 Hello everyone, I'm Patrick Dunn from the UFI Voktec Trust, and what we do is we help people get the vocational skills they need to get more out of their working lives and we do it by supporting the development of digital technologies. We provide funding, expertise and investment for innovators in vocational technology. We build a community of educators, developers, designers, employers, investors and policymakers and we use our funding to catalyse change in attitude, focus and investment in vocational technology. The term we use for this is Voktec vocational technology and we do it in the UK. Now my particular interest is in our projects in the criminal justice sector as I've project managed or been involved in a number of them and this is what I'll be talking about for the next 20 minutes or so although it won't just be me talking, we'll hear from a number of our projects. Now there are all sorts of challenges in prison education and training relating to both traditional methods and using technology and at first sight this may appear somewhat overwhelming. Just to say, most of these statistics that I'm about to go through are from an excellent paper by the Centre for Social Justice and I'll put the link in the chat. So 47% of those in prison have no qualifications, 20% to 30% have a learning disability, 60% have dyslexia or literacy or numeracy issues. Motivation and confidence not surprisingly are enormous barriers. Prisoners move frequently between institutions. There's a very substantial diversity of culture, education levels, very significant differences and different institutions and those who run them have different priorities and approaches. There's a whole range of issues relating to network device security as we'd expect, weaponisation, reliability and so on. Network provision particularly Wi-Fi is a huge challenge and it's inconsistent between institutions. Trainers have widely different experience of using technology and the cost per unit as you'd expect are generally much higher than with other environments. Now given that UFI's core mission relates to vocational training, the fact that only 4% of women and 11% of men are at employment six weeks after release is worth noting. And we know that engaging in education in prison can reduce re-offending by up to 43%. That statistic is from a Ministry of Justice paper which I will also link to. And today even jobs that many would regard as at a fairly basic level, supermarket workers, casual builders and so on, they need digital skills that many in prison just don't have. I find this quote from the CSJ paper really quite chilling. They say many older prisoners serving longer sentences have never held a digital device. Now I might even go so far as to say that if voc tech can help in this sector, I've heard this said, it can help anywhere. Now there are some excellent initiatives in the criminal justice sector using a very wide range of technologies, augmented reality, virtual reality, community approaches, e-learning and so on. But what we found is that criminal justice related projects, the ones we're involved in, they've thrown up a number of common overlapping themes. And although these themes reflect the typical issues that technology related learning often grapples with, secure environments present a range of tough challenges. So I'm going to talk through these four common themes. The first one is access. Now one of the early promises of learning technology was that learning could occur anywhere on demand. But as I mentioned just now, prisons present challenges to this. In prison learning generally and with technology in particular, if at all, takes place not in cell but in libraries, learning centres and so on. But in prison most people spend most of their time in cells up to 20 hours a day. So typically they can't access learning content. The obvious solution is to facilitate learning in cell. So providing access is the baseline without which everything else is pretty tricky, it could be irrelevant. And it's worth saying that once access is provided it can help in many other constructive ways such as maintaining family relationships which we know also reduces re-offending. But what's become clear is that simply providing a connected device is a necessary but not sufficient condition. For access to be genuinely useful prisoners also need firstly an account that follows them because as I said before prisoners can change institutions very frequently. And this should include when they leave prison altogether. Secondly they need comprehensive content and appropriate methods so they can find and use something that's useful to them. And thirdly they need the capability to personalise given the diversity in the sector. Let's hear from Dan Brown of Meganexus. We're fortunate we're in every prison in England of Wales and the system is an internet based system. So an individual's account moves with them wherever they go to from prison to prison to the community as well. So that's part of the system design and that's catered for. So we're comfortable with that issue. What we need to ensure is that the individuals access the relevant resources when they go out. Ironically sometimes there are challenges where there is quite a lot of work done in a prison for a service user. But when they leave the prison all of that support just falls apart and wants to make sure that there is continuity when people leave. Clearly we don't want people coming back in and the system can cope with that but that's not something we want. There's another way of looking at access here as demonstrated by another of our projects. The Northern Irish Offender Rehabilitation Organisation, NIACRO, is using virtual reality headsets to teach construction skills to prisoners. And this kind of training and content is booming at the moment. So this is about providing access, that's what we're talking about, to real world hands on training bringing a small secure part of the outside world into the prison. So that learners who literally cannot go anywhere have access. And the impact of this access transporting them to a virtual environment can be transformational. And we saw straight away the benefits of the immersive learning. The ability for users to put on a headset and become immersed in this environment with no distractions. And the ability to carry out risk free training to actually go on to learn a building site and experience it as if they were there in real person. It's the next best thing to actually doing it in real life. It's risk free and also the learners can try and retry as necessary. So if at first you don't succeed, try again. The second theme is tailoring and adapting of learning. In many learning situations the cohort of learners is in a learning environment in order to learn. Or they have specific job roles so there are similarities between them. The problem here is that in prison you have a far greater diversity of culture, educational experience, motivation and so on as I mentioned earlier on. But learning technology is supposed to be good at adapting to individuals. So what we should be aiming at is for each prisoner to have access to learning that's entirely relevant and appropriate to them and their specific needs and context. Even if a prisoner has access to a library of learning materials linked to a personal account, the ability to share information and access tutors all in cell, how do they know and find what they need? How do their tutors and trainers do this? A technology we know can help in lots of interesting ways and they're well established such as diagnostic questionnaires and quizzes. But also through more innovative means. Now one of our projects run by the AI company Fluence uses the technology applied to forensic linguistics to carry out formative assessment that is to find out what prisoners need. I'll let David Haw of Fluence explain. So for example at the moment the process of formative assessments of understanding what is required or what's going to have the biggest impact on the student that can take up to two weeks for someone to work out what is going to be best for that student. If we could do that in the space of a couple of hours or even a couple of minutes if we can capture that information passively, it buys the tutor so much more time to do what they do best, which is to do the teaching side, which is to do the pastoral side and the progression side. But there's also a softer, more emotional component. Prisoners have to connect personally with what they're learning. Now another of our projects digital change makers by MyBe Awards builds on this company's long term experience in developing highly customised vocational training aimed at prisoners and probationers with complex learning needs. And one particularly innovative approach is the way that they're using avatars to personalise learning. I will let Sarah Cox from MyBe Awards explain. So a learner can have a avatar that is representative of themselves. They can reflect on experiences that they maybe they've been through in the past and pull out different experiences and expertise that they've developed through those experiences. Also crucially the learners that we work with they will have had to recant their personal histories dozens of times over the course of their journey within the prison and probation service. And they often get quite frustrated and sometimes retraumatised by having to recant these stories. Using an avatar gives them a bit of a distance and it also makes it more engaging and interesting way of learning from their past experience. So on to assessment. We know that if you can accredit learning, if you can provide a certificate, a badge or something that demonstrates meaningful progress while in prison, that's more likely to lead to employment. Or on a really basic level, you can let prisoners know they've done okay. After all, many have an appalling experience of education and training and they need support. But when you have such a disparate and shifting learner group, effective assessment against any form of consistent standards can present substantial challenges. Now our project with the AI company Fluence, who you've just heard or heard from, tackles a key aspect of this by examining large quantities of data. I'll let David Hoare explain. It's very difficult for tutors to coordinate standards and to agree on the definition of what an A looks like or a pass looks like. So what we do is we analyse how hundreds and hundreds of previously graded samples have been graded and then that allows us to automate that process on behalf of the tutors. And the idea is that it allows tutors to do away with the difficult administrative and difficult to quantify work, which can take up up to 14 hours of their working week. The secure estate is one of the most complex teaching environments we've ever analysed. And the problem is that it's a very secure environment. It's very difficult to share best practice between prisons. So it's difficult therefore for two tutors to agree on the definition of a pass. Of course, what we need to do is genuinely assess the degree of change in the learner. That's what assessment is. The Niagara Virtual Reality project builds assessment fully into the learning in that you're assessed by successfully completing real world tasks. It's not about what you say you remember or whether you can complete a quiz. It's about genuinely carrying out tasks and being assessed against how you got on. Niagara also have had very good feedback on the way they gamify elements using visual interface for category of games, using game like methods. And they encourage learners to keep going, achieve tasks and be assessed against completion of these tasks. I will let Lee Tavender from Niagara explain more about this. I think it's far more tangible to individuals to give them these skills than it would be to set them down with a piece of paper. I think this puts them in a working environment. It makes it a bit more real for them and it motivates them towards release to start building other skills as well. And I said that the fact that it's different and the fact that it's new becomes a little hook to bring them into a classroom. And once they are there, once the VR has maybe been the attraction to them, then we can build on that from an educational point of view. The fourth theme is around creating employment opportunities. As I said before, prisoners re-offend less if they can get a job, if there's a pathway out of a secure environment to a decent job or career. So projects like the Niagara VR one, where prisoners are connecting their experience inside the prison with likely experiences outside and effectively rehearsing being at a work in a real job, they're invaluable. And here's Dan Brown again from Meganexus reiterating the point about having an account for each learner that follows them not just within prison, but also when they leave. So we've got something called VC in the community, which enables people to access the system whilst they're in the community. There is a difference in philosophy for that system. The key thing is when people are in prison, they have a walled garden and the virtual campus has some very stringent boundaries in terms of what people can access. When they leave prison, we actually want those people to be using the virtual campus as a springboard, as a trampoline. We don't want them to keep identifying as offenders or even ex-offenders. We want them to identify as students. But statistics show that relatively few prisoners, as we saw before, are in full time work a few weeks after leaving prison. So a couple of our projects are looking more specifically at the challenge of getting prisoners into employment. Now what Socrates' Way to Work project does is use digital technology to create a more giant joined up approach. Cameron Holloway from Socrates will explain. Where we feel we can help with this is by providing a more joined up approach for people in prison or on probation to look at what's available, choose a job that they actually want to work towards, and then showing them the steps that they need to go through to get to that point. So the qualifications and the skills that they will need to actually reach a point where they are employable in this career, but then at the end of that have it linked to actual job opportunities with our partner employers. And it's worth saying that this joining up of goal setting, training and job search functionality is of real benefit to employers as well, as it increases the quality and appropriateness of the people that employers encounter when they want to recruit from the prison sector, which actually isn't that unusual. We have a number of other projects that you might refer to as connecting up those in the criminal justice sector with employment such as the wise groups justice training directory, which is part of their CPO connect product. What this does is it helps those working through their community payback orders to find appropriate opportunities. So this concludes my presentation covering the main themes that have emerged from our work in the criminal justice sector. So just to summarise, I've talked about four themes. Access, tailoring, assessment, training for employment. I would very much encourage you to keep in contact with us at UFI, and we have a really useful and informative newsletter that you can sign up for. The link is in the presentation. So thank you for listening and if you have any questions, I would be very happy to take them now. Thank you.