Unlocked Graduates Celebrates a Record-Breaking Year

Last month, we celebrated the launch of Unlocked’s 2024-2025 Impact Report at an event in the House of Lords. We were delighted to be joined by so many of the people who have made the last year a milestone one for Unlocked, not least our participants and Ambassadors, funders and corporate partners, who support us to innovate and find new solutions to some of society’s most challenging problems. We are also incredibly grateful to The Rt Hon. the Lord Foster of Bath, Chair of the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee, for supporting this event.

The last 12 months have seen record-breaking success for Unlocked Graduates.

Following our most competitive recruitment season with over 40 applications per place, we welcomed our largest ever cohort to Summer Institute in July last year. Over 130 future prison leaders completed their training with Unlocked in the summer before starting their roles on the frontline.

Our 2022 cohort graduated from the Unlocked programme in September with our highest ever retention rates as our support and training model – led by our excellent team of Mentoring Prison Officers – continues to demonstrate incredible success. We are delighted to see so many of this cohort continue their work towards our mission of breaking cycles of reoffending, with many being promoted or taking on additional responsibilities on the landings.

Following the launch of our new Impact Report, Unlocked Graduates’ CEO and Founder Natasha Porter OBE said: “We are incredibly proud of all the work that our participants and Ambassadors are doing in prisons around the country. They are having a real impact on the landings, supporting the prisoners in their care and breaking cycles of reoffending. This has been an outstanding year for Unlocked Graduates, with record-breaking recruitment and retention figures on our graduate programme, meaning we are able to reach even more prisoners and continue to drive system reform. This success is the result of years of continuous innovation which we are determined to continue in the year ahead.”

We are incredibly proud of the impact that our participants and Ambassadors are having, working in some of the most challenging prisons in the country and continuing to support the prisoners in their care. Since we were founded in 2016, we have now placed nearly 900 graduates as frontline prison officers in 38 prisons across England and Wales, and participants and Ambassadors from our programme have reached more than 125,000 prisoners.

This success is the result of years of continuous innovation which we are determined to continue in the year ahead

Unlocked’s Associate Director of Impact and Insights, Liam Fenn PhD said: “We are delighted to present our latest Impact Report, highlighting some of the incredible achievements for Unlocked Graduates over the past 12 months. Our evidence-based solutions to the recruitment and development of prison officers continue to demonstrate success with record outcomes this year. We continue to build world-leading datasets on the experiences of prison officers in order to find the most effective ways of training prison staff to improve outcomes for prisoners and break cycles of reoffending.”

You can read our full Impact Report here.