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New government review of offender learning: and the winner is ... Virtual Campus
Commitment still there:
The good news is that the tone of the report is still positive towards investment in offender learning. The business case is put clearly on page 10:
“...prison education and vocational interventions produce a net benefit …from £10,000 to £97,000 per offender when victim costs are included.”
Power to the local labour market:
The new vision is prisons as places of work delivering skilled people fitted to the needs of the local labour market. A decentralised power structure is planned for delivery of offender learning and skills, handing the purse strings to prison governors assisted by a committee of stakeholders.
The engine of change is a new re-tendering process for Offender Learning And Skills Service providers effective in August next year. Work starts now.
Procurement decisions will be taken by local clusters of prisons represented by a Group, or team of stakeholders, presided over by a Lead Governor (p26).
A strategy for successful change:
There are many useful provisions in the new plan. An emphasis on those with the greatest need for basic skills, including speaking and listening, is balanced by recognition of the need to support higher educational provision. New joined up action is planned through the Work Programme to combine Job Centre Plus, welfare-to- work providers and Probation to reduce reoffending. Apprentice schemes may help those in prison workshops to get truly job-ready.
Virtual Campus:
There can be little doubt that the new opportunities offered by the Virtual Campus are of importance in the government’s vision for making it happen. Virtual Campus (VC) is mentioned no less than 16 times throughout the review, a document 32 pages long.
The new plan has a rational approach to continuity. VC was born out of the December 2005 green paper: “Reducing Re-Offending Through Skills and Employment: Next Steps”. That plan introduced the Campus Model which draws together employers and ex-offenders to get them jobs with support from resettlement service providers and mentors.
VC is a carefully controlled special version of the Internet to help ex-offenders and supporters to work together with due concern for security issues across both prisons and in the community. VC’s home page tells us:
“The Virtual Campus allows access to resources to assist offenders on their journey to resettlement outside of prison.
The Virtual Campus is delivered on an operational level by a partnership formed by the National Offender Management Service, Skills Funding Agency and Department for Business Innovation & Skills through prison projects across England and Wales.
Its gives the opportunity to view relevant training courses that are available and apply directly for jobs within the relocation area.
Throughout all of this the key theme is increasing the employability of ex-offenders through providing holistic through-the-gate support.”
VC is currently rolling out across the prison system. It is an important platform for providing offender learning. The government plans to measure the impact of the Virtual Campus and to study the opportunities presented by e-learning and e-employment (p28).
Delivering offender learning on the Virtual Campus, here’s how:
There is a workshop that has been running at HMP Wandsworth since July 2004 called Wanno Media Centre (WMC). WMC provides an in-house media, communications and information management service. At present it provides full time purposeful activity to 8 prisoners. WMC publishes a prison newspaper and works closely with Radio Wanno our prison radio station.
We do many jobs for staff involving the creation of posters, leaflets, and computer applications to help support the internal systems of the prison, where security considerations allow. We estimate that we saved about £38,000 of staff time last year by providing this service.
Not all inmates have low educational attainment. WMC gives those with higher qualifications the opportunity to use them for the benefit of the prison community. We apply the principle of self help through mobilising the efforts of prisoners themselves to add value. It runs as nearly as possible as an enterprise within the prison. WMC offers inmates the chance to make a difference and maintain motivation and working habits over the long haul.
After a meeting at a conference with those developing VC some two years ago, we decided to invest effort in offering leaning and skills content to VC. The content would be developed in WMC by inmates themselves.
Moodle is the name of the e-learning platform used in VC. Moodle is freely available on the Web. WMC has the trained workforce and equipment that could be adapted to run Moodle. WMC learned how to use Moodle. The VC developers helped. In the prison, education staff gave time on an extra-mural basis. Our Moodle publishing capability was achieved at no extra cost.
Now WMC can take a course specification and learning materials and turn that into a Moodle e-learning unit ready for VC in about two weeks. The cost is minimal.
The enterprise skills course on VC was developed in Moodle by WMC. We are working on an upgrade. We have developed some 10 other e-learning units. WMC is an example of how we can work smarter at no extra cost to support e-learning and e-employment.
None of this could have happened without the support and encouragement of the prison governor and his staff and the college I work for (Kensington and Chelsea College). We fostered these relationships by finding projects that also benefit their objectives. Collaboration is a winning strategy. That goes for our students too. Successful resettlement is something we do with them not to them.
There is more about Virtual Campus:
http://www.prisonerseducation.org.uk/index.php?id=190 .
Here is more on Moodle:
Here is more on the origins of Wanno Media Centre:
