Adult skills minister John Healey said this week that education can reduce the likelihood of re-offending by 12 per cent, and admitted that the amount of learning in prisons “simply isn’t good enough”.

He chose the Prison Education conference in Birmingham on Wednesday to outline the relationship between education and criminality.

“Providing basic literacy and numeracy teaching as part of an offender’s daily regime can reduce re-offending rates by as much as 12 per cent,” he said.

“To make a real impact, we must improve the quality of learning available to offenders. Only one in five accesses learning on the inside.”

The extra cash will fund new classrooms designed to integrate prisons industry with education, including basic skills teaching. It will also be used to ensure the training prisoners get is better matched to the kind of jobs they could apply for on release.

The prison education budget will reach pound;87m for 20034.

Education is particularly important for prisoners, who suffer as a result of the widespread reluctance among employers to recruit people with criminal records.

More than half of prisoners are convicted again within two years of release, and it costs around pound;27,000 a year to keep each of them in prison.

The connection between re-offending and education, especially numeracy and literacy, is reinforced this week by a report from the Basic Skills Agency.

The report, Basic Skills and Crime, analyses two groups of people - one set born in 1958 and the other in 1970. The BSA says the report makes it clear there is a statistically significant connection between repeated offending and poor literacy.

Alan Wells, the BSA’s director, said: “Raising standards of literacy and numeracy won’t lead to a crime-free society. But it will make it less likely that frustration and failure result in criminality.”

The report is available from the BSA on 020 7405 4017