Ms Claire O'Connell:

Some prisoners are not particularly interested in coming to school. It could be because they are on such a short sentence, they do not think it is worthwhile. In some of our prisons, there are prisoners who cannot come to school because of protection arrangements. They are literally in their cells 23 hours a day. Those are the prisoners who would really benefit from in-cell learning. We do our best to do in-reach work with them and provide them with materials but we are limited in what we can do. For example, in Mountjoy Prison where the population is around 500, between 150 to 200 might attend school. Our difficulty is that it is greatly split. Due to protection arrangements, we have different landings so we cannot provide a full week of classes to students in those situations.