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.”

This refers to the mental health challenges of the main character, Dan (Josh Finan), a philosophy teacher in a category-B prison somewhere in London, and also his students (men both outside and inside the prison walls). But it also speaks directly to what I came to realise about the power of art education.

In an excruciating but true-to-my-experience dinner party scene, Dan is questioned about why he teaches in a prison. He challenges the other guests’ naive assumptions based on the fact he is a “nepo baby” of former prisoners in his family – his father, uncle and brother. The party concludes that all he does is provide a “two-hour holiday in [the inmates’] heads”.

While this might........

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