The project was based at Her Majesty’s Prison and Young Offenders Institution Doncaster. It was led by Novus working with partners including Nacro, Catch22 and other prisons. This Outstanding Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (OTLA) project from 2016/17, aimed to improve the quality of teaching, learning, and assessment by addressing poor attendance in education and work sessions in offender learning. The work included raising awareness of the importance of education to prisoners and staff, and embedding maths and English in vocational contexts. As a result, attendance in classes rose significantly. At the start of the project it was at 60% and at the second census point at the time of an inspection in October 2017, this increased to 90%. The project used a supported experiments methodology and participants were also introduced to a Japanese learning model centred on an action resource showing the study cycle. Presentations were created with ActivInspire, an educational lesson-planning application and contained elements of a lesson plan such as arithmetic principles, and problem-solving exercises. This project had excellent outcomes in an environment in which it can be difficult to achieve change.

Technical accessibility note: the main case study and accompanying resources where possible have been re-formatted to improve accessibility for screen readers but some outputs in the resource folder, below, may not be fully accessible.