Attendance at Education Courses by Prison 2025/2026
Published 30 July 2026
Applies to England and Wales
© Crown copyright 2026
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/prison-performance-ratings-2025-to-2026/attendance-at-education-courses-by-prison-20252026
1. Introduction
There is a statutory duty to provide prison education in England. In 2016, responsibility for most prison education in England moved from the Department for Education (DfE) to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). Decision-making is led by prison governors who, since 2019, have been able to commission education for their prison based on the needs of the population. The data provided covers 92 public and 3 privately managed prisons in England, with Welsh prisons and most privately-run prisons being out-of-scope for this publication.
October 2025 marked the introduction of the new Prisoner Education Service (PES), replacing the previous Prison Education Framework (PEF); meaning that the reporting year (1 April 2025 – 31 March 2026) is divided equally between the two frameworks.
Due to this transition in contracts, processes, data systems and methodology, the data from the new Prisoner Education system is not comparable with previous data. Therefore, during this transition, the attendance at education courses performance measure is temporarily excluded from the Annual Prison Performance Ratings 2025-26 official statistics release.
Due to the then ongoing procurement of Core Education services in the West Midlands, the 8 prisons in that region continued to operate under the PEF for the entirety of 2025-26. As a result, they are presented in a separate table from all other prisons in the annex.
2. Scope
This publication contains the attendance percentages for adult prisoners in prisons in England utilising PEF and PES services during the period of 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026. The reporting period contains two separate, non-comparable prison education contracts. Due to data quality issues in the first quarter of the Prisoner Education Service rollout, the period of 1 October 2025 to 31 December 2025 has been excluded.
Period 1 – Table 1a: 1 April 2025 – 30 September 2025, covered by the Prison Education Framework
Table 1b: 1 April 2025 – 31 March 2026, covered by the Prison Education Framework – West Midlands only
Period 2 – Table 2: 1 January 2026 – 31 March 2026, covered by the new Prisoner Education Service.
3. Data Sources
The data in this report is based on the prison education management information system, CURIOUS. CURIOUS has also been redeveloped to meet the needs of the PES contract, and so separate iterations exist for the PEF and PES data.
4. Methodology
In line with data included in previous years’ performance framework, the attendance figures published represent the number of attended spaces on education courses out of the number of spaces allocated to learners.
5. Limitations and Caveats
There are limitations and caveats that need to be considered when interpreting the findings in this report:
- The two systems (PEF and PES) represent different contracts, alongside changes in processes and systems, measuring attendance differently in terms of scope and methodology. The two tables cannot be compared and Table 2 is not comparable with previous years.
- Table 2 contains a single quarter of data from a new system. Care should be taken about extrapolating performance from a limited dataset.