Our client, His Majesty's Prison & Probation Service are an executive agency of the UK Ministry of Justice. They are responsible for the operation and management of the UK prison and probation system covering:
113
Prisons
85,000+
Prisoners
250,000+
People under Probation
PRIORITIES
HMPPS had three priorities for the service:
- Effective management of the transition from prison to community to reduce the high levels of reoffending
- More access to employment support for prisoners pre and post release
- Ensuring that progress was not interrupted when a prisoner moves between prisons. Plans and records of progress were regularly lost resulting in prisoners having to repeat work. This reduced engagement levels and outcomes were negatively affected
OUTCOMES REQUIRED
- HMPPS needed a highly enhanced, cost-effective and scalable solution that could operate from within a prison and could securely allow prisoners to engage with external parties who would support their employment or skills development upon release
- The problem of lost records needed to be eliminated
- Post-release employment outcomes needed to improve in order to deliver lower reoffending levels
OUR SOLUTION
Using our APT engine, we redesigned and expanded our existing Virtual Campus service which had been in use in UK prisons for 9 years. We consulted professionals and prisoners to determine the root causes and significant barriers involved in meeting the required outcomes, particularly in safely enabling the interaction between people inside prisons and employers and support staff "beyond the gate". We developed flexible learning plans; new content and content integration to standard platforms; a secure link to external support workers; enhanced CV building; new tracking functions to manage outcomes and intelligent job searching.
THE TECHNOLOGY
The technical design addressed scalability and resilience through the deployment of approved public cloud platforms to deliver the Software as a Service (SaaS). Our core product design allowed us to configure appropriate security, authentication and content upload to meet the stringent requirements of the client.
OUTCOMES ACHIEVED
Since the 2019 "go live", the service has been implemented in all prisons in England & Wales. Over 150,000 service users have benefited since Virtual Campus was first implemented; there have been no data/infosec breaches; service users can send information directly to support workers outside the prison which means much faster, more efficient processes and better rehabilitation outcomes on release; and records are easily transferred when prisoners move between prisons.