A time of dynamic change
As can be seen from the previous sections, the Prison Service itself is going through a process of dynamic change at the moment. First there was the combination of the Prison Service with the Probation Service under the overall umbrella of NOMS. The Home Office then split off prisons, and other related areas, into the Ministry of Justice. At the same time the world of education and training is also changing significantly. The Department for Education and Skills was reorganising the way that Post 16 education and training is funded by setting up the Learning and Skills Councils. Then in the summer 2007 the DFES was itself split into the Department of Children Schools and Families and the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills. This change will eventually take 16 to 19 funding away from the LSC and place it back with the local authorities. A new dynamic for local strategic planning will, therefore, be needed that could have a major impact on the education and training provision in prisons.
During this period new systems and procedures have been introduced that affect sentence planning in general and the provision of education and training in prisons in particular. Unfortunately, overall sentence planning through OASys only starts when a person has been sentenced. On the other hand many prisoners are held in remand so they have not received an OASys based plan, at that point. However, their Individual Learning Plans (ILP), as required by OLASS, are still drawn up as part of the reception process and are used for planning prisoner activities, including education, training and work, from the start of their time in custody. This plan is forwarded to the prison’s Offender Management Unit (OMU) to be included in the OASys assessments when they are raised after sentencing. In a reciprocal arrangement, education and employment targets identified during OASys assessments are referred to the education department and become a part of ILP. Consequently, both processes are taken into consideration when identifying and allocating activities and prioritising according to need. However, the potential lack of connectivity between OASys and the ILP under OLASS is exacerbated by the historical fact that all prisons are different and organise themselves differently to suit their particular regimes. A further complication is that OLASS has not yet been fully implemented and so the passing on of learner records between prisons is not as well developed as it should be. Consequently, the old problem of prisoners always starting from square one when being transferred to a different institution has not been completely eliminated.