.