Ms Caron McCaffrey:

The priority of the Prison Service is always to offer the maximum amount of structured activity we can to people in our care because we know by engaging in education and work training we can reduce the risk of reoffending when people get out. The system has been under pressure and a governor on any given day really wants to prioritise the opening of those services, but there are tasks the governor has to assign resources to which regrettably, from time to time, can lead to the closure of schools and work training activity. The predominant draw from prisons is on escorts. We have received additional funding to increase the number of staff in our escort corps and we have been working towards that, but certainly the number of school closures has been reducing and every prison has a regime management plan and there is a very strong effort made by all governors to keep our school and our work training activities open because when people are engaged in structured activity it also contributes to safer prisons for those prisoners and for our staff.