Steve Grix, Head of Digital Learning at Meganexus (an NEC Company), and Andy Gullick, founder and chief executive of RIFT Social Enterprise, presented a joint case study at this year's Modernising Criminal Justice conference on bringing self-employment training to prisoners through digital learning platforms already in use across the estate.
Steve opened with a stark picture of prison education funding. Data from the Prisoners' Education Trust shows planned education delivery in prisons has already dropped by an average of 21% between October 2025 and March this year, with a further decline expected to bottom out at around 25% over the next 12 months. He was clear this isn't a straightforward funding cut - provision is simply costing more to deliver - but the practical effect is the same: longer waiting lists, fewer courses and reduced daily teaching hours, with prisons likely to prioritise foundational skills like English, maths and basic vocational training over other provision.
Andy, whose career spans over a decade in probation and prison roles before founding RIFT eight years ago, focused on self-employment specifically. He said his own past scepticism about supporting self-employment among people with convictions - given the barriers around disclosure and regulation - was misplaced: there is significant entrepreneurial appetite in prisons, and self-employment is often a practical necessity for people trained in trades like construction, where a large proportion of work is contracted on a self-employed basis.
RIFT's response was a self-employment workbook, developed over 18 months with input directly from women in prison on content, language and design, piloted across five women's prisons, and accredited to 21 guided learning hours. It was later piloted in men's prisons too. The workbook is deliberately designed to be completed independently, without needing classroom time or specialist support, and is now used in dozens of prisons in printed form.
The case study's central idea came from Steve and Andy realising their two organisations held complementary pieces of a solution: RIFT's proven, co-designed content, and Meganexus's Virtual Campus platform, already installed in every prison in England and Wales, along with rapid content-generation technology capable of turning existing material into digital learning far faster than traditional development - Steve cited producing 600 hours of content in around 4% of the normal time. Together, they built a fully digital version of the workbook inside Virtual Campus, deliberately kept simple and broken into short, self-contained sections suited to in-cell learning, with data automatically deleted once a learner downloads their completed business plan as a PDF - both for security and to reinforce that the resulting plan belongs to the individual.
The pilot has since expanded to prisons including Holloway Bay, Belmarsh, Drake Hall, Foston Hall and Peterborough, with further sites in discussion. Early feedback has been positive, with many users reporting increased confidence, something Andy said is often overlooked in favour of formal qualification data. RIFT also offers optional follow-up support from its business start-up advisers, both before and after release, for participants judged most likely to succeed.
Looking ahead, Steve and Andy are now in discussions to extend the same model to Community Campus, the digital platform used across probation, to create genuine continuity between learning started in custody and continued after release - particularly relevant given the Sentencing Act's shift towards more community-based sentences. Both were candid that unpaid work requirements currently shape how Community Campus operates, and argued it needs to become about more than punishment if it's to support this kind of provision effectively.
They also used the session to invite wider third-sector organisations to get in touch, framing Meganexus's platforms as a route for smaller charities to reach prison learners at scale without having to solve digital access barriers themselves.