Finding work after leaving prison

The project

A consistent service across every prison

Employment is one of the strongest factors in reducing reoffending, yet the way prisons captured and used employment-related information was fragmented and paper-based. Each establishment had developed its own approach over time, shaped by staff, local priorities, and available resources.

We created a shared digital service to replace these fragmented approaches with a consistent, structured way for staff to capture and use employment information across multiple prisons, reducing duplication for staff and improving support continuity for people preparing for release.

The challenge

No single, shared way of working

One of the biggest challenges was that there was no one simple checklist, we first had to understand multiple versions of the same process. Stakeholders were often attached to their local ways of working and cautious about standardisation, so we needed to find the right balance. The project wasn’t just about building a digital service, it was about supporting cultural change.

The work also took place in a complex environment with strict policies around data, security, and access, which limited how quickly ideas could be tested and rolled out. We needed to navigate competing priorities between different prison and probation service areas, including policy, operations, and delivery.

Frontline staff were already stretched. They didn’t have spare time for workshops or lengthy interviews, and they’d seen plenty of initiatives that consumed time without delivering value. Prison security also meant we couldn’t just turn up.

What we did

Mapping, co-design, and prototyping

We did research to understand how education and work teams operated in practice, then co-designed a service that could work across the estate.

• Mapped as-is services showing how information moved (or didn’t) between roles and establishments, identifying pain points, workarounds, and moments where service delivery and data broke down.
• Documented variation in practice, separating useful local adaptation from problematic inconsistency, visualising this created a shared understanding across teams.
• Co-designed a future service model with end-to-end service blueprints showing roles, handovers, touchpoints, and dependencies.
• Designed workflows that reduced duplication and supported continuity as people moved between staff, departments and services, identifying where digital tools could reduce administrative burden and where human judgement remained essential.
• Prototyped and tested key journeys, including managing jobs and applications, getting someone ready for work, and reporting dashboards.

The outcome

From Discovery to Alpha and into Private Beta

Despite constraints, we achieved meaningful participation, staff felt heard and the service reflected operational reality. During my time the project moved from Discovery into Provate Beta, delivering:

• A service-level vision across the Reducing Reoffending area for education and work services.
• A suite of products and features to replace offline spreadsheets and provide a joined-up service across prisons: Get someone ready for work, Finding work after prison, Match jobs and manage applications, and Work after leaving prison reporting.
• Reduced duplication and clearer end-to-end workflows for frontline staff.
• Better continuity for people approaching release, with more consistent support regardless of where they are in the system.
• An end of Alpha service assessment and a re-prioritised strategic roadmap for the Reducing Reoffending area.

The Reducing Reoffending area also won the Pivot Award within the Ministry of Justice.

Learnings

Reflections from this work

• Service design is about designing for change, not just designing services. The biggest challenge wasn’t designing the service itself, it was designing how change would happen across a complex, resistant system. Slowing down to speed up can be helpful when you need to build trust.
• Co-design creates buy-in, and better solutions. Staff knew things we couldn’t have figured out from the outside. The service worked because it reflected operational knowledge we could only access by designing collaboratively.
• Visual artefacts are decision-making tools. Service blueprints and journey maps became the way we had strategic conversations and made trade-offs explicit, working tools, not deliverables to hand over.
• Speaking the same language. Delivery is much smoother when product and service people align around shared concepts and the real problems to solve, rather than discipline-specific jargon.