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The Clink Charity partnered with Meganexus, an NEC company, to overcome language barriers preventing foreign national prisoners from accessing vocational qualifications. Leveraging GENAIE, we rapidly developed a multilingual NVQ Level 1 catering course—reducing build time by over 96% and achieving around 94% translation accuracy. This enables faster rollout of consistent, high-quality training, improving accessibility, and learner engagement. 

Breaking down barriers to training and qualifications

Foreign national prisoners within His Majesty’s Prison & Probation Service often face barriers when accessing vocational training due to limited English proficiency. While many can understand course material in their native language, gaining qualifications such as NVQ Level 1 requires them to learn and demonstrate their skills in English. 

To access programmes delivered by The Clink Charity, learners must meet a certain level of English understanding. Existing provision, such as ESOL programmes, focuses on general language learning but does not effectively support vocational or job-specific contexts. 

This gap makes it harder for learners to fully engage with training, develop practical skills, and successfully achieve recognised qualifications that support employment on release.

GENAIE to generate professional courses

The Clink Charity partnered with us to design and deliver a multilingual vocational training programme that makes learning more accessible for foreign national prisoners. 

With GENAIE (Generative AI for Education), our team developed a nine-module online catering course aligned to NVQ Level 1 in Hospitality and Catering with approximate accuracy of 94%, ensuring consistency across all languages. This AI-driven approach is reducing course development time by over 96%, enabling rapid deployment compared to traditional methods while maintaining quality and scalability. 

The courses are also made available in Romanian, Polish, Albanian and English, helping learners to engage with content in their native language while building English skills in a vocational context. 

Designed as a secure, scalable solution, the platform supports structured learning and prevents incomplete course progression, while providing visibility of learner engagement and progress for education providers.

The Impact and Achievements

The pilot demonstrates how multilingual, AI-enabled learning can improve both engagement and outcomes in prison education. 

  • Stronger achievement outcomes – 5 out of 8 learners successfully achieved City & Guilds NVQ Level 1 in Hospitality and Catering 
  • Improved accessibility and understanding – learners were able to engage more effectively with course content through native language support 
  • More confident participation – combining vocational training with contextual English learning helped learners build skills more quickly 

The project also garnered interest from the Collaborative Action Research Network, which provided funding to publish. 

Ongoing research aims to refine the approach and assess its broader applicability. The success of the pilot lays a solid foundation for scaling up and optimising the integration of language learning with vocational training. 

I studied catering course and learned the UK rules of the kitchen (law and legislation) in my native language. During this eight-week course, my cooking skills have improved, and I now know more catering words in English that I use while working in the prison canteen. The learnings from the course and my understanding of catering laws will help me in future as I plan to reopen a pub that I used to run before I came to prison.

A learner who has completed the catering course

Find out more

If you have any questions about how GENAIE is improving training and qualifications across prisons in England and Wales, contact us here.