Currently 47% of prisoners have no formal qualifications and to help overcome this, all UK prisoners are obliged to engage with vocational training as part of their sentence.
Learning providers have to address the challenge of delivering training within the complex and transient environment of prisons where learners may be moved to another institution or released before their qualification can be completed. Fluence has developed a highly accurate, Artificial Intelligence-assisted decision-making engine that emulates the decision logic of educators. Learning providers can input content, such as work assignments, into the Fluence engine, along with decisions made about the content (e.g. grades) and the Fluence algorithm learns to replicate the decision logic of educators on all future content. Fluence can apply this auto-grading technology to both formal learning and ‘naturally occurring evidence’ based on the work produced by prisoners on site. It can provide formal evidence of their abilities, as well as assessing them up front. This turns the process of assessment and accreditation into a silent process, happening invisibly in the background, allowing teachers to focus on teaching. Through this project, the technology has the potential to make a genuine step change in prison education by improving the accreditation of vocational learning for 85,000 vulnerable learners in prisons.