We launch Things Done Well with an interview with Natasha Porter OBE. Having helped set up King Solomon Academy, a transformational London school, she was part of the Coates Review into education in prisons. Based on a recommendation from the review, she created Unlocked Graduates. Over a decade, the charity has placed over 900 prison officers, trained custodial managers, and is now helping to run better prison wings.
Natasha explains what’s wrong with prisons and how we can improve them. She describes how Vanguard Wings in tough London prisons have cut violence in half. She also reflects on how you launch a startup dependent on government, and explains why government procurement rules and inflexibility mean Unlocked will be closing this month.
We discuss:
What differentiates a good wing, and a good prison officer, from a bad one
How the Brexit campaign supercharged Unlocked’s launch
Being told it would take two years to get started - and doing it in eight months
How Unlocked refined its approach to training and support to dramatically increase retention
How Natasha’s experience of effective schools influenced her approach to prisons
The small changes in Vanguard Wings which have cut violence in half
How government procurement rules made it impossible for Unlocked to keep going
A disclaimer: I’ve known Natasha since she was a teacher; last year, we published a book on effective prison officer practice together.
You can listen to the interview on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or read the transcript, lightly edited for clarity, below.
For more about the Unlocked approach check out their new Substack.
Imagine the reader is sent to prison. What might they expect to see if they end up on a wing that’s working well?
They will initially be held at a remand prison, which is somewhere that you can be until you’ve been sentenced. Something that I wasn’t aware of when starting to work in this space was that a lot of people in our prisons are awaiting sentence, or haven’t yet been found guilty. Some of those people will be innocent.
Readers may well feel like this is something that could never happen to them because they’re law-abiding people. There are some good protective factors that make you less likely to end up on remand: for example, if you don’t have a previous history of offending, and if you have some advantages in your life. But it is a possibility for all of us.
An obvious visual marker is that a good wing will be clean and tidy. There will not be food wrappers lying around. The staff are the most important thing, because how staff hold their power is going to set the culture on a wing, and how prisoners feel about a wing. The indicator of a good prison wing is staff holding their power carefully: recognising the huge power they wield, using it to try to keep the wing safe - to try to reduce criminality on the wing, violence and drugs, and also checking that you’re okay and offering you support.
Ideally, your cell will not have graffiti on the wall, will not have threatening, nasty things. You will be given a bed. It will be a bunk bed, almost certainly, in the current overcrowded prison system. There will be a blue plastic cover on a very thin mattress, and you will have clean sheets to put on that bed. The walls will be clean, so there won’t be any blood, faeces, or other bodily fluids of previous inhabitants of the cell. There will also be a careful risk assessment to make sure that the person you are sharing a cell with and you are safe together.
It will still be horrible. Your risk of self-harm and suicide will be at its highest point, because coming into custody, particularly for the first time, is extremely distressing, as everyone can probably imagine.
There will be a toilet in your cell. You will have a screen in front of it, if this is a well-functioning prison. But you will still be using the toilet in front of your cellmate. Some prisons will let you eat on the landings, but many people eat in their cell. You will have a television which will be shared, and you will need to negotiate with your cellmate what you’re going to watch.
In most of our remand prisons, you will be behind your door for over 20 hours a day. In some of the inner-city ones it will be 22, 23 hours a day.
What might the reader experience in a bad wing?
We know the biggest impact on a prisoner’s outcome, especially in that remand population, is the quality of your prison officer. In a bad wing, that will look like overuse or underuse of power. Overuse of power is quite obvious. It will be, perhaps, ruled by fear. It will feel very “us and them” with the staff. There might be over-presence, so a real sense of that staff member making your life difficult, trying to start a fight, trying to upset you.
What’s more common is underuse of power, which will mean the prisoners are in charge. It will mean that things are allowed to slip, that prisoners use drugs and are violent, and the prison officers don’t get involved. It might also look like prison officers sitting in their offices rather than being out on the landing trying to help.
I visited Pentonville Prison in the pandemic, and a prisoner said to me that he knew from the sound of footsteps outside his cell which officer was on that day. Every morning he’d lie in bed, he’d listen to the footsteps, and he’d know from the sound whether it was going to be a bad day or a terrible day, because he said you’d never have a good day in prison.
He said that with some footsteps you knew, in your one hour out of cell, that person would try to actively help you. If you needed more toilet roll, they’d give you more toilet roll. If you needed help contacting a member of your family, if you were worried about something, you knew that that prison officer would try to help you as much as they could. There are at least 30 other prisoners they’d have to help in that time. If you’re on a wing of 60 or 90 prisoners and the other officers are sat in the office, then you might be the one person having to help many prisoners.
But he said that with some officers, when he heard the footsteps, his stomach would get butterflies with excitement, because he knew in his hour out of his cell he would get so much done. Some mornings he knew that he wouldn’t leave his cell in that hour, because it was someone who’d try to start a fight with him, or try to upset him, and he was having a hard enough time.
Unlocked has spent ten years placing graduates in prison, trying to get more of those better footsteps coming down the wing.
What were the bets you made in designing the programme, in terms of recruitment, training, and support?
This came out of the Coates Review of prison education. In 2015, David Cameron gave the first speech about prisons by a prime minister in a very long time. Prisons are not something prime ministers make speeches about generally. This is a bit of the public sector which - unlike hospitals, schools, police, every other bit of the public sector - is a real Cinderella service.
Michael Gove was the Secretary of State for Justice. It was just before the Brexit campaign started. Perhaps it was no coincidence that David Cameron, on the pro-Remain side, made a big speech about Gove’s part of government, just at this point where he was trying to make a decision about which side he was going to go on.
As part of that speech, David Cameron announced the start of Unlocked Graduates. There was this funny weekend in the lead-up where I was having calls back and forth with the speechwriter at Number 10, because they said, “We want to announce it. It lands well with the public. We want to say something like ‘Teach First for prisons’.” I was making this recommendation as part of the Coates Review, so this was one of the recommendations they wanted to announce. I’m sure they thought it was a perfectly decent idea - that it would be a nice thing to announce and not too controversial.
No one could get their head around the fact these weren’t teachers. I kept getting sent, “This is what the PM’s going to say.” It was “Top graduates to go in and be teachers in prisons.” I kept saying, “I love that you’re saying this, but it’s not teachers, it’s prison officers.” No one can get their head around graduates being prison officers.
Our best bets were that if we could get the right people in - if we could begin to build the capability of prison officers and prison leadership - we could start to create some of the reforms that we’d seen in education over the past ten years. [I have looked at these reforms in a previous set of interviews.]
On paper, there were some real problems with this. Firstly, graduates don’t want to be prison officers. In our polling, 0% of male graduates at Oxford or Cambridge universities said that they would want to work for the Prison Service. Most of our polling suggested that 1-3% of graduates would very much like to work in the Prison Service. About 10% said they would consider it – this was working in the Prison Service, not being a prison officer.
We did focus groups, and we tried to understand why not, because loads about being a prison officer is very similar to other public service roles that graduates do consider. What we realised was that being a prison officer has a serious image problem. There are three words that come up again and again in our polling: prison officers are perceived as violent, dangerous and corrupt. The three words about the job itself are dangerous, boring and low status. That is, as a trilogy, deeply unappealing in a way that almost no other job is.
You can do a job which is super boring but glamorous, like being an investment banker – apologies to any investment bankers out there who think their job is very exciting – or a tax lawyer. People want to be tax lawyers because they get paid well, and it’s a high-status job. I’ve never been a tax lawyer, but the word on the street is it’s very boring. You can also have jobs which are very dangerous, like being in the army or being sent as a spy to Russia, which would be very dangerous but exciting, high status.
There’s something about boring, low status and dangerous which is uniquely unappealing. But what we found by talking to people was that, when they sat and thought about it, they realised they thought a prison officer would hit people over the head when they’re naughty, lock and unlock doors, and that was the whole job. When you talked about who’s in prison and what the job actually entails, they realised it’s much more of a relational-practice job, and that everything they’ve seen on films and TV is not entirely true. They began to be interested. That was the best bet we had: that if we repositioned the role as it actually is rather than as people perceive it to be we might be able to recruit some people.
But we were told it was a terrible idea repeatedly, including by experts in every domain. Prison experts and graduate-recruitment experts said it was a terrible idea. When we first opened applications, I did worry that literally no one would apply.
You didn’t listen?
Firstly, the focus groups were clear that there was a way of positioning this that wasn’t a terrible idea. Secondly, when we polled graduates, they said, “We’d never want to do that.” Then we said, “What if there was this offer where it was a graduate scheme?” We explained Unlocked, and about 50% said they would then be interested in this programme. There was definitely a sense that if we repositioned it, we could shift people.
I did Teach First back when it was weird and people thought it wasn’t a very good idea. The position of my colleagues was, “Just because you have a good degree, you think you can do our job? Screw you for that.” Of course, they were right: it didn’t make you able to do the job at all. What was interesting was the prison officer response was, “Why would you want to do this job if you had any other options?” That struck me as sad.
There were a couple of other evidence points that persuaded me this was a good idea. When I was leaving university, I looked for a prison officer scheme, because I thought Teach First sounded great, but a bit too easy, and what would really be a challenge would be being a prison officer. There was one being run, but it seemed very low status, and I was quite needy and wanted to impress people with my graduate job. Teach First seemed much better put together. I thought maybe I was the only person who felt like that.
When I was starting Unlocked, I was contacted by someone called Si, who was the CEO of the Brilliant Club, and he told me that he had also looked for a prison officer graduate scheme when he was applying for Teach First. Then I bumped into someone else, and I thought, “There are some of us out there who would apply for this.”
The people who end up in our prisons are people who social workers, teachers and doctors have engaged with much more than other people in our society:
About a quarter of prisoners grew up in care. In our youth system, two-thirds of children in prison have grown up in the care system. It’s quite a high threshold to go into the care system. Outcomes are terrible.
Many more prisoners will have had a social worker when they were children, because they were living in homes where they were unsafe. It’s a degree profession, so you need at least three years at university, one year postgraduate training, and ongoing professional development.
About 50% of prisoners left school without a single qualification. I used to lead a bit of a school. If someone left our school without a single qualification, I would say that we had failed that child. Teachers get four years of training and ongoing professional development.
Then doctors: about 70% of prisoners have some mental-health condition. Doctors get six years of training.
We invest heavily in that workforce to try to shift the trajectory of these people’s lives, to stop compounding the challenges.
Then they end up in prison: the people social workers, teachers, and doctors didn’t reach - the most challenging people, really expensive for society. That’s where we need our most expert public service workers to transform the outcomes – not in a mollycoddling-prisoners way, but just because they are bloody expensive. They are complex. They use many more public services than most of society. Many are homeless, many are long-term unemployed, and there are intergenerational issues: there’s just been data out showing that 2% of children in this country have a parent in prison, and the most common factor in offending for young males is having a family member in the criminal justice system.
How do we recruit and train this phenomenally important expert workforce? For much of the time Unlocked Graduates has been running, there has not been an interview to become a prison officer and you do not need a single GCSE. There’s no evidence that academic attainment makes you a better prison officer, partly because we don’t even capture that data. But we do know that people who have been successful academically are much less likely to become a prison officer than to take other public sector roles, so we are missing that diversity within the workforce. It says something about status when we recruit like that as well. It’s been a low bar to become a prison officer, and then training has been between five and ten weeks. That’s it. That’s not your initial training and then you get loads of training on the job. The majority of people on Unlocked do not meet their line manager.
No one comes and sees you, ever?
There are systemic problems, I increasingly think, that make that the case. Imagine - you can be 18 years old, you don’t need a single qualification, there isn’t an interview, and then you get, worst-case scenario, five weeks of training - some of which has been online over the years - then you arrive in a prison. You don’t have a line manager, you have no ongoing training, and you’re dealing with the most complex embedded social problems that exist.
The extraordinary thing in our prisons is that we have some of the best public servants I have ever encountered in any sector. We’ve got some people who are able to build relationships with prisoners who no one has managed to reach before through their lives, who everyone has given up on – who are considered unreachable – and you have public servants who are able to engage with them without any training or support, and having been recruited through a process which hasn’t tested for that. That is extraordinary, but it is because of skills they bring to the job themselves, and that is a terrible way to develop a workforce.
After two years, 79% of Unlocked graduates are still in their role, versus 61% who’ve come through the conventional route.
What are you doing over those two years that is different?
We think all prison officers should get what we’re providing. We’ve ended up stepping into a space where you would want line managers to be, if they had the capacity - which in the current system in prisons, they don’t have – or often the capability, because of the way we recruit and train. There are some extraordinary people in that job, but they’ve systemically not been given the support they need.
Firstly, we think of initial training as what happens before you start as a prison officer, but you don’t learn how to be a prison officer in a classroom. You can begin to build a good enough muscle memory to get the basics right, like how to search someone, or how to lock and unlock doors. But in your prison, you don’t know where the doors are when you first start, and you don’t know how the locks work. There are things that are so context-dependent that it’s very hard to teach them when you’re not in situ.
Secondly, when you are training and someone is running towards you threatening to thump you - you know they’re not going to, because you’re in a training scenario, and that is physiologically different. When you’re on a landing and some random prisoner – you don’t know what they’ve done to be in prison – is running towards you saying they’re going to thump you, quite sensibly, your body is going to go into a fight-or-flight response. The muscle memory that you build in initial training either gets deepened or replaced when you’re in situ. The first thing we needed was structured training once they were in the role, to prepare them for the reality of their specific context and the domain of prisons.
All of us were in school, and you can imagine yourself as this or that teacher. It’s quite hard to imagine what kind of prison officer you want to be, because they’re always depicted so horribly in films. You have to create that for yourself, in this completely alien environment, and that you need to be explicitly trained for.
The other thing that we do is create accountability around retention. Every week, we RAG-rate our participants in terms of their performance as prison officers. We have a group of purple participants, who have given us some indication that they are thinking about leaving. Every week, I’ll go through that data with the programme director, and they will then go through with our programme team: what are we doing to support those participants? How are they feeling? That creates accountability, and we then give them freedom to work out how they’re going to retain these people.
We have a list of 16 interventions that have helped us retain participants who are thinking about leaving, and we train the mentors in those. We also do no excuses training. In our first year, a participant quit because her boyfriend got his dream job in New York. The response of the mentor was, “Obviously, there was nothing I could do.” If her Unlocked job was seen as the most prestigious graduate scheme on offer, that would’ve looked like a very different conversation with her boyfriend. Because the prison officer role is so undervalued and so low status, it’s quite a jump for people who’ve worked in the Prison Service to realise that.
We recognised that whenever Unlocked felt low status or non-prestigious, we had participants talking about leaving. Because they’d signed up for a graduate scheme, they had to buy that this was going to be a prestigious scheme that was not going to ruin their life, or they’d quit. What we found was, if you give people accountability but also responsibility and freedom, and you train them - and then we also had group supervisions where they could take particularly knotty cases - we saw retention soar: 68% completed in two years, and that was up to 88% a couple of years ago.
What things are on that list of 16 interventions?
The first thing is we would try to slow down your decision-making. People can sometimes quit on a whim, or because they feel like nothing can change; they feel hopeless. We would say, “Hold off on the decision.” We have a conversation which helps them slow down their thinking, and either link that to some event in a few weeks’ time or give them a timeline.
The second thing is reconnecting them with their why:
Why did they join the programme?
How is that currently not being met?
How could we restructure things so it is met?
Sometimes that’s just self-perception. You think you’re going to change the system; you realise quite quickly one person is not going to change the whole system, at least not in a two-year scheme. It’s about recalibrating what impact looks like. You might connect them with someone else who’s been through something similar on the programme to talk to them about how they got through it. Sometimes they might have gone through some awful death in custody, got very little of the support that they felt they needed, and they need a four-month stint in a non-operational role, giving them space to process it, and then they can go back to an operational role.
One of them is a walk-and-talk with me. I remember one day walking around Battersea with a participant who wanted to quit, revisiting the why. Sometimes they’ve been offered another job, and it’s talking to them about that job and the impact they’re going to make. Some of it is reminding them this is going to be another broken attachment for the prisoners in their care, and they didn’t sign up to do that. How do we support them through that?
It’s giving people permission to be unreasonable. It’s quite unreasonable to say, “No, you’re not going to quit. Let’s have a chat about that. You’re going to slow down your decision.” It’s much more unreasonable than saying, “These are good reasons. I totally understand. Really sorry to lose you, but thank you.” A lot of what we do is build unreasonableness into the organisation, and that’s a place where we’ve had to build unreasonableness into the team. We do that by training them, giving them examples, and giving them permission to be unreasonable.
What else has changed? If I joined the final cohort, how would my experience have been different?
Completely different. We were told it would take about two years:
You’ve got to build a master’s programme and get it accredited.
We were the first charity to ever deliver prison officer training, and we had to get that all signed off.
We also had to build a brand and recruit graduates into a scheme they’d never heard of, in a sector none of them wanted to work for.
The problem was we had this incredible opportunity with the government to do something bold. We had a government which was supportive of our agenda in a way that we weren’t convinced would continue, and we also had prisons that were completely on fire.
You can spend years planning, but until you trial it, you don’t know what’s going to go well. The first time you do something is always the worst time you do something. Let’s get the first time out of the way, and then we can actually start. Let’s build as we go. I quite like jumping out of the plane and building the parachute on the way down, because it focuses the mind, and you end up with something better.
We signed the contract with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) in the final week of November. We launched our recruitment in the third week of December. The day before we planned this big launch was the biggest prison riot in a generation. It opened the news agenda into prisons, which was useful - but it was bad. It was the end of the milk round, so we were launching a brand when the milk round had finished, in a sector which had just had a riot. We onboarded participants in the March, three months after we launched the brand, and then we started the training that July. I had a baby in the March, and was recruiting my senior team; two of my senior team started when I had my son. It was pretty rapidly pulled together.
What we’re interested in is what prison officers need to know, do and believe in order to be expert in their job.
For knowledge, over the years, we moved more of it out of the time that we had together, because we could put that in pre-reading. The time we had together was focused on building that practice, because that’s the thing you have to do in person.
What you need to do was the biggest thing, and that’s where we’ve built a practice curriculum and scenarios. After our first cohort, we sent people out to spend some time with Doug Lemov from the Teach Like a Champion team, learning how to use practice. We’ve tried to codify what it is that makes a good prison officer, because very little of that was codified beyond the procedural bits of the job, locking and unlocking. We had to codify how to build relationships and how to deal with challenging prisoners. We then needed to build models of excellence. We wanted videos, but it took us years to make them, so at the beginning it was prison officers who we would train to act out the scenario. That’s imperfect, but it was the best we had.
Then training the trainer. The Prison Service is unusual in how highly it prizes being a great prison officer as something that makes you a good trainer. That’s the narrative, but it’s not true. Being a great trainer has its own domain knowledge and skill set, and we had to train the trainers how to train; many of them had also not had much professional development. We got much better at that.
We positioned ourselves in opposition to the Prison Service in our first year. We were like, “We’re going to do things differently.” We focused on rehabilitation. I spoke about good prison officers having a good balance between care and authority. Some of our first cohort were probably too focused on the care and not comfortable enough with setting boundaries and holding authority and power, and that is dangerous in a prison. We learned from that.
We only did the standard corruption training for our first cohort. What we found was the forgetting curve: you learn something and then you forget most of it quite quickly. If you do a training session, you’ll forget a lot of it within a week. When it comes to corruption, forgetting 90% of what you’ve learned – given the high risk of corruption within our prison system, particularly for young female staff, as we’ve seen - we realised we have to do through-the-year training on corruption. We know what makes good training, but somehow we didn’t use that in the corruption training, because we used the standard training as a risk cover. It reduced risk in that we could arse-cover and say, “We trained them,” but it created risk, because that’s not how you learn this stuff.
The mentors: because we didn’t have a model of what good prison officer training looked like, there was an easy way for mentoring to become wellbeing, “How are you going? You broke up with your boyfriend. Let’s have a chat about that.” That is not what they needed. You’ve got your friends for that, and if you need a therapist, you need someone who’s qualified to do that. That should not be a professional mentor’s role.
But without a model of what a good prison officer looks like, the best you’ve got is what works for you. We had some mentors saying, “Why don’t you try this? This works for me.” But the reason it worked is because this mentor was seven foot tall and had the resting face of an aggressive bulldog. It wasn’t going to work. Then he’d say, “Why isn’t it working for you? You must not be doing it right,” instead of recognising that it works for me, but it won’t work for you. What we needed was the codification of what good looks like regardless of who you are - this is something all good officers do. They’ll bring their own personality to it, but there is a consistent approach.
When we codified that and made a model of that, we were able to get mentors developing participants professionally. From survey data, we found the mentors who focus all their time on developing professional practice got much better survey results than those that were focused on wellbeing, in terms of how much participants felt supported and developed by them.
You’ve then created these Vanguard Wings - what are they?
I’m going to start by telling a story. When I did Teach First, I was placed in a school in North London where we were undersubscribed, so we didn’t have enough children applying every year to fill all the places that we had. For each pupil, you get money from the government, so not having enough pupils means you don’t have enough money to run your school. If pupils got expelled from other schools, if they weren’t happy at other schools, but also if they were new to the country, they’d end up in our school. The cohorts became increasingly challenging as we went through the school, because we had all these vacancies. The school was very caring about those children and wanting to provide them support and care. The year before I went, 18% of those children got five GCSEs.
We’re talking mid-2000s?
We’re talking 2006. It was the Blair years: set a target, raise performance. The government set a floor standard: every school would have to have 30% of children hitting their target, or they’d be in some trouble. I was an English teacher, and it had to be with English and maths GCSE. At the time, you could do a BTEC qualification, which counted as four GCSEs in the league table, so you could do one BTEC plus English and maths. We were quite good at getting children a BTEC over a weekend. It had to be the English and maths on top. We couldn’t get to 30%.
The year I left, we maybe got 23%. But there was a real narrative that 30% didn’t understand these kids. They were living in disadvantaged communities. Some of them wouldn’t have breakfast in the morning. Some of them didn’t have anyone at home – single-parent family, mum was having to work four jobs to keep food on the table. Good reasons why these kids were struggling to be successful in school. They were hardworking teachers - I learnt a huge amount from some of them. But there was a narrative that, for kids like these, there are too many barriers.
Then a new academy opened up the road with the same children. Some of the siblings of my children went to this school. They actually had higher free school meals than us. On paper, it was a slightly more challenging demographic than my school. They got 83% 5 A*-C at GCSE.
This was Mossbourne?
It was Mossbourne. I’d heard about KIPP schools as well, working in some of the most disadvantaged communities in America, that were getting 100% of their kids into four-year college programmes. Their kids were living in projects and had similar issues to my kids. I went to visit Mossbourne, and taught a lesson there. I realised that the kids were never the problem. These were the same kids, but they behaved completely differently. They learnt more in that hour than in any lesson I had taught in my career to that point. I’d been teaching three years.
I realised that the problem was teachers like me who believed that those children weren’t able to achieve. I was completely in it at that point. I was like, “Education is my life. I want to continue working in disadvantaged schools.” We set up King Solomon Academy (KSA). We got 93% A* to C. In my subject, English, we got 95% A* to B. Two children got a D. That was the same demographic – actually it was even harder than Mossbourne. Michaela recently got 100% of their kids. All of that started with Mossbourne, KIPP, and then KSA, because it showed that the problem is never the children. The problem was us. It moved the locus of control to us, and then we can solve the problem.
When we were starting Unlocked Graduates back in 2015, the essay question was, “How do we create that in prisons?” It was around the time that Michael Gove was setting up these reform prisons, and they were going to have new leaders. Maybe that would do it, but when you looked at how we were recruiting and training prison officers, it was so accidental that there was not the capability being brought into the system that would be able to bring this reform agenda. Looking at schools, Teach First was transformative - it brought in this group of people who were able to reform stuff. The starting point was, how do we do that for prisons? The answer was, we set up something like Teach First. We spent the last ten years building that capability into the system. But for the last five years we’ve been thinking: how do we create that proof point?
We brought out our new strategy in 2023. We were like, “We’re going to create this proof point.” We saw an example in the US – a different model: they’re trying to replicate Scandinavian principles in prisons, whereas ours are not. They had one wing in a prison run on Scandinavian principles, and all the other wings run as normal, but with prisoners allocated at random to this one wing, to see if the outcomes are different for prisoners living on this wing than on other wings with the same prisoner group but different inputs.
That was another penny-drop moment. In England we’ve got some fantastic prisons. We’ve got Grendon for people with personality disorders. It’s one of the best prisons in the world. People travel from all over to see it, but somehow the practice never spreads. It’s not seen as transferable. People say, “That’s just Grendon.” What was beautiful about this wing was it’s the same prisoners. You can see that if the whole prison could be run like this, it could be different.
The thing that was powerful about Mossbourne was that it wasn’t a posh Surrey neighbourhood. Hackney is a very different place now, but in 2006 it was still pretty grim, particularly Hackney Downs, where Mossbourne was. They still had big warehouse parties there where people would smash through and put on big raves. When I walked to the school, there were people lying in the gutter.
When we were starting Unlocked, I’d been to launch it in the north of England, and they said, “You could never do that here. You couldn’t pick graduates as prison officers. The prisoners would walk all over them.” I said, “We’re doing it in Wandsworth, and it’s been successful, and we’re just starting in Pentonville, and that’s going well too.” The minute I said that, they were like, “If you can do it in Wandsworth, you can do it up here.”
We chose Wandsworth and Pentonville, two of the most difficult prisons in the country, recently gone into urgent notifications. Unlocked Graduates started as a graduate scheme. It became a model. Over the years, we have honed the evidence about how you recruit and train someone to be a great officer. We applied that model. We’ve opened these two wings. Pentonville is the top two floors of a five-storey wing, with about 65 prisoners, and Wandsworth is a whole wing with about 160 prisoners.
We said to staff in the prison, “Would you like to come and work on this wing? What we want to do is recruit and train staff properly to make better outcomes for prisoners.” We had a lot of applications. Wandsworth did their own recruitment process; Pentonville, we supported on theirs. Both of them used the principles from Unlocked about what makes a good prison officer. Using our recruitment processes, we selected those that would make good officers.
We couldn’t do a six-week initial training programme, and these were experienced prison officers, so they didn’t need that. But we did want an immersive experience to build the team so they would get to know each other, which is an important part of initial training at Unlocked’s Summer Institute, but also to help build their sense of possibility and help them understand best practice and think about how they might apply that to their own context. We took them to a prison in Sweden for a week. Sweden sounds like Scandinavian utopia, but if anyone Googles crime or prisons in Sweden, it’s moving much more towards the UK and American system than it used to be.
Before that, we did two days of training on locus of control – how do you take a problem and make it your own? How do you take accountability? Good practice and prison officer professionalism. We began to set up group supervision so they’d understand how they could work together to try to solve knotty problems.
The prison then allocated at random. When you first come to prison, you’ll spend about five days in a wing just for new prisoners, where they check if you’ve got health conditions, if you need to be separated from other prisoners. On day five, if you are part of general population – you don’t have a drug addiction issue, you haven’t committed a sexual offence, you don’t need or choose to be separated – you get allocated at random. Prisoners started being allocated at random to these wings, and King’s College London set up a randomised controlled trial, so we could accurately see: same prisoners, staff who align with our reference about what makes a good officer, getting fortnightly training. Do we see better outcomes for prisoners?
Crucially, we trusted those staff. We said, “What do you think is best for the prisoners?” There is a problem in our prisons where we respond to risk or failure with box-ticking processes, so that in future we can say we’ve managed a risk instead of trying to solve the problem. An example is if you are a prisoner who’s at risk of self-harm or suicide, there will be an assessment, and an ACCT document will be opened, which will require a prison officer, for example, to check on you every hour to see if you have tried to self-harm or commit suicide. Every hour, the prison officer will come along, check, and sign to say they’ve checked.
You are not dealing with someone’s propensity to self-harm. What you’re doing is covering risk, so if something ends up in court, you can say, “I did what was expected.” But all the energy you’re taking with that process could be applied to having conversations with the prisoner, trying to work out what’s going on, maybe trying to signpost them, trying to find a different solution.
What we wanted to do with these wings was, as much as possible, instead of introducing a process when there was failure, ask: how should the wing be run? What decisions should we make that are best for the prisoners? Prison officers are best placed in a prison to do that. Why don’t we normally do that? Because we don’t recruit and train prison officers systemically enough to be able to trust them with those decisions. That’s what the trial is doing. If you go to Wandsworth or Pentonville, you will walk around other general population wings with the same prisoners demographically, and then you will go to the Vanguard Wing, and our hope is that what you see there will be so mind-blowingly different you will realise the prisoner was never the problem. The system was the problem, and it’s fixable.
Wandsworth say they’re going to put it in two other wings. Charlie Taylor, Chief Inspector of Prisons, says he wants one in every prison. The Ministry of Justice says there’s no current plan to expand them.
How does this spread to become more mainstream?
Governors have much less autonomy than almost any other public service that I’ve seen.
They are civil servants, so they can’t speak out publicly.
They have a maximum spend limit of about £500.
They don’t choose their own staff; they all get centrally selected.
Something they can do is set up a wing with a different purpose. The obvious response from a governor who has one of these wings, which are running very successfully, is, “The thing that I have in my arsenal is an ability to open another wing or two.”
There’s a problem, which is that we are concentrating a very particular group of staff - who our evidence shows are the staff who lead to the best outcomes for prisoners - in one bit of a prison. The other side is that we are concentrating the other staff in other bits of the prison, and the more wings you run like this, the more you’re concentrating another group of staff. There are, of course, staff who might be very suspicious of this. A lot of this is about mindset. I had my mind completely blown by Mossbourne and went on to be a very different teacher as a result. But not everyone will.
Any governor can set one of these up in their prison tomorrow. Of course that is the response from the system. The response from the centre needs to be different, and our recommendations will look a bit different. We’ve done staff surveys comparing the staff who work on these wings with other staff in the prison. Are you happy at work? Do you feel safe at work? Do you ever think about leaving? Same as everyone else. There are two questions which differ: do you believe prisoners can be rehabilitated? And do you have any good relationships with prisoners? Those two questions are wildly different - those are the most predictive questions.
Something we didn’t assess for was the ability to work as part of a team effectively. We would have selected for that if we could do it again. These are prison officers who are answering two questions very differently from their colleagues, and they have a different set of values.
The biggest problem we have in prisons is offending, not reoffending post-release. Reoffending post-release is a problem, but we think of it as you leave prison, hope you don’t reoffend, and at some point in the future you commit a crime, and then you’re back in a reoffending cycle. That’s not what it looks like. At the moment, many people are offending every day in prison. They’re taking drugs, being violent, contacting their victims on a mobile phone in their cell. The problem is offending in prison. The best predictor of reoffending is previous offending, and the more recent that offending, the stronger the predictor.
If people are offending every day in prison, they’re probably going to offend as soon as they come out as well. Part of what we’re doing on these wings is creating a break in someone’s offending behaviour. Average length of stay is about 40 days. If they’re released from prison in 20 years’ time, even if the 40 days they spent on this wing does change their life, you’re never going to be able to prove it. But we are just interested in: can we stop or reduce offending in prison? Because that’s our best predictor of offending later on. Many of those people have grown up in and out of children’s homes. They’ve been offending every day for years, through their childhood. Can we create a break, and can we teach people a different way of behaving?
What we’re seeing from the Vanguard Wings is every safety data point is better. There’s less violence, less self-harm, and less disorder. Those are the most important data points other than escape and death in a prison. We also haven’t had any escapes or deaths - they’re pretty unusual data points. We also haven’t had a single serious incident or fire. Very unusual, so there’s no statistical significance to it. But these are objectively safer, better wings, and they get better outcomes.
If all we’ve done is change the quality of prison officer, and we have seen every key metric improve – a 45% reduction in violence - there is a question about why we are not changing how we recruit and train our prison officers. When Mossbourne got their results, the first question was, “How did they fiddle this?” Mossbourne did have banding. They have some rowing scholarships. That doesn’t get 83% in this demographic, but it definitely gives some people some ammunition. Michaela - people say the free school meals are low. It doesn’t explain the huge changes. People will always come up with a reason why, and what you need to do is make it as hard as possible, so those reasons are as small as possible.
What we’ve tried to do is choose a difficult prison so that no one can say, “You did it in Grendon. What a surprise.” But what people are saying is, “We always knew the prison officer made that big a difference.” Really? You’ve continued to train them for ten weeks. You’ve continued to not give them any professional development. You’ve continued to pay them less and have them on a lower band than people doing admin jobs in non-op roles. You always knew this? That’s a massive ethical issue. If this is true, and our data shows it is true, we should be applying the Unlocked model across the whole service.
They don’t have to be graduates, although it would be interesting to start doing some evidence collecting on whether at least you need English and maths GCSE, because governors tell me the biggest gaps they have at the moment in prison officers are oracy and written skills. Maybe we should start testing for that a bit more. But what we do know is that prison officers who have a skill set around building relationships, and a value set around how they view the prison system, are more likely to get these outcomes. We should be recruiting everyone to that bar. We also know fortnightly training – structured instructional coaching training – plus group supervision, plus trusting a team of officers to make more decisions for the prisoners in their care, makes for better outcomes for prisoners.
The final bang of the drum on this point is we have given each wing £10,000 to invest in the physical environment. That is an amount of money that the governor can invest, so the governors recommended that that would not make this non-scalable. They haven’t spent anywhere near that amount. The big thing they’ve done is repainted the walls. But getting the paint through the gates at one of those prisons required a governor to be in touch with security. The paint was stuck in the gate for weeks.
We need to change the way we recruit and train prison officers to match the complexity of the job and the complexity of the people they’re dealing with – not just because it makes sense on paper, but because we now have the data that it makes for less offending in prison. Especially if we’re going to expand the prison population massively, they’re going to churn and reoffend when they come out. We need to stop them reoffending, and the way we do that is by investing in our prison officers. It doesn’t cost any more.
But we also need to completely change the way the service focuses on the prison officer. There’s a quote from a manager in a prison, and he says, “The gap between poor-performing and fired in a prison is a chasm.” You can spend your entire career poor-performing as a prison officer, and you will never lose your job for it. Commit gross misconduct, or do something terrible, you’ll lose your job. But you can be one of those people who overuses or underuses power your entire career.
Part of that is that you don’t have good enough line management to track that - to support people to get better, but also to hold them to account and to be able to get rid of them. Part of that is that there’s so much time and energy spent on gross-misconduct and non-attendance issues that there’s no headspace to deal with underperformance, because there isn’t enough HR support at the local level to hold those most complex cases, to free you up to deal with the others. Part of that is that, in some of the prisons we work in, line managers will line-manage - 25 prison officers is not unusual – but up to 45 or 50 officers. A system where you have 25 people to line-manage does not care about that bit of the workforce, in my view.
If the prison officer is the way that you improve prisons – and there was lots of academic evidence before our trial that it was, but we now have absolute evidence through a randomised controlled trial that it is – you need to get better people in at that level, but you then need to change every system on the way through. Opening more wings is tempting because you can do it tomorrow, and you don’t require central government to pull a lever, but it does mean you’re potentially creating ghettos in the prison of the wrong staff. It needs to be a whole-system approach. You trial it across a prison or an area, giving more autonomy to those prisons, and you invest much more upfront in recruitment and training of staff.
The other thing we found is sickness is 50% lower on our wings compared to their peers: they’re taking about half the number of sick days – seven rather than fourteen – so that pays itself back pretty quickly. You trial it across an area, and then you roll it out across the system. But what you don’t do is say, “Nice, let’s open a couple more wings.” As central government, we need to take prison officers seriously.
I’m going to ask a couple of final questions about the life cycle of a startup. At the outset, you pitched Michael Gove, who gave you an initial small tranche of funding to develop the idea.
Michael Gove is fairly unusual as ministers go, but how did you plan that pitch? How did it actually go?
I found Michael Gove a very unusual minister to work with, in that he’s prepared to do what’s right, not what’s easy, and not what’s necessarily going to make him popular with officials. It’d be good if we had more of that. What we did have was this very hard deadline of the Brexit vote. At the time, there was a narrative that there was definitely going to be a win for Remain. Michael Gove would then be made deputy prime minister to try to bring the Conservative Party back together.
We knew that we had this borrowed time until the Brexit vote happened. We made sure that we had a meeting in the diary with Michael in advance of that, so that we could get it over the line before he got the big promotion. I wrote a business plan. I had someone on loan from a think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, who had been part of the Coates Review, who was brilliant: Lucy Kinder. She supported with that and also tried to get us booked into careers fairs and things, in the hope that we’d get the nod, because we knew we wanted to start quickly.
I sent that to Michael, his advisers, and the Ministry of Justice officials. It was about 70 pages, and PricewaterhouseCoopers gave me someone to help do the financials, because I had no idea how to do any of this. Josh MacAlister from Frontline, who’s now children’s minister, gave me a copy of their bid. Dave Spencer from Police Now gave me a case for change they’d written. I was meeting Brett Wigdortz, who’s founder of Teach First, quite regularly, and I tried to work out how we would apply this to the prison context.
I spoke to everybody I could: unions, university officials, I went into prison every week to speak to prisoners and prison officers. I tried to get as much evidence as possible to build what this programme would need to look like. We did loads of polling of university students. We tried to give Michael an evidence-based paper to show how we’d make this work, with full costings.
I sent that maybe three days in advance of the meeting. I then went to this meeting where I had a PowerPoint, and I pitched the model. Michael was very good at bringing everybody to these meetings – all of the officials and decision-makers – so they could hear from him what he wanted to happen. There were maybe 20 people in the meeting. I was physically shaking. I was absolutely terrified. I was also maybe a month pregnant. But I went through this PowerPoint and pitched. At the end of that, Michael said, “Brilliant. Let’s support it.”
With Teach First, you get to work with loads of different schools. In this case you were selling to a single purchaser. How should a CEO plan for that relationship risk?
We tried to make it so prisons had to pay £500 for each one, because we thought that would create some market pressure: if we weren’t good enough, they wouldn’t pay for it. It would create a quality marker as well. But we weren’t allowed to do it, because it would cost more to transfer us that money than £500, because of the way finance works.
What then happened, of course, was that Remain lost, Theresa May became Prime Minister, and she fired Michael Gove very quickly. Liz Truss came in as Secretary of State for Justice, and we had to start again. At the same time, the Kids Company scandal broke, so you weren’t allowed to get large amounts of money from the government without going through a formal procurement process. The whole thing fell apart, and we had to build a new pitch for Liz Truss and create some process to get it off the ground.
By that stage, we had good MoJ support. What I realised early on – and I learned this from Brett Wigdortz – was the more that you spend time with the people who are going to be your detractors, helping them to design the model. One of the things the Prison Officers’ Association, who were potentially going to not be supportive, said to us was, “We think training needs to look more like the job. It needs to be longer hours.” We were already planning to do that, just to cover the content. But their point was brilliant, and it helped us change the narrative as to why we were doing that. When we went public, they did say it was barmy on the BBC, but they probably could have come out more aggressively if they hadn’t helped design the thing behind closed doors.
I saw my job as getting to know all those people, them helping us design the programme, and it responding to what they thought was best for the system, not us. We do only have one customer, which is the Ministry of Justice. But the governors are the ones running the prison, and if they’re not happy, the government does respond. If the governors aren’t bought in, it doesn’t matter what someone in Westminster says. All the governors have to do is roll their eyes in front of the team, and the team know they can cancel training for our participants. We had to get the governors’ support, and the relationship with the governors has been as important as the one with central government.
With central government, you should have a civil service team who is carrying out the minister’s wishes. It needed to be clear for the civil service what the minister’s wishes around Unlocked were. A big part of my job has been making sure that the ministers know who we are and have a view on us, so that the civil servants know what the direction of travel needs to be. That can be quite annoying for the civil servants, but it serves us all best in the end.
You have multiple cohorts, then you come to a point where you’re not able to recontract. The Ministry of Justice said there were a set of terms, they were clear to all the bidders, and they couldn’t change them. David Shipley said, “It’s the Ministry of Justice rejecting anything that’s not under its direct control.” The Justice Committee was incredibly critical.
At what point did you realise you couldn’t accept the Ministry of Justice’s terms to recontract?
The night the contract came out. It was published about 10pm on a Friday night. I read it, burst into tears, and spoke immediately to my Chief Operating Officer, who had had the exact same response. Our initial response was, “They don’t want Unlocked to deliver this contract any more,” because it was so far from the model that we had built over the years. The biggest thing was that decision-making would no longer sit with us for key deliverables, but we would still be held to account for the same outcomes. It felt like quite a badly designed contract, because who would sign a contract where you don’t control the levers by which you’re judged?
We thought, “They obviously don’t want us to deliver it any more.” I said this to an official, and the response was, “That’s totally not the intention. Unlocked need to be the best applicant through the bid process, but of course, we assumed Unlocked were going to bid.” We were reassured that this could be worked out on the other side. We had experienced that previously. Our first contract had payment terms six months in arrears. We were in startup mode, so we obviously couldn’t do that. We had a consultation immediately after we won the contract, and we had payments made five days in arrears.
They said, “Put in a bid and say how you would run it.” We did that. Really high-risk option, isn’t it? But we thought that’s what we need to do. We thought there’s a good chance they don’t go with us, because we’ve veered quite a way from the bid. Then we got the call. I was on holiday. I saw that we’d won the contract and thought, “Amazing. It has all been okay.” At no point in this stage did we get the politicians involved, because that would be breaking the rules of procurement, and then you put yourself up against risk.
I emailed and said, “I’m so pleased. Thank you so much. Let’s set up a call so we can start negotiating on contract terms.” I put in an attachment and said, “Here are the things we can’t sign. Here are our recommended replacements,” which our lawyers had helped us draft. They came back and said, “We can’t change a single term. You sign unamended, or you won’t be the preferred bidder.” We thought that can’t be right, because we’ve never had that experience, and of course we’d negotiate terms. I sent emails saying, “Could we get on a call, please? Can we talk about this?” But all we got was this stock response, “You’ve got to sign or you’ll be disqualified from the process. We’re not amending.” We were writing to the permanent secretary, writing to the minister, and we kept getting this stock response back.
At the same time, I was talking to the political side at Number 10 and the minister’s team, who were saying, “This is a complete disaster.” Our lawyers were saying, “You could change the terms. You’re the only bidder who’s ever delivered this contract.” It was March when we were told we were the preferred bidder. There’d then been an election called, and we’d gone into purdah. In August, we were told, “If you don’t sign by this date, you will be disqualified.”
We kept thinking maybe we just sign, and then we do things the way that we want to, or maybe we sign and then we negotiate to do things differently. We were being told all sorts of things by the MoJ – that maybe we could do things against the contract – but, new contract team, we knew it was too risky. You couldn’t sign a contract that you knew you couldn’t deliver. So we just couldn’t see a way out. I’d used some reserves to keep paying our recruitment team, but I had a date by which, if we didn’t sign, we’d have to make the recruitment function redundant. Mid-August 2024, we were disqualified, and we had to decide to close the charity.
We’d been the most successful graduate scheme in the public sector on many measures:
We were number 22 in The Times Top 100 list of graduate recruiters.
We were one of the most oversubscribed graduate schemes in the country, for a prison officer job.
We had the president of the Oxford Union on the landings of Pentonville for four years.
We had headteachers leaving schools to come and do the programme.
We had the highest retention rate – 18 percentage points better than coming through the standard route.
We had people going up in seniority.
We had someone who went to KPMG, and they started recruiting ex-prisoners in KPMG.
We had this incredible track record as a golden child public sector graduate scheme, never missing a single target.
But we couldn’t compromise on impact in the end. We couldn’t sign a contract knowing that we couldn’t deliver what we’d been delivering to date. We couldn’t see a way through, so we decided that we’d have to do what was right, not what was easy. We always say that to our participants, “You do what’s right, not what’s easy.” That’s what we did.
You’ve set up a transformational school; you’ve set up a transformational prison officer training route and transformed wings. What’s going to be next for you?
I’m interested in this model. I’ve seen many things not change public service and not make things better for the most disadvantaged in our country. There are points in human history where you see things like the invention of the railway completely transforming society. There are similar highest-leverage innovations which can do their own version of inventing the railways, in a small way, for the public sector. I saw that happen in schools through Mossbourne, KSA, Michaela. It showed what was possible.
Brett Wigdortz talks about starting Teach First in a country where there wasn’t a single school with above-average free school meals that got above-average GCSE results, so it was impossible on paper for these schools to do well. When the impossible becomes possible, the whole sector lifts - GCSE results are much higher than they were 20 years ago. You can grow up poor in this country, go to a school where most children are poor, and do extraordinarily well. Phonics has also done that for schools: one policy has made a seismic change to outcomes. I’ve been interested in what that looks like for prisons, and the Vanguard Wings and Unlocked Graduates have managed to do that.
We have created a seismic change around prison officer recruitment and training. There is this big innovation happening at the moment, and it is largely based on our work. I believe Vanguard Wings are dropping the gauntlet for the system to do things differently. I want to do the same thing again. I love startups. With Unlocked, I do feel that, if you are government-funded – and I’ve seen this with other schemes – you probably have a period of up to ten years to be disruptive before you become the system. Even if you refuse to become the system, like Unlocked, the system will force you to become the system, because bureaucracy eats what’s in front of it.
I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I will do a startup, and it will be a similar theory of change model. I’m not ready to fall in love again yet. With this startup, you need to be in love. It needs to be so central to who you are.
Unlocked should never be defined by a failed government contract. That’s one very small part of our journey, and what that enabled us to do was the wings. We were able to fundraise: about a third of our income has been fundraised this year, compared to about 10% historically. That has enabled us to set up these Vanguard Wings, which we didn’t have capacity to do while we were running a graduate scheme, and to ramp up our middle leadership training.
The thing Unlocked needs to be defined by is the impact it had on the system: a ten-year journey of trying to shift the system as much as possible and create a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change prisons. Of course it’s sad: it’s falling in love, and this is breaking up. But the history of Unlocked is the impact, and the failed government contract enabled us to have more impact.
FYI: Tried to listen to this on Spotify and it doesn't seem to have the questions in - there's just silence in the space where the host's questions should be.