On Thursday 20th February, Milton Keynes College Group hosted its second annual Reading Festival at the Chaffron Centre, bringing together over 80 attendees, including Prison Services staff and HMPPS colleagues, to discuss the importance of literacy and strategies to foster a love of reading among learners.

The participants of the event had an opportunity to participate in a series of workshops, led by the Group’s Prison Services colleagues. These showcased the best practice and innovative ideas that the staff were working with in their prison teams. Workshops included the team from HMP Standford Hill sharing how they have created creative spaces for reading around the prison and the impact this has had on readers, and Lindsay Battersby, Neurodiversity Support Manager at HMP Wakefield, shared her phonics awareness project with the participants.

The event featured speakers from the Shannon Trust and education teams from prisons, including Lil Norbury, Priority Projects Lead (Curriculum) for HMPPS, and the author Adam Farrer. With a passion for prison education, Adam was keen to encourage the attendees, emphasising the change the College Group staff could make with the work they do and the impact they have on prison learners. Sharing about a workshop he had run in one of the Group’s contracted prisons, Adam remarked on how engaged and inquisitive he had found the learners.

Milton Keynes College Group’s Prison Services Quality Team also received a generous donation of 1,200 books from World of Books, who are supporting the Group’s prison education departments with continued donations. The books were taken by staff at the end of the day to be stocked into lending libraries and classrooms across the prison education network.

Ian Merrill, CEO of Shannon Trust, introduced the Trust’s work and echoed some of the statistics that the prison teams had shared. 16% of all adults in the UK have very low literacy, and this figure rises closer to 60% in prisons. Shannon Trust have seen a growth in the numbers of learners they’re working with, to more than 11,000 in 2024, with more than 2000 peer mentors supporting their work across England.

With Ian stepping down as the Trust’s CEO in the next couple of weeks, Sally Alexander, CEO and Group Principal of Milton Keynes College Group, thanked him for his leadership: “We’re incredibly grateful for the work the Trust does. It’s like having extra members of staff! The work of the peer mentors is essential – it’s an initiative we’re looking at taking forward on campus. Everything we can do to drive the importance and power of reading is so critical.”

To find out more about MK College Group’s prison services, read more here.