A prison service recruitment charity will close by the end of the month, after the end of a £4m-a-year government contract.
Unlocked Graduates has recruited university graduates to work as prison officers for the past 10 years.
The charity is winding up following the end of its contract with the Ministry of Justice, which saw it deliver a graduate leadership development programme.
The programme brought nearly 900 graduates into HM Prison Service, placing them in 38 different prisons across England and Wales.
Over the past year it has delivered the Unlocked Vanguard Wings project, an initiative that tested the organisation’s model at scale across two prison units in HMP Wandsworth and HMP Pentonville.
The MoJ contract was the charity’s main source of income, with the charity’s 2024/25 accounts showing it recorded a total income of £3.5m, £3.3m of which stemmed from the grant.
The contract was worth £4m annually, but since the programme had already begun winding up in 2024/25 the funding fell slightly below what was paid in previous years.
The grant was not renewed in 2024 because an agreement for a further term could not be reached, Third Sector previously reported.
At the time, Unlocked Graduates said that, as a result of the breakdown in negotiations, it did not have a contract to recruit any further cohorts; but the Ministry of Justice said the charity was offered a contract to continue providing the service but it was rejected.
Unlocked Graduates will conclude the majority of its operations by the end of October, Third Sector understands, with the organisation formally winding up over the coming months.
In the year ending March 2025, the charity had an average of 40 staff, but the organisation refused to confirm latest employee numbers.
In a blog post, the charity said: Over the past decade, we’ve taken on challenges that looked inconceivably difficult at first glance, often by looking beyond our own sector and borrowing the best bits from other industries, practices and countries.
“Along the way, we built a culture with unusually high levels of freedom and accountability in every role, and a rigorous test-and-learn discipline to find the highest-leverage solutions.”
Unlocked Graduates added that when it planned its closure, it “wanted to leave a legacy that keeps this work going”.
The charity said it hoped the lessons from its operations would improve prisons, and that it plans to publish new papers each week until early December setting out what the organisation learned from its work.