Offendingis strongly associated with poor educational attainment and insecure attachments to further learning and employment. Both employability and adult learning services offer opportunities for people to develop the confidence and skills to allow them to move away from offending to participate in employment and other aspects of community life. Employment is one of the strongest ‘protective factors’ supporting desistance from offending. Alongside services to combat addiction, accommodation support and strong social networks, opportunities to engage in work and learning are a crucial part of the reducing reoffending agenda.
National policy in this area is developing. The Scottish Government has just published its Offender Learning Strategy which it commissioned in 2008. This identifies a number of key issues that need to be addressed in order to improve the provision of learning for those in custody, in the community and for young offenders. It suggests that offender learning be explicitly recognised as an objective We are waiting for the Government response, which is likely to be incorporated into the actions of the Reducing Reoffending Programme, an ambitious end to end programme to overhaul the criminal justice system and particularly to strengthen community sentences, making them more immediate, visible and effective.
One of the key parts of this and of the Criminal Justice and Licensing Bill, currently progressing through Parliament, is the introduction of the Community Payback Order (CPO). This single order will replace existing Probation and Community Service Orders and Supervised Attendance Orders (SAO). There is scope within the new order to build in learning and skills development. The unpaid work element itself also offers an opportunity to more strongly promote learning and skills through the activity of unpaid work.
Glasgow has an enviable range of support services for adults to begin to move along the employability pathway including accessing support for literacy and numeracy. The links between these services and the City’s criminal justice services and local prison HMP Barlinnie have been developing over the last few years.
Glasgow's Offenders and Employability Strategic Group aims to develop these links and improve outcomes across community and custodial settings.
The group commisisoned research on employability services in the City and the findings and actions in response to this are on the right.