Investing in prison literacy and numeracy programmes is a no-brainer

Shannon Trust is about supporting people to change their lives.

As an organisation, we are best known for our work in the criminal justice system. More than half of the prison population struggle with literacy and numeracy, many cannot read at all. We inspire and support those in prison who can read and handle numbers to teach their peers who can’t. This helps both learners and mentors make positive changes, giving them purpose to their time inside.

Entry to mainstream prison education tends to need minimum standards of reading and numeracy. Shannon Trust’s programmes ensure more people in prison have the skills to take part. And for our mentors, the experience of helping others to learn develops their people skills, as well as a sense of responsibility and self-worth.

Significant problems and strains in the prison system have made headlines these last few months. The day-to-day work of Shannon Trust, and other organisations making a difference, tends to slip under the radar of the national press, because we are just ‘getting on with it’.

Perhaps they would be surprised to know that charities like Shannon Trust provide a wide range of rehabilitation services in prisons and post-release, including vocational training, support into work and housing, help with reconnecting families, and literacy and numeracy programmes like ours.

The benefits these services bring to individuals in prison and their families are in fact often partly funded by trusts, foundations and other donors, meaning a significant financial saving for the government, and taxpayers. We estimate over ￡100m has been donated in this way in the past 5 years alone.

The new Minister for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Offending, Lord Timpson, spoke to the Prison Governors’ Association earlier this month, stressing the role that purposeful activity like vocational training plays in good prisons, and mentioning his plans to increase access to employment for prison leavers. We welcome this.

What is less clear is Lord Timpson’s thinking on prison education, and whether the government is committed to investing in prison education. The new Prison Education Service contracts will have less financial support than its predecessor the Prison Education Framework, and the flexibility to commission third party programmes to aid the rehabilitation of people in prison through the Dynamic Purchasing System has been restricted with no clarity about what comes next.

For charities working in the criminal justice system, uncertainty like this is very destabilising.

Take Shannon Trust as an example. We always knew we had something important to offer. In the last 3 years since the joint Ofsted/HM Inspector of Prisons report shone a light on the lack of basic reading education in prisons, we have transformed our strategy, ramping up our capacity to support hard pressed prison authorities.

We now have Shannon Trust staff in around 70 prisons in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, building links with prison education teams, libraries and other departments. This has helped us significantly increase the number of learners and mentors we can reach.

In 2024, we will see more than 10,000 programme starts. We have added numeracy to the learning support we offer, and we have also started to reach out to communities with our Turning Pages and Count Me In programmes.

As a charity, this increase in scale has required us to take risks. We have taken on many more staff, worked hard to improve the quality of our programmes, and developed our digital capabilities. Our annual budget has increased five-fold and much of that growth has come from taking on Ministry of Justice contracts making us less reliant upon on the generosity of donors as we try to do more.

I am sure it will be obvious to One Page readers that we can only continue our work at its current scale if we, our prison colleagues and donors, have some certainty about the future. Particularly our future funding, and the ability of individual prisons to ‘buy in’ to Shannon Trust’s expertise to help their education provision. Funders need to know what they are contributing to.

And we need to know if our 2025 plans should be to continue to scale up, or wind back in.

I believe that the work we do is good value for money, and that our programmes are badly needed. The Prison Reform Trust’s February 2024 report put the total economic and social cost of reoffending at ￡18.1 billion, stressing that engagement with education can significantly reduce reoffending. Our early-stage support helps the very people in prison who do not typically engage with education, by helping them become literate and numerate. The argument for continuing to fund these and other similar programmes really is a ‘no-brainer.’

Please get in touch if anything I have written resonates with you; whether you agree, disagree or you have a suggestion for how we can improve what we do.