We recently published our annual report for 2024, the third year of our current five year strategy.
I thought it might be useful to summarise the key points of another busy and productive year for PET for anyone who doesn’t want to delve into the 55-page report!
Supporting people in prison
During 2024 we funded 1,540 distance learning courses for people in prison. This was significantly more than we funded in 2023 (1,340) as fantastic work by our Fundraising team enabled us to keep up with growing demand for our services.
As always, we funded a wide range of courses, from health and safety to creative writing to drug and alcohol counselling. You can check out the top 10 in this blog.
In addition, we provided information, advice and guidance (IAG) to people in prison and prison staff, making sure that learners had the information they needed to choose the right course and to complete it successfully.
During 2024, we provided IAG on 3,507 occasions, including 1,121 calls on our free Advice Line. We also published a new version of our course prospectus.
By providing IAG, we aim to ensure that learners have a positive experience of studying. To make sure that this is the case we continually seek feedback. As just one example of the hundreds of comments we received last year, this one – from Samira who recently finished our Creating and Starting a Digital Business course – summarises, I think, the impact that our work can have:
Developing our services
We are always seeking to improve what we do, and in 2024 this included continuing our three-year project to extend our reach and the support that we offer, funded by The National Lottery Community Fund.
As part of this, we began a pilot programme of more intensive support with four prisons in the north of England, as we had been receiving relatively fewer applications from prisons there.
Alongside this, we improved the resources that we provide for prison staff, creating new videos covering a range of issues that learners told us were important in enabling them to complete their PET course.
We also made improvements to the prison staff area of the PET website. This significantly increased traffic to that part of the site – the number of visits increased by 26% compared to 2023 and the number of people using it tripled.
Going digital
A further strand of work to improve and expand what we do focused on making use of digital technology.
This included launching a new secure version of our website that can be accessed within prison, enabling people who have secure access to the internet to find out about PET and what we offer. This is available across the prison estate and is an important step in our work to make more courses available digitally.
We also worked with HMPPS to launch seven short digital courses. These were launched on the Virtual Campus in June and by the end of 2024 had been accessed 1,808 times across 108 prisons in England and Wales.
Influencing the agenda
Looking outside PET, we also worked to influence the development of policy on prison education at a crucial time for the future of prisons – with a new government and a prison capacity crisis that has impacted on the delivery of education.
This included publishing Getting prison education right: Priorities for the new government, a briefing that makes 10 recommendations to the ministerial team at the Ministry of Justice on how to transform prison education. We also published a research report on young women’s experiences of education in prison, which explored the experiences of young women aged 18 to 24 who have spent time in prison and their relationship with education and work.
In addition, we produced a report summarising the evidence for the efficacy of prison education. This was published by Clinks, the infrastructure body for the criminal justice voluntary sector, as part of their online evidence library.
A year to be proud of
When I sit down to write our annual report I am always struck by how much my colleagues achieve. Fitting it all into a lengthy report is a struggle and cutting it down to a few hundred words for this blog has inevitably meant that the above is only a flavour of a year’s work.
But the annual report demonstrates that progress was made across all the strands of our organisational strategy and we finished the year in a strong position, both financially and in the delivery of our services.
This is all down to the contributions of a lot of people, both within and outside PET. I would like to take this chance to thank my colleagues for all their hard work and our funders and supporters for enabling us to do what we do.
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