Source · Select Committees · Justice Committee
Recommendation 35
35
Rejected
Paragraph: 188
Publish strategy to address education data gaps for incarcerated women, ensuring public availability
Recommendation
It is clear that there is a gap in education data for women, which makes it difficult to provide education that meets the specific needs that women may present with. We do not know their educational needs, whether they have learning disabilities, and nor do we know their qualification levels, thus making it difficult to pitch education to women at the right level. The Ministry of Justice and HMPPS, alongside education providers, should set out how they are working to address this data gap and ensure that data is collected and made available publicly.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government explicitly rejected the recommendation, claiming the issue is already being addressed through other means. However, the subsequent explanation focused solely on strategies for reducing homelessness and providing accommodation services for prison leavers, including gender-specific provision and increasing women in open conditions, rather than addressing education data gaps for women.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
188
Government Response
Rejected
HM Government · verbatim extract
Rejected
We accept this recommendation. MoJ and HMPPS use CURIOUS, a data management tool facilitating the management of contracts, to capture data, including from the women’s estate. It includes details such as initial assessments, courses undertaken and the outcomes of those courses. We are expanding the use of CURIOUS and developing our approach to capturing data around a full range of learning difficulties and disabilities (LDD) and additional learning needs across the prison estate. Where appropriate a prisoners individual personal learning record (PLR) can also be accessed to find data on prisoners’ prior educational attainment. We published data on prisoners’ education assessment and achievement in August 2021 (Prison Education Statistics 2019–2020). We will explore the potential to breakdown relevant excerpts of this data by gender as part of the next planned data release in Autumn 2022. A further publication is planned for 2023 which will set out prison performance ratings against new education metrics that cover: attendance; progress in English and maths and vocational qualification success rates. In addition, work through the Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) programme, which will run until March 2024, will seek to derive new insights into the link between employment, education (including school exclusion) and reoffending, to explore the impact of education and employment on post release outcomes and how this differs for different cohorts, including women. Work is currently ongoing to improve data on prisoners with care experience. To create a safe environment for prisoners to share their care experience, we have dedicated leads in every prison to help identify and support prisoners belonging to this cohort and have recently created a bespoke guidance leaflet for prison and probation staff, which will be published at the end of October to coincide with Care Experienced Week 2022, an annual awareness initiative. Additionally, a research project is currently in progress, in association with Lancaster University, looking at linked MoJ/DfE data, to explore the intersections between ethnicity, care experience and criminal justice systems involvement. The project is due to run until January 2023.
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