I taught art in a high-security prison – Waiting for the Out took me straight back to my classroom

I taught art in a high-security prison – Waiting for the Out took me straight back to my classroom

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 qual…