Get your donation doubled as part of the Big Give Christmas Challenge!
The Challenge is vital to funding our work. Last Christmas, you helped us to fund 86 courses for people in prison including GCSEs, A-levels and Health and Safety qualifications.
This year, prison education budgets have been slashed by up to 50%.
Against the backdrop of an extremely overcrowded and understaffed prison estate, these cuts will reduce the already limited educational opportunities provided by prisons.
As people in prison spend up to 22 hours a day locked in cells, PET’s distance learning courses are vital for them to be able to access education and use their time inside to build towards a new future.
A donation to our Christmas Challenge can help someone like Robin lay the foundations for a new career.
Thanks to your donations, Robin was able to study an Education and Training course to support his peer mentor work in prison and to progress towards his goal of becoming a teacher upon release.
In prison, Robin volunteers as an Education Peer Mentor and provides support, encouragement and guidance to fellow learners. In his application to PET, he explained how the course would aid his employment goals:
Working in an educational setting as a peer mentor has developed my passion for teaching and improving the lives of people who need help to achieve an education. This course will provide me with the formal qualification to teach in an educational institution as my new career.
Robin’s application was strongly endorsed by the prison’s learning and skills tutor, who wrote that Robin “has strived to become an effective and supportive peer mentor. He is a hard worker and is motivated to help others and himself to improve”.
Describing the difference the course made, Robin also reflected:
This Christmas, we hope to raise just over £45,000 to fund distance learning courses for people like Robin, alongside PET’s expert advice and support for people in prison.
We have secured just over £22,000 of generous match-funding towards this target which means that donations made through the Big Give campaign page until midday Tuesday 9 December will be doubled!
Thank you so much for your support that changes lives and builds hope for people in prison.
Illustration by PET Lived Experience Consultant Erika Flowers – find more of her work here.