This is a guest post by Jon Collins, Chief Exec of the Prisoners’ Education Trust.
Back in April 2022 I attended the first market warming event for the procurement process for new contracts to deliver education in adult public sector prisons in England. Three years and three months later, we now know who will be providing education in these prisons from October this year until at least 2029 and possibly 2032.
The process has been protracted – the results were originally due to be announced in autumn 2024, with the new contracts starting from April this year – and is the culmination of work to create a new Prisoner Education Service (PES), originally a commitment in the 2019 Conservative Party manifesto.
These contracts, and other recent reforms, are intended to address current failings in prison education, with more than half of Ofsted inspections finding provision to be inadequate and significantly fewer people accessing education now than a decade ago.
What’s changed?
These new PES contracts will replace the current Prison Education Framework (PEF) contracts and are broadly similar to the existing arrangements. The country has been divided into lots, with an outsourced specialist provider contracted to provide education in the prisons in that area. As is currently the case, the provider will deliver literacy, numeracy and vocational training up to Level 2 in each prison.
There are some differences. Under the current contracts, there are 17 lots altogether – 14 based on regions, two for the long-term estate and one for women’s prisons. The new contracts split the country into 11 regional lots, with prisons in the long-term estate and women’s prisons slotting into their region. These larger lots are presumably intended to create economies of scale.
At the moment, there are four providers. Under the new contracts there are currently planned to be just three: Milton Keynes College (who won three lots), Novus (who won four) and PeoplePlus (who won three). Weston College, the other current provider, decided not to bid this time. Seetec – who are not currently a provider of prison education – was successful in getting through the first phase of the procurement process but did not win a lot, which means there are no new providers involved.
As a result, there will be a lot of continuity. But there are some changes. Most notably, PeoplePlus will replace Novus in London, while Milton Keynes College will replace Weston College in the South West. They had already taken on responsibility for prisons in Kent, Surrey and Sussex from Weston College during the lifetime of the current contracts and will retain them under the new contracts. A full list of who the providers in each lot will be is available here, while FE Week has provided a useful map.
It is worth noting, however, that a decision has not yet been made on who the provider will be in the West Midlands lot, covering eight prisons. FE Week reported that this was due to “exceptionally close scoring” between the organisations bidding for this lot and that Novus, the existing provider in the region, has agreed a six-month extension while a further tendering process takes place.
Funding challenges
The key question is whether these new contracts are sufficiently well-funded to enable the providers to develop a curriculum that will meet the needs of people in prison. There have been significant concerns about the level of funding available for prison education for several years. For example, the Education Select Committee stated in its 2022 report that “prison education is in a perilous state due to a continual decline in funding”. In their evidence to that inquiry, Novus stated that “funding, and in turn resources available to deliver education, are not enough to support the complexity of need that is presented by the prisoner cohort”.
Worryingly, it does not seem that the new contracts address this. In their evidence to the Education Select Committee, submitted in 2021, the Ministry of Justice said that the PEF contracts had a “total annual value of c.£125m”. During the procurement process, the initial annual value of the new contracts for the 11 lots was just over £98m, a reduction of more than 20%.
These two figures are not wholly comparable. Five prisons were taken out of the procurement process for the PES Alternative Commissioning Models project, an initiative to test new approaches and drive innovation that has disappointingly now been scrapped. Responsibility for providing computers and a digital learning platform has moved from the education providers to HMPPS. And there have been other changes to the prison estate in the meantime. Moreover, the published contract values are higher at £102m annually, excluding the West Midlands. It is not clear, however, whether this includes anticipated inflation over the contracts’ lifetime or other changes.
But whatever the exact figures – which are frustratingly difficult to determine due to the opacity of outsourcing processes – it seems clear that this is not going to be a boost to prison education funding. This is supported by what we are hearing from several prisons, which are planning for cuts to their budgets from October. This is deeply concerning. Funding is not the only barrier to providing good quality education in prison, but it is certainly one of the most significant reasons why prison education is nowhere near as good as it should be.
Making a difference
There is clearly a risk that with the existing providers again sharing provision between them, a similar focus to the contracts and even less money available, what we will end up with is simply more of the same or worse. This would be a missed opportunity.
Instead, the Ministry of Justice must provide more funding to ensure that a broad and varied curriculum is available to everyone. And the education providers and prisons must treat this as a fresh start and work together to make sure that there is a real focus on improving the education and training available, so that people in prison can use their time productively and gain the skills they need to thrive on release.
Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the images in this post. You can see Andy’s work here
