Justice
Early Insights 2024-2025
Teaching and learning
Many learners engage positively in their learning and achieve suitable accreditations. However, a minority do not make enough progress, either because of a lack of interest in their allocated courses or due to weaknesses in teaching.
What’s going well
- In sessions, many learners’ attitudes to learning are strong.
- A majority of learners achieve suitable accreditations.
- Most teachers build trusting, positive working relationships with learners.
- Where teaching is particularly successful, teachers have high expectations and personalise their approaches effectively to meet learners’ needs.
- The majority of learners on vocational pathways make strong progress in developing their vocational skills.
- In a minority of adult prisons, staff support learners to develop literacy, numeracy and employability skills innovatively in vocational contexts.
What needs to improve
- In half of adult men’s prisons inspected, learners’ attendance is not strong enough.
- Provision to develop learners’ literacy or numeracy skills is too variable.
- A minority of prisoners do not engage well enough in their learning and make insufficient progress overall; often, this is because they are enrolled on courses that they have no interest in, have already completed elsewhere or due to weaknesses in teaching.
- A minority of teaching is not sufficiently effective because teachers focus too narrowly on repetitive and unchallenging activities, and do not consider learners’ needs or progress well enough.
Well-being, care, support and guidance
Learners generally feel safe in education, training or work environments and receive valuable advice and guidance when preparing for release. Support for learners with additional needs is too variable.
What’s going well
- Nearly all learners report feeling safe in education, training or work environments.
- All prisons and the YOI offered valuable opportunities to support learners’ personal development and well-being.
- A few learners take on worthwhile leadership roles.
- Many adult prisons offer valuable advice, guidance and provision to support learners towards the end of their sentence to gain work.
- The support for neurodiverse learners is comprehensive and highly effective in half of the adult men’s prisons inspected.
What needs to improve
- Too often, individual learning and work plans do not link well enough to prisoners’ sentence plans, or are not precise enough to inform curriculum choices, teaching or progress tracking.
- Overall, staff understanding of how to support learners with individual or complex needs is too variable.
- Provision to develop independent living skills is inconsistent across the Welsh estate.
- Half of men’s prisons do not use Release on Temporary Licence arrangements well enough.
Leading and improving
Prison leaders engage well with a wide range of partners to enhance the curriculum offer and the range of advice and support for release. Vocational provision is strong. While leaders have strengthened their monitoring, self-evaluation and improvement planning, too many weaknesses remain in these areas to support strong strategic impact.
What’s going well
- Prison leaders work diligently towards their vision for securing strong outcomes and engage effectively with partners to enhance education, training, and guidance on release.
- Early careers teachers receive valuable professional learning to strengthen their teaching and vocational skills in a minority of the providers inspected and in the YOI.
- Nearly all prison leaders have strengthened self-evaluation arrangements, drawing on a wide range of first-hand evidence.
- Nearly all prisons monitor more closely the progress of groups of learners at risk of adverse outcomes; a minority are using this information well to inform improvement actions.
- Generally vocational learning environments in adult prisons provide valuable and authentic contexts for learning.
What needs to improve
- Overall, there remain shortcomings in the provision for reading across the estate; for example, some reading strategies are in the earliest stage of development and do not identify, support or track non or emergent readers well enough.
- Across the sector, there is a lack of structured provision for developing digital skills.
- Disrupted regimes or a part-time offer of purposeful activity in half of adult men’s prisons negatively impact these learners’ well-being and do not prepare them effectively for life on release.
- There are weaknesses in providers’ approaches to evaluating the quality and impact of provision, including the impact of teaching on learners’ progress
Overview of recommendations from inspections
During the academic year 2024-2025, in partnership with His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons, Estyn carried out three core inspections of purposeful activity in four adult men’s prisons and one independent review of the progress of a young offenders’ institute. Several key themes emerged from the recommendations provided by inspection teams.
These related to weaknesses in:
- Teaching
- Provision for developing reading skills
- Learners’ attendance
- Arrangements for allocating prisoners to education, training or work activities
- The lack of a full-time purposeful activity offer
- The quality and impact of self-evaluation and improvement planning
Effective practice identified during inspection
Provision for neurodiverse learners
HMP Usk (though noted across both Prisons – HMP Usk and HMP Prescoed)