A Quiet Revolution

From insidetime issue April 2013.

Twenty five percent of Gypsy and Traveller children in England and Wales are not enrolled in education and for those that do attend school, educational attainment is lower than for any other ethnic group. In 2012, only 25% of Gypsy and Traveller primary school leavers reached minimum expectations in English and Maths, compared to 74% of the general school population. At secondary level only 12% of Gypsy and Traveller pupils achieved 5 good GCSEs compared to 58.2% for all pupils.

This grim array of statistics will come as little surprise to teachers up and down the countries, who have encountered the challenges of working with Gypsy and Irish Traveller children. Many teachers have also encountered the added difficulty of communicating with parents of Traveller children who have low levels of literacy themselves.

Recent developments offer little hope in the battle to tackle illiteracy within the Travelling community. Since local authority spending cuts got underway in 2010, there has been a 27% reduction in Traveller education staff in England, with many Traveller education teams being ‘deleted’ all together by councils.

With poor educational attainment comes a reduction in life opportunities and an increase in the chances of imprisonment. According to the HM Inspectorate of Prisons, Gypsies and Irish Travellers make up a staggering 5% of the Category B prison population nationally.

It is in this depressing context that a reading initiative by the Traveller Project at the Irish Chaplaincy in Britain has recently been

launched.

‘Across the 130 plus prisons we’ve seen a huge interest in learning to read amongst Traveller prisoners’, says Conn Mac Gabhann, Manager of the Traveller Project. ‘In the bureaucracy of a prison, where every aspect of your life is regulated by rules and form-filling, Travellers see the enormous value of being able to read – many realising this for the first time.’

‘Working with the Shannon Trust whose aim is to ‘make every prisoner a reader,’ we’ve launched a campaign throughout the prison estate, to ensure that this aim includes every Traveller in custody. The upsurge in participation has been marked. In a prison we visited last week 40% of the Traveller population were either Toe by Toe learners or mentors.’

‘Reading schemes such as the The Shannon Trust Reading Plan (AKA Toe by Toe) have a unique appeal because the informal, one-toone approach doesn’t recall the negative experiences many Travellers have had in formal classroom settings. After years of disaffection with education, many Travellers have had quite remarkable success with Toe by Toe’.

As the number of Travellers in prison doing courses such as the Shannon Trust Reading Plan increases, so too does the demand for interesting reading books. The Traveller Project has put together a short series of reading books for Travelling people who are just starting to read books.

The first book, ‘A Traveller’s Home’ written by Mac Gabhann and illustrated by Dublin artist, Niamh Merc., tells the story of John, a Dublin Traveller and wannabe cowboy.

The second book ‘We Are Travellers’ was written by Joe Cottrell-Boyce, and is a factual introduction to the history and culture of English Gypsies and Irish Travellers.

‘It’s important to remember that Traveller men and women want to read interesting stories.’ MacGabhann stresses. ‘No adult really wants to read a children’s book. These books are interesting and they are relevant to Travellers’ lives.’

‘There’s a quiet educational revolution happening in prison. Travellers are learning to read because they want to learn and perhaps for the first time they are learning in a way that suits them. Ironically, the interest in reading in prison is changing attitudes in the wider Traveller community. More and more, we’re seeing Traveller men in prison who’ve learnt to read and are now passionate about their kids going to school, telling us ‘education is the only way forward.’’

For free copies of Traveller reading series’ books contact the Traveller Project, The Irish Chaplaincy in Britain, 50-52 Camden Square, London, NW1 9XB or travellers@irishchaplaincy. org.uk

The Case Against Private Prisons

Originally published on Left Foot Forward

The right-wing think tank Reform has published a report claiming that private firms are better at running prisons. 'The case for private prisons' criticises the government for moving away from the wholesale privatisation of the prison estate, claiming that private prisons, introduced in England and Wales in the 1990's, are more cost-effective and better managing offenders than public prisons.

Reform's headline claim is that private prisons have lower rates of re-offending than their public sector counterparts. A cursory glance at their statistics does indeed show that seven out of ten comparable private prisons in England and Wales have lower than average rates of re-offending.

But a fundamental problem with Reform's analysis is that prisons are not the only factor influencing recidivism. Home Office research has shown that the quality of post-release support has just as significant an impact on re-offending and therefore the performance of local - public sector - Probation Trusts must also be taken into account.

Five of the seven private prisons held up for lower than average re-offending rates turn out to be in probation areas with lower than average re-offending; so attributing this success to an individual prison is problematic.

Indeed within some probation areas private sector prisons are performing significantly worse than comparable public sector institutions. The private male local prison HMP Forest Bank has a re-offending rate of 60.48% amongst short-term prisoners. This is below the national average of 62.33% but significantly higher than HMP Manchester; a public sector male local prison within the same probation area. HMP Altcourse has a re-offending rate of 60.43% amongst short-term prisoners; again better than the national average but significantly worse than HMP Liverpool, a comparable local prison.

Beyond its dodgy re-offending claims, 'The case for private prisons' utilises very selective statistics to support its other key arguments.

The report claims that 'in 1997-8, one study found that contracted prisons provided between 0.6 and 1.6 hours more out of cells per weekday than public sector'. This is true, but more recent 2010 research by the Prison Reform Trust has found that inmates in private prisons spend significantly more time locked in cells than those in public sector prisons. This evidence was completely ignored in the report.

The report claims that per-place costs are lower in private sector prisons, again relying on research from 1998. This ignores statistics provided by the National Offender Management Service in 2007 which showed that the per-place costs of private prisons were significantly higher than public sector prisons.

Chris Poyner, president of the Public and Commercial Services union's National Offender Management Service group has called prison privatisation 'a national scandal', pointing out that;

"multimillion-pound global companies are being handed huge amounts of taxpayers' money to profit from locking people up by cutting staff and working conditions."

There is in fact no solid evidence that private prisons are better than their public sector counterparts. Audits have however found that inexperienced staff and cost cutting measures have left many private prisons struggling to create a safe environment for prisoners.

Reform's clumsy, agenda driven research and bad statistics only go to show the inherent weakness of their position.

Joe Cottrell-Boyce