Rebecca Pulsipher Breinholt lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA and completed a Librarianship MA last fall at the University of Sheffield where she loved learning about the English prison system and the impact of the library services they offer.
This blog post offers a summary of Rebecca’s dissertation research, which explored the implications of the Ofsted and HMIP Reading Education reports in prisons in England.
Background
In 2022 Oftsed and HMIP conducted a review of reading education in prisons, and a follow-up review in 2023*. The resulting reports asserted that reading education was poorly organised and under-prioritised by prison regimes and included a number of recommendations that have impacted the work of prison education providers, prison library services, and the many voluntary organisations that offer reading support services and materials to incarcerated people.
Aims & Methods
This small-scale study set out to look at the impact that these reports and their recommendations are having on the work of key reading stakeholders by aiming to do two things:
- Identify what has taken place to implement the recommendations, and
- Examine what the implications have been for prison library services in England.
Nine in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a combination of prison library staff and people who work in partnering voluntary sector organisations that support reading across the prison estate. Findings speak only to a subset of institutions represented in the study and are not representative of the whole prison estate. Nevertheless, they offer useful insights into the success and challenges of implementing report recommendations.
Findings
Findings concerning the first aim, identifying efforts to implement the Ofsted/HMIP Report recommendations, highlighted four areas of focus: creating Reading Strategies, embedding reading and books throughout the prison, establishing new positions and roles, and increasing library access for prisoners. Of these, increasing prisoners’ library access has proven the most elusive.
Concerning the second research aim, examining the implications for prison libraries, the study found an increase in the profile of reading and libraries, particularly at the management level, but that libraries continue to be underutilised and that there remains a significant need for improved collaboration between reading stakeholders and greater consistency in provision across the prison estate.
Recommendations & Conclusions
The findings of this research align with existing research concerning several of the most pressing challenges that prison libraries face, strengthen arguments for the very things the Ofsted/HMIP Reports recommend, and add urgency to calls for their effective implementation.
They also support several of the recommendations put forward in Finlay and Neri’s 2025 report, particularly their calls to:
- Establish national standards for prison library provision;
- Integrate library awareness into prison officer training and development;
- Prioritise strategic ways of increasing access to prison library services;
- Strengthen cross-departmental communication and collaboration; and
- Commission a comprehensive review of prison library provision.
If implemented, these five recommendations would make a significant impact in addressing some of the issues identified in this research. The findings also reveal areas where further research is needed. While this study examined the perspectives of library and voluntary sector staff, the perspectives of education providers need to be explored to discover what can make library-education partnerships more effective and research that engages prison staff and prisoners themselves would be particularly valuable in learning how to enhance prison staff perceptions and in gauging the effectiveness of implementation efforts.
You can read a longer summary of the research below:
*Since this research has been carried out, a third report was published by HMIP in January 2026 called ‘Reading for Rehabilitation’.
