1st term of teaching finishes at Wayland

Main entrance to HMP Wayland, Norfolk by Chelb (licensed under Creative Commons)

Our first term of teaching has just ended at Wayland, and we’re over the moon with how it’s gone.

This term has seen us transition into a new teaching system, doubling the number of contact hours we spend teaching, delivering both a 3-hour lecture + discussion and a 3-hour reading and writing workshop. After spamming the prison with posters we had huge interest from residents, leading to Crito running two cohorts at the same time. This was a welcome first for us allowing us to teach 24 students this term, a record for the charity. These two factors, while both welcome, have lead to a big uptick in workload, with delivery, marking and planning for 146 hours teaching time.

Over the three months we’ve got to know the People Plus team really well and received outstanding support from everyone in the department. experience has shown us that a good relation with the education team on the ground is essential in our opinion - they deserve our respect as full-time teachers and experts in prison teaching, and we’ve learnt a lot from them at every prison we’ve taught in.

One exciting aspect in particular we’d like to develop in 2020 is to make good use of our students’ access to laptops in their cells. Wayland is one of only three prisons in the country to allow this access for its students; we can see it revolutionising the way we deal with access to publications, coursework and videos in particular.

A hug success then – a strong cohort of eager and bright students, a great new team to work with, and a governor who strongly believes in the importance of incarcerated study. Promising times …