Justice Select Committee: Training excellent prison officers

Justice Select Committee: Training excellent prison officers

“Prison is surely where we need our greatest professional expertise. This is where we need to entice our most masterful relationship builders. We need to be clear that the prison officer job requires excellence.”

Unlocked Graduates CEO and founder Natasha Porter OBE recently gave oral evidence to the House of Commons Justice Select Committee Inquiry on the Prison Operational Workforce. This followed Unlocked Graduates’ written evidence to the Inquiry.

The committee explored the key challenges to the workforce, including recruitment, retention and the culture of the prison service. Unlocked Graduates’ evidence was informed by over 600 Unlocked participants and Ambassadors working in establishments across England and Wales, reaching a third of the prisoner population:

“At Unlocked Graduates, we believe that the prison officer is the most important person for many prisoners while they are in prison. Prisoners have told us that and we have heard it again and again. That is why our scheme is focused on the prison officer rather than on another job.

The role is incredibly complex to do this job very well. There is a need to shift the way the public, prisons and even prison officers see the role.

There is also recruitment challenge, with pressures with shortages just to fill vacancies. It is a real mistake to do that at the cost of quality.

Some of the most impressive public servants I have ever come across are prison officers, working on the frontline in prisons. They are going out and seeking this knowledge, almost despite some of the systems around them. They are doing phenomenal work with some people that teachers or social workers haven’t managed to reach.

A prison officer with not very much training or support is doing amazing work. How do we codify what they are doing and what is working for them and roll it out across all prison officers? There is a way of working in prison that is incredibly effective.”

Natasha went into further detail regarding the importance of the prison officer role, its complexity and the excellent training required in an op-ed for Russell Webster:

“Relationships between prisoners and frontline staff are at the heart of prison. Prisoners have stories of the profound difference ‘good’ and ‘bad’ officers have had on their time in custody.

Good prison officers are on the frontline, supporting prisoners to break cycles of reoffending. They encourage attendance at education, support family ties, signpost towards employment post release. Rehabilitation isn’t done to somebody, but supportive and skilled professionals can plant important seeds, and be a key part of someone’s rehabilitative journey.

Those who end up in prisons increasingly have complex histories of challenge and disadvantage. One in four has been care, nearly two thirds are functionally illiterate, many have substance dependency issues. At every other point in their lives, social workers, teachers, and doctors are deployed by the state, all with more training and higher bars to entry.

We need to be clear that the prison officer job requires excellence. As far as I know, there’s no evidence that this correlates with prior academic qualifications, but there is a skill set good prison officers have: excellent relationship building, a sense of possibility, moral courage. There is a baseline we need to recruit to, but there also needs to be more deliberate training over a much longer period.”

Read Natasha Porter’s full op-ed for Russell Webster here.