“People often ask what it’s like working in a prison, telling me they can’t imagine it. But we have such well-structured security here at HMP Preston – it’s a safe environment. We have alarms in every room and in the 15 years I’ve been teaching here, I’ve pressed it once. Instead, we aim to use the strategies we’ve learned to calm the situation before it escalates.”
Alison Brown, 52, a digital skills teacher and local education manager at HMP Preston, a category B men’s prison in Lancashire, retrained as a teacher “later in life” at 38. Her background was art and design, and she previously worked in fashion, alongside other managerial roles. Working in prison, she says, almost happened by accident.
“Having been made redundant from my last merchandising role, I decided to do a PGCE, and found a part-time role in a college as a graphic design teacher after finishing. I didn’t know anything about prison teaching until someone from my course mentioned prisons were looking for help with cover lessons.”
Before she knew it, Brown found herself covering graphic design, art and digital skills lessons at HMP Preston. Her first day, she says, was somewhat daunting. “I’d had an interview and been on a tour before starting, but I was still apprehensive. I remember nervously shadowing a teacher in a class. One student was a bit of a character and started singing Abba songs loudly. I remember thinking: ‘Well, I’d better get used to being out of my comfort zone, then!’”
After 18 months, a full-time role as curriculum coordinator came up at the prison in 2011, and Brown decided to go for it. Since then, she has been promoted to senior team leader and more recently, local education manager (“a headmistress role”, she likens it to). Until recently, she taught three to four sessions a week as well as volunteering as the Novus “digital lead” for Lancashire and Cumbria prisons, delivering on-site training and support to other prison teachers. “I’d help demonstrate how digital innovation could be used with the limited resources we have in prisons. For example, we have a very locked-down internet, for obvious reasons,” she says.
The actual subject matter is only a small part of the job, she says, with teachers taking on an “embedded pastoral role”.
“If a learner has had a bad phone call or a negative interaction on the wing before our lesson, the first thing we’ll do is try to unpick that together. With brand-new learners, we might just have 10 minutes to capture their attention and get them into the mindset of learning, which can be challenging. But it’s those little lightbulb moments that are the reason you come back. So when a learner says: ‘I can’t do it, I’m thick’, and you say: ‘No, you’re not, you have additional learning needs’, it’s like a second chance for them. While we can’t officially diagnose, learning support staff can follow up with screenings for conditions such as autism or dyslexia, for example.”
Former prisoner Dan Whyte knows exactly what it’s like to be handed a second chance. At the time of his sentencing for murder and robbery in 2002, Whyte had no qualifications.
“I was so anti-education I didn’t even want to take the ‘diagnostics’ test to determine my education level,” he says. A prison teacher eventually persuaded him to take the tests, before urging Whyte to consider the possibility of further studies. It meant that he studied for and passed five GCSEs and four A-levels shortly after his conviction.
“In my next prison, I was given a teacher called Jane who encouraged me to seriously consider higher education, telling me I could do well,” says Whyte. It led to him taking an undergraduate degree in psychology, followed by a degree in social policy and criminology, completing both in prison, much to the surprise of his peers.
“Beyond qualifications, there are so many benefits to education in prison, from mindset shifts to self-belief. But the greatest thing I was able to achieve was a shift in my identity, made possible through being accepted by a different community – the academic one,” says Whyte, who went on to complete a master’s and even embark on a PhD before his release. “I was able to hang my identity on a different hook, going from an ex-criminal to something much more positive.”
Today, Whyte is co-director of the social enterprise DWRM (Doing What Really Matters), which promotes further and higher education in prisons. He praises Jane in particular, for having had a profound impact on his education. “She was one of those people you want to do your best for. She’d not only encourage me to start learning, but would support me with whatever I needed. Even though it wasn’t her subject matter, she’d take time to reason things out with me. It wasn’t just with me either, it was with every student.
He describes Jane as “one of those people who smiled every day”. “I’d be like: ‘Why is this woman so happy?’ Now I understand – she was happy because of the work she put in and what she got back. Now I understand that job satisfaction, because I experience that most days, too.”
As for Brown, it’s the fulfilment that makes her envisage a long future in prison teaching. “I had a student teacher visit this week and after this third day, he told me: ‘I don’t want to do anything else but prison education’ – he loved the ethos and culture. That’s exactly how I feel.”
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