20th February 2026
At our Annual Conference in Birmingham last week, we were delighted to launch our 2025-2026 Impact Report, spotlighting some of our incredible achievements over the past 12 months.
This has been another milestone year for Unlocked Graduates, and our unique approach to the training and development of high-performing prison leaders has continued to show real success.
Throughout this period, we saw some incredible outcomes across our award-winning graduate programme and our new middle leadership programme, Unlocked ChangeMakers, with our participants and Ambassasdors making a real difference on the landings, helping to break cycles of reoffending. This report documents some of the highlights from the past year, including:
- New data published by the Ministry of Justice shows that retention for prison officers on our graduate programme is 17 percentage points higher after two years than those joining the same prisons via the standard entry route, ensuring outstanding officers can continue their transformative work on the frontline.
- Since 2017, our participants and Ambassadors have now reached more than 140,000 prisoners across England and Wales, building transformative relationships with those in their care and helping to radically improve outcomes.
- Last summer, we published Leading Prison Landings: The Unlocked Guide to Jailcraft, a first-of-its-kind training manual for prison officers, continuing our efforts to mainstream the solutions that we know are working in prisons.
Natasha Porter OBE, Unlocked’s CEO and Founder, said: “This report outlines some of our key achievements from a year in which we remained at the forefront of innovation in the recruitment, training and development of outstanding prison leaders, driving reform across the system. We have continued to find new ways to support these leaders to drive real change in prisons this year, and many of these are shared in this report with the hope that others might benefit from them.”