A prison watchdog has accused the Government of making “swingeing cuts in prison education” while misleading the public about what is happening.
Elisabeth Davies, outgoing National Chair of the Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs), set out the concerns in a letter. She sent it to the Prisons Minister, Lord Timpson. Her letter draws on findings from 60 local boards at jails in England and Wales. They show a drastic fall in the number of classes on offer.
Monitors at most prisons that supplied figures found education budget cuts of 36 per cent or more. Among boards able to obtain a percentage, 12 per cent reported cuts of 56 to 65 per cent. Another 15 per cent recorded cuts of 46 to 55 per cent. Cuts of 36 to 45 per cent appeared at 34 per cent of these prisons. A further 20 per cent saw reductions of 26 to 35 per cent. Cuts at the last 19 per cent ranged from 5 to 25 per cent.
Effect on prisoners and staff
Ms Davies wrote that the picture was changing fast. Some boards said their prisons still did not know which local cuts would follow. Others warned that the full effects would take many months to emerge.
“The majority of Boards expect the impact to be seismic,” she wrote. The cuts reach every region and prisons at every level of performance, she added. Leicester, a reception prison that Ofsted rated poor in November 2025, has faced severe cuts. So has Standford Hill, which received an excellent Ofsted rating in February 2025.
According to the IMBs, prisoners now face longer periods in their cells and fewer chances to progress through their sentence plans. Many also lack routes that match their skills and ambitions. Boards fear that prisoners with specific needs are suffering disproportionately.
Ms Davies said the cuts had hit vocational training especially hard. Many boards reported courses scaled back or scrapped altogether.
Some boards said prisons had cited poor attendance to justify the cuts. Ms Davies questioned that reasoning, pointing to deep cuts at prisons where attendance is very high. North Sea Camp, an open prison with 92 per cent attendance, lost 46 per cent of its budget. Wakefield, a long-term high-security prison with 90 per cent attendance, saw a cut of 39 per cent. The letter adds that low attendance often stems from regime problems, such as a shortage of officers, rather than prisoners’ unwillingness to take part.
The cuts also threaten other purposeful activity. At Liverpool, demand for the library has grown since education provision shrank, but too few officers are available to supervise it.
Ms Davies described the rollout as inefficient and haphazard at many prisons. The size of the reductions took numerous establishments by surprise. Staff waited long periods for formal announcements. Redundancies and cuts to hours have been widespread, and some key teachers have resigned. Morale has often been extremely low. At Coldingley, teaching staff have gone off sick with stress. At Exeter, one member of staff told the board the changes helped neither teaching quality nor support for learning.
Paul Bridge is head of further education at the University and College Union. He told FE Week that his union estimated around 300 teaching staff had lost their jobs. He warned that more redundancies would follow, described the situation as chaos and accused the MoJ of hiding.
Ministry disputes the figures
Ms Davies said the cuts went ahead even though the MoJ had told IMB policy leads and board chairs that funding had not fallen. Officials had attributed any apparent cut solely to inflation raising the cost of delivering education.
The MoJ said it would respond to the letter in due course. It again insisted that the overall prison education budget had not fallen. The department manages the budget nationally, and it covers a range of services. Individual prisons receive money for locally commissioned services according to their population, type and location. Other services run nationally, including higher education through the Open University and distance learning through the Prisoners’ Education Trust.
The department said inflation across education services had reduced the share of the budget available for Core Education Contracts. As a result, the volume of teaching delivered through those contracts had changed at some prisons. That applies only to education, it said, and not to training or work in prison industries and workshops.
New education contracts began in October, the MoJ said, and the department now runs updated digital systems directly. For that reason, it argued, no direct comparison is possible between budgets from before October and current ones. Prisons learned in April what their budgets would be from October 2025 to March 2027. They have planned their teaching since then, it added.
“We know the vital role education plays in turning offenders away from crime,” a ministry spokesperson said. The spokesperson said the Government was expanding training and education, with longer daily regimes in some jails so prisoners can work for longer. It is also launching sector-specific training with guaranteed job offers on release.
Ms Davies criticised the Government’s lack of openness about the cuts and its reasons for them. She said IMBs’ regular presence in prisons let them spot quickly where official accounts differed from reality on the ground. The boards would keep using that insight to expose where prisons were failing prisoners, she said.
The MoJ has committed to publishing a prison-by-prison breakdown of education delivery early in 2026. Senior sources in prison education departments fear that classes will already have closed, and teachers lost their jobs, by the time it appears.
