Inside the prisons training up fashion workers

Every prisoner will probably say the same thing. You walk in through the gates by yourself and you walk out through the gates by yourself. But the prison for us here at LCS is outside. In this workshop, women make clones. Once you cut this off, I like this to come into play. They're being taught by Winston, who is a professor at the London College of Fashion, but now his students are all prisoners. They're serving time at HMP Downview, a women's prison in Sutton. This is a manufacturing unit, as well as being an educational department. We will work for ASOS. We will work for independent designers, whether they're small or whether they're large. So you're good to go, yeah? Yeah, thank you. Alright, thanks very much. So these are pockets, these are backs and fronts. So this is your deconstructed skirt? Deconstructed skirt. You put all that together and once you've put all that together, with the grace of God and the prevailing wind, you could actually wear this. Suzanne has worked in Winston's workshop since September. We do production, we do garments, we practice and we take our exams. So it's a home from home for me. The women apply to work here. There's an interview process and if you don't cut it, you don't get in. You have to be good. You have a month's chance of showing that you have the capabilities of sewing. But if you're accepted, you'll get the qualifications and the skills you need to get a job on the outside. You know, we try to promote good working practice, professionality, punctuality, everything that you kind of need for society and when you're going back out to work. This isn't the only workshop like this. In fact, there are plans to get more than 70 prisons teaching accredited qualifications in fashion and textiles production. Those are the kind of skills you'd need to work in a garment factory. Now the women here are being trained up to maybe get jobs on release, but it's not just about their futures. It's also about the future of the British fashion industry because there's a massive skills shortage in the UK and there just aren't enough people to fill all the jobs that are required. We've had years of the industry being chipped away as the industry went offshore. Now they're starting to look to re-shore. They realise that there's an ageing workforce and most of the ones that they used to have are now retired. So they have to start looking at bringing young people, young blood in and kind of revitalising the industry and raising the profile. While I've been researching this story, I've been regularly checking job sites. Over the last month, Indeed.com had at least 200 active job adverts looking for UK sewing machinists. Over 180 of them have been full-time positions, so the jobs do exist. Now it's just about trying to fill them. This is our amazing factory. I'm incredibly proud of our ladies and a couple of guys that work here. Jenny Holloway has run a garment factory in London for years. I was there filming last November and spotted some prison guards being taught how to pattern cut. It turns out they're taking those skills back up to prisons up north. We're already working with the prison service and have been working with them for about eight years in total. After decades in the industry, Jenny has seen first-hand just how few people there are currently who can take up jobs in UK garment factories. The skill shortage is so bad within our industry. When you think there are about 3,200 women that are actually in the prison system at the moment, that is a lot of people that could have those skills that could then be brought into the industry. This is an untapped market. Like you mentioned, there are thousands of women within the prison system, hundreds of them taking part in these kind of workshops. Do you think it's realistic that people running factories like yours would hire these women when they come out? Oh yeah, we've definitely done that before and we also have offered apprenticeships as well. The women, they've been sentenced, judged, juried. There's got to be a time when you've got to stop that and then allow them to actually start contributing back to society. Yeah, I just think it's a godly thing to do, you know. Nikki Carroll, Sky News.