Offender Learning and Skills
Re-offending blights lives and communities, and is costly to society. The National Audit Office has assessed the cost of re-offending by prisoners as between £9.5 and £13 billion a year.
While punishment will always be a primary aim of the criminal justice system, the Government is determined to do more to turn offenders away from crime and into work, improving their skills, and encouraging them to lead productive lives.
Helping offenders learn skills so that they can find and keep jobs on release or whilst serving a community sentence makes sense. It means they become assets rather than burdens to society.
Evidence shows that learning by offenders produce a net benefit to the public sector ranging from £2,000 to £28,000 per offender(or from £10,500 to £97,000 per offender when victim costs are included). We are determined to secure those savings for the public purse.
On 18 May 2011, Skills Minister John Hayes launched Making Prisons Work: Skills for Rehabilitation. The document sets out the government’s reform programme for offender learning, following the Minister’s announcement of a wide-ranging review in July 2010. The plans reinforce public service reforms, shifting power away from the centre of government into the hands of front line staff and local partnerships. They will mean a much greater focus on developing the vocational skills demanded by employers.
The new emphasis on decentralised control and accountability means a significant change in the distribution of resources between prisons, putting in place the right skills offer for the offender whilst they are within the criminal justice system.
To put these changes in place, the offender learning contracts for delivery in adult prisons in England are being re-procured, with new contracts running from August 2012.
