The Offender Learning and Skills Service was introduced across England from August 2006, part way through the 2006/07 financial year. In financial year 2006-07 and 2007-08 the Offender Learning and Skills Service budget for offenders in the community was £9.5 million and £9.2 million respectively, resources flowing from the previous spending round focused on enhancing the delivery of “Skills for Life” to offenders in the community. From the start of the 2008-09 financial year, the learning needs of offenders in the community have been met from the Learning and Skills Council’s mainstream learning budgets.
It is not possible to determine what proportion of this budget was spent in probation centres and what proportion elsewhere.
The Offender Learning and Skills Service budget in 2006-07 for delivery to young offenders aged 17 and under and for adult prisoners was £98.4 million, in 2007-08 the equivalent budget was £155.4 million and in 2008-09 was £161.7 million. This Department’s planned expenditure through the Offender Learning and Skills Service for 2009-10 is £132.3 million.
This figure does not include funding from the Department for Children, Schools and Families in respect of young offenders aged 17 and under, and will be subject to additional allocations for learning delivery resulting from the Ministry of Justice’s expansion of prison places.
The Offender Learning and Skills Service was introduced across England from the start of the 2006/07 academic year.
The Offender Learning and Skills Service is focused on learners in prison. We had an additional budget of £9.5 million in 2006-07 and £9.2 million in 2007-08 to boost participation for offenders serving community sentences, mostly for Skills for Life. But as this was mainstream learning we have no data on the number of enrolments by offenders in the community, either in probation centres or in mainstream learning.
The Offender Learning and Skills Service funded a total of 240,045 enrolments in 2006/07 and 299,939 in 2007/08 in prisons and young offender institutions.