The Erasmus funded project to create a Blended Learning Environment for European Prisons (BLEEP) held its first in person meeting in over 2 years in Lisbon in February 2022.

13 of us were able to gather in this beautiful city which brought out the best collaborative working practices in us all. Partners from the Netherlands, Turkey, Italy and Portugal and our projects officer from the EPEA spent 2 days reviewing the learning platform which is almost ready for use in prisons, and preparing a training programme for prison staff. Only the partners from Romania were unable to be there in person and had to resort to the now familiar Zoom call.

BLEEP site is an umbrella website where the end user gains access to parts of the site that are relevant to him through account settings and personal choices. The content has been carefully planned to be relevant to people in prison and on release and is translated into the language of each participating country. The website is, metaphorically, built up as a tree.

Example for the Netherlands:

• The trunk is the whole system for all countries.
• The branches are the countries, one branch is the Netherlands.
• The side branches in the Netherlands are the safety regions* and one branch for the detention centers.
• The leaves are accounts for the end user – the leaves can be moved from one branch to another, for example from the branch within the detention center to the branch of the Safety region of Utrecht when he leaves the detention center.
• Institutions or person with the appropriate authority within this region or detention center may put specific information on their page, in addition to the national information that is already on it.

We are looking forward to introducing prison staff from the partner countries to this innovative learning platform at a 3 day training session to be held in Rotterdam in May. There are some places available for other interested parties, with travel and accommodation costs covered by the Erasmus budget.

If you are interested in attending this training please contact the EPEA Projects Officer, Ruth McFarlane on projects@epea.org or for information about BLEEP please contact Max ter Beek of Click F1 mterbeek@clickf1.nl

Ruth McFarlane
EPEA Projects Officer