‘I am doing an OU course by distance learning but have to get up at 5am; you’ve only got a couple of hours to yourself in the whole day.’ The speaker is a bright-eyed man obviously eager to learn but with one big impediment: he is a prisoner sharing a small cell with someone who is (shall we say) far from sympathetic to the joys of learning.

A first visit to one of Her Majesty’s Prisons can be a daunting experience. HMP Wandsworth, in South London, conforms to every stereotype mind picture of a Victorian jail: grim exteriors, grimmer interiors of long bare whitewashed corridors, tiny cells, metallic reverberations of slamming doors and the quadraphonic echoes of shouting voices. Add to this an all-pervasive smell of carbolic and you don’t have a very good environment for learning. Trish Smith has been the education officer at Wandsworth for 17 years and, when we met, it was her last day before embarking on a new career in community education. ‘You have to be a bit nuts to work in prisoner education but it can be amazingly fulfilling,’ says Smith in her unmistakable New Zealand accent.

Education at the jail is hotchpotch and, according to Smith, very typical of the way things are done at our HMPs. Basic skills are funded and provided by the prison service with delivery contracted out to external providers – though with some officer participation. Anything beyond basic skills has to be provided either on an ad hoc basis (see page 00 for details of the prison’s radio project) or by appeals to charity.

This is a time of great (but so far confusing) change for prison education: a House of Commons Select Committee is pondering its future direction and the newly created Offenders Learning and Skills Unit is only starting to flex its muscles. Everyone is waiting to see how the new National Offender Management Service (NOMS) will impact on the ...

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