By Barry Hartle, Instructional Officer –  HMP Haverigg

From meetings with Claire Collins (PDNorth Exchange Lead) and Dave Everett (my manager) on the idea of introducing embedded learning maths and English into the workshops I was asked if I could develop ways to engage the prisoners to improve their maths and English.

With prisoners not wanting to engage in education, I came up with the idea of developing work related job sheets that didn’t look like an education test sheet.

The sheets had:

• A pictorial cover sheet of the finished product or the equipment the prisoners were going to use to complete the product they were working on.
• No more than five questions on maths and English; this could have consisted of three maths and two English related questions, the variations could be any, all English or all maths etc.
• A feedback section for the prisoner instructor. I also decided to change the naming from prisoner and instructor to employee and employer, so the prisoner could take them when they were discharged from the prison.

To engage the instructors on this was difficult because they were thinking: “more work added to my work load?!”, but after having a meeting with all the instructors, I explained that the job sheets would be based on  information they gave to me on the products being made in each workshop and that it would be me designing the job sheets as I was their pen and paper =This seemed to get full approval.

We now have four workshops delivering the job sheets with very good feedback from the prisoners and the instructors. With the  prisoners who say they can’t do maths and English: the instructors are able to say to them, that they have answered questions at certain levels. This with the possibility of encouraging them to take up education and at the moment we have a good success in doing that.

This is an ongoing development making the sheets at different levels to show progression of their maths and English. For us here, this was the way to go. The idea is there and could be developed in other areas.

You can download Barry’s Job Sheets (and other task based learning resources) for use in your own workshop by clicking the image to the right: