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#Recruitment & Diversity
Our recruitment strategy is designed to reach and persuade high-calibre participants, particularly those who would not otherwise consider a job in the prison service, that this is the role for them.
#Attraction
Our award-winning recruitment campaigns have raised the profile of the prison officer role and reached candidates who would never have considered a career in the prison service. In line with other graduate schemes, our programme is two years long and encourages participants to enter a sector without committing to a life-long career.
Shaped to match the priorities of ambitious graduates, four out of five (81%) of our newest recruits cited the Unlocked mission as a reason for applying to the programme. Professional development opportunities such as building leadership skills and the chance to have genuine responsibility from day one were other key motivating factors.
Unlocked participants studied in 91 different subject areas.
#A fair selection process
Our selection process was developed to be rigorous, fair, and successful at attracting and selecting diverse cohorts of candidates with strong potential to be excellent prison officers.
Building on best practice from other graduate recruitment schemes and our consultation with a wide range of stakeholders in the prison service, we developed our core attributes for recruitment: sense of possibility, motivation, resilience, self-awareness, leadership, decision-making, relationship building.
Our participants attended 86 different universities. Over half were from the highly selective Russell Group of universities.
#Recruiting a diverse cohort
It is vital that the prison workforce is representative of the people it works with. This is true of all under-represented groups and protected characteristics. We know that over a quarter (27 per cent) of the prison population are from an ethnic minority group, compared to 14 per
cent of the general population. While seven per cent of prisoners identify as homosexual, bisexual or other sexual orientations compared with three per cent nationally.
Our proportion of programme joiners from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds is around one in five, and trending upwards in the last two years.
Informed by the workforce challenges identified in the Lammy Review, we have made recruiting a diverse cohort a priority from our first year. In fact, the Review mentions our work as an example of best practice. Since then, we have continued to make diverse recruitment a priority, being transparent with applicants about our wish to attract a diverse cohort and actively seeking to engage with the challenging issues surrounding diversity and inclusion.
We regularly gather insights and opinions from participants on these issues through our Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board and weave these throughout our recruitment campaign. We have also built in more explicit training and support through the programme so participants coming from minority groups receive targeted support for some of the challenges and nuances they may face in the prison officer role.