Conference Agenda

Higher education in prisons remains both insufficiently available and structurally marginalised within the UK prison education system. Prisoners’ Education Trust reports that provision in prisons in England continues to focus predominantly on literacy, numeracy and vocational education, with higher education opportunities largely restricted to distance learning and a small number of fragile prisons university partnerships. These arrangements are widely recognised as insufficient to meet learner needs or support meaningful progression into higher levels of study. Participation in education has also declined in recent years, alongside deteriorating prison regimes and reduced time out of cell (Prisoners’ Education Trust, 2024). While design research has a strong tradition of engaging with complex public services, prison education remains under-examined as a site for systemic design inquiry (University of the Arts London, 2021).This Conversation addresses that gap by bringing together design researchers, many of whom will have little direct familiarity with the prison education policy landscape, to collectively explore how universities might contribute to more inclusive and sustainable higher education provision in low-security prison contexts. The aim is not to propose solutions, but to identify tensions and generate new research questions for the design research community.