This do-gooding prisoner rehabilitation scheme should be investigated for its role in the London Bridge attack.
Learning Together, the educational initiative supported by Cambridge University, must be seen as a major contributing factor to the tragedy
The upcoming inquest to be held in early 2021 into the events at Fishmonger’s Hall and London Bridge, which saw Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones murdered by Usman Khan on the 29th November 2019, will have to find a way of making sense of multiple, and at times competing narratives, which resulted in three people losing their lives as a consequence of attending ‘The Learning Together Anniversary and Alumni Event’.
Learning Together is a prison-based, eight-week educational initiative supported by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Teaching and Learning, which started in 2015 at the pioneering HMP Grendon – the only prison in the whole of Europe to work as a series of therapeutic communities.
Learning Together brings together prisoners and those studying Criminology at Cambridge to study alongside each other "in inclusive and transforming learning communities" – an approach that their website describes as "being, belonging, becoming".
At the inquest there will rightly be an understandable focus on the tragedies of Jack and Saskia’s deaths – the former employed by Cambridge University to work full-time for Learning Together and the latter a graduate in Criminology – and a tendency to responsibilise Khan, a convicted terrorist, for their murders. DT.
