Watching Waiting for the Out, the BBC’s flagship new drama series, transported me straight back to my classroom in HMP Wakefield in the mid-1990s. This decaying Victorian building at the heart of a challenged city in the north of England is one of the UK’s ten category-A, high-security prisons for men. Many inmates are on life or whole-life sentences.
I was a naive, young graduate from Yorkshire with limited teaching experience, no teaching qualification and certainly no knowledge of prison education. I was looking to fund my part-time PhD – a qualification that was becoming the prerequisite for employment in universities.
Teaching art and the humanities at HMP Wakefield changed my life, making me the educator and campaigner I am today. As the publicity for Waiting for the Out says: “Freedom isn’t always on the outside.”
