21st July 2025
Since 2017, Unlocked Graduates has recruited and trained nearly 900 future prison leaders on our award-winning graduate leadership development programme. Our unique approach to prison officer training is showing great success, and our participants and Ambassadors are leading real change on the landings, having reached over 125,000 prisoners.
Over the past eight years, we have continued to innovate and refine our training, and we are now delighted to be introducing a bespoke instructional coaching model to our programme. This builds on the unique support model we have developed for participants, led by our fantastic team of Mentoring Prison Officers (MPOs), and we are pleased to be partnering with leading professional development platform Steplab throughout this process.
Instructional coaching has demonstrated significant success in developing outstanding leaders across public services – most notably in teaching – but this marks the first time that it has been introduced to prison officer training. Designed by our expert curriculum team, this will provide frontline staff with the tools to become high-performing leaders, accelerating the impact they are able to have on the landings. It will give officers access to high-quality continuous professional development and effective coaching, supporting them to improve their practice and transform outcomes for the prisoners in their care.
Focusing on relational practice – which is where we believe there is the greatest opportunity to accelerate impact in our prisons – our instructional coaching model covers more than 20 different techniques to support new and experienced staff to build transformative relationships with prisoners, ultimately breaking cycles of reoffending.
Hosted on the Steplab platform, a series of training videos will support prison officers, alongside their coaches and mentors, to develop the skills that we know are vital for effective practice on the landings. We will also be publishing the accompanying training manual, ensuring that all prison officers can benefit from our approach to the development of outstanding prison leaders with a step-by-step guide. This will support our efforts to drive system-wide reform, mainstreaming the solutions that we know are working in prisons. Leading Prison Landings: The Unlocked Guide to Jailcraft will be available later this year.
Natasha Porter OBE, CEO and Founder of Unlocked Graduates said: “We are excited to be working with the team at Steplab to launch our new instructional coaching model. This is a significant leap forward in our efforts to codify what good looks like in our prisons, using the evidence we have gained from nearly a decade of training incredible frontline leaders. We believe it has the potential to transform how we think about prison officer training in this country. It also represents the first time that officers who have not completed the Unlocked programme are able to follow our training model, enabling us to mainstream our hugely successful approach to leadership development in prisons and reach even more prisoners.”