2024-06-01-accounts

The Crito Project Charitable Incorporated Organisation

Report of the trustees for the year ending June 2024

The trustees of the Crito Project charity present an annual report for the year ended 01June 2024 and confirm they comply with the requirements of the Charities Act 2011, the charity’s constitution, and the Charities SORP (FRS 102). Included is the charity’s receipts & payments account report.

Our Aims	2
Our Objectives	3
Review of Activity and Achievement	4
Future Plans	5
Structure and Governance	6
Trustees & Volunteers	6
Receipts & Payments Account	7
Statement of Assets & Liabilities	8
Notes to the Accounts	9

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Our Aims

The Crito Project proceeds from two key beliefs:

• 1) That education is the most cost-effective and successful mode of reform available to our society.

• 2) That universities have a civic duty to seek out students in unconventional settings, especially those whose lives stand at critical junctures, and who can benefit the most from higher education.

In light of these beliefs, our primary aim is to provide access to higher education to inmates serving their sentence in the east of England.

Second, we advocate for, and work to bring about, the provision of accreditation for those students, in association with strategic partners including the University of East Anglia (UEA), the Bard College Prison Initiative (BPI) and the USbased Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison which it leads, prison governors, PeoplePlus (the prison education provider contracted to our region), affiliated charities, and universities other than the UEA which are aligned with our charitable aims.

Third, we audit our work whenever possible, in order to add to the collective knowledge and understanding of the impact that such study has upon the wellbeing, life chances, behaviour and decisions of the Charity’s students. We also assess our activity in order to improve the provision of our tutors and the efficacy of our courses.

We confirm that we as the charity’s trustees have complied with our duty to have due regard to the guidance on public benefit published by the commission in exercising our powers.

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Our Objectives

This year saw the charity begin full delivery of its long-awaited accredited curriculum at two separate prison sites. Given the purpose of the charity, and the extended setbacks associated with the pandemic1, this return to face-to-face teaching was of crucial importance. In January 2023 the charity commenced teaching at HMP Highpoint, and in January 2024 at HMP Warren Hill. HMP Highpoint’s large population and status as a Category-C training prison made it a good candidate, while HMP Warren Hill’s smaller population but emphasis on reform, education and rehabilitation made it a natural partnership for higher education.

Just as significantly, our attempts to broaden the curriculum of the charity bore fruit, with the University of East Anglia’s School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing signalling their support for the charity, and their willingness to contribute accredited modules to the curriculum. This means that within a year we will have hit a massive milestone in our charity’s five year plan early, which is the provision of a full year of a degree to our students, face-to-face, known as a CertHE. Therefore our primary objectives for the year were:

• Delivery of a revised curriculum from 2020 & test out our hypotheses regarding best practice in assessment, student support and pedagogy as we opened at a second site.

• Recruit students and inform the population at HMP Warren Hill, to get the word out about our accredited higher education; this involved posters, flyers, application packs under every cell door, briefing fellow teachers on-site, and creating adverts for “Wayout TV”, the in-cell television service, to broadcast.

• Revisit all procedures and charity policies, to be ready for a fresh round of due diligence with our partners, People Plus.

1 Read User Voice’s 2022 “Coping With Covid in Prison”, for an excellent overview of the impact on prisons UK (see https://www.thecritoproject.org/crito-news/2022/8/22/measuring-thepandemic-impact)

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• Recruitment and orientation of new tutors to meet increased breadth of future curriculum requirements due to the new CertHE provision

• Conduct meetings and negotiations for the University of East Anglia’s LDC school to join us in accredited provision accreditation.

• Begin to source and prepare the hundreds of academic books which will make up our second dedicated on-site library.

• Expand the expertise on our Board of Trustees to include a Treasurer.

Review of Activity and Achievement

The start of 2023 was an extremely important moment for the charity; we have bounced back from a trying period of lockdown and false-starts, to achieve our principle purpose as a charity: to deliver meaningful higher education face-to-face in prison classrooms. Understandably, the majority of our work, as well as our limited resources, have been dedicated to making a success of this promising start, and the Board of Trustees is proud to report that the first six months of provision

has been a real success. Due to the unfortunate events of the past three years, the number of university-prison partnerships in the UK has flatlined in both number and ambition, and we think our charity is uniquely placed to lead a resurgence in the sector, and ultimately to establish it and its partners as the foremost partnership of its kind in the country. To these ends, we have:

• Enrolled a new cohort of ten students at a new prison, on the UK’s only face-toface accredited higher education prison programme.

• Begin a second round of accreditation talks with the UEA, to expand our provision to 120 degree credits.

• Transitioned from invoicing tutors as contractors to full PAYE as recognised employees, and began the recruiting process for new Crito tutors.

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• Been invited to attend the 2024 Bard College Prison Initiative’s Summer Residency2, this time in person in New York State.

• Recruited a new trustee as Treasurer and retained our current board.

• Kept our charity website (www.thecritoproject.org) updated with news and opinion pieces.

• Keep our central partnerships with PeoplePlus and the UEA in good condition, leading to the writing of a Memorandum of Understanding being signed by the three partner institutions.

Future Plans

• Our future plans revolve around two cohorts of students at HMP Highpoint & Warren Hill; our first priority is to provide them with the same first-class teaching and support that they would expect to find on UEA campus, as well as to implement changes in provision at Warren Hill in light of our experiences at Highpoint.

• We plan to implement and embed CertHE-level education as our standard, working with the UEA to help achieve this goal, and to raise awareness within the university and its partners, of our good work.

• We plan to continue our dialog with Bard College Prison Initiative in the US, whose guidance has been instrumental so far, and to help build a nascent network of like-minded universities in the UK who, like us, take their lead from the BPI’s example. So far this includes the UEA, UCL3 and DWRM4.

• We want to work more closely with People Plus, and continue our good working practices with them, and make sure our provision meets the requirements of both their sub-contracting due diligence process, and the parameters outline in our shared memorandum of understanding.

• 2 https://bpi.bard.edu/beyond/national-engagement/summer-residency/2024-cohort/

• 3 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab/news/2024/dec/unlocking-potential-role-universities-can-playreforming-prison-education

• 4 https://dwrm.org.uk/

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• Once established, we foresee the need to begin public relations to some degree, to raise awareness of our good work and its potential for growth, and to create a profile with which to attract donations. However, we remain cautious in our approach, based upon a simple costs/benefits analysis of media impact.

Structure and Governance

The single change to the charity’s structure or governance in this fiscal year has been the successful recruitment of Dominic Daniels as Treasurer and member of the board of trustees.

Trustees & Volunteers

Chair

Dr Tom Greaves, Senior Lecturer, UEA Philosophy Department

Treasurer

• Dominic Daniels

Trustees

• Georgie Oatley

• Professor Liam Dolan, FRS

• Mollie Holden Oates

Teaching Staff

• Dr Ben Walker, Crito Project Course Director, UEA

• Jack Manzi, Postgraduate Researcher, UEA

• Nayantara Nayar, PhD Student, UEA

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Statement of Assets & Liabilities

• Because the charity’s annual income is now over £25,000, the trustees will arrange for an independent person or accountancy firm to carry out an independent examination of these accounts before they are submitted to the Charity Commission, before 26th March 2025.

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• The charity has no assets or liabilities to declare, no dedicated offices, and no dedicated computer or IT equipment.

• The purchase of books for students on site is here expensed as incurred and is not considered a fixed asset.

• Since April 2024, the Charity now has three staff on PAYE zero-hour contracts, with hours typically tied to our agreed provision. Our employees’ PAYE is calculated and recorded by CBR solutions5.

Notes to the Accounts

In accordance with our agreement with PeoplePlus, we have delivered hundreds of hours of accredited university education across HMP Highpoint and HMP Warren Hill this financial year, and have been paid £28,053.00 by the company for this provision. These payments have been in agreement with the terms set out in the relevant memorandum of understanding, namely, on a costs-only basis, where the charity clearly outlines its expenditure on tutor pay, travel expenses and teaching materials, and PeoplePlus agrees to match them.

The charity remains committed to paying its tutors a fee commensurate with the UEA’s associate tutor rates (currently £35.45 per hour of classroom teaching). Unfortunately we are not in a position to pay our Course Director, Ben Walker, a wage for his second, voluntary role. As and when we develop a more robust income, we may revisit this arrangement. In early 2024 Board of Trustees made the decision that, given the regularity with which the charity was using the same key tutors, it was sensible for us to move to a PAYE system. Outside of a few key tutors, we will still invoice tutors when they teach on an occasional or temporary basis, however.

The charity made a number of purchases this year, in relation to advertising its work both onsite in prisons and online, and in establishing the necessary academic library onsite at HMP Highpoint. None of these purchases can be considered assets and are rather expenses; library books, book-protection materials, student journals and stationary, printed posters and packs, etc.

5 https://www.cbrsolutions.org.uk/

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The year ended with the charity holding less income than it started with, due to its larger outlay on library materials. While we do foresee a need to establish new funding streams and greater donations for the charity in the near future, to supplement our agreed payment from PeoplePlus, the bulk of the books required to teach at two prisons have now been purchased, and so continuing expenditure on this cost will markedly diminish over the next two years.

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