Clarity, accessibility and impact: improving our inspection reports

Every inspection of a prison or young offender institution (YOI) that we carry out results in judgements about how well the establishment is performing against the four tests of a healthy establishment; for an adult prison this means scores for safety, respect, purposeful activity and preparation for release. The four final scores provide a useful snapshot about how well a prison is performing, but behind each of those final judgements is a much more nuanced story. This includes consideration of a wealth of evidence from our prisoner survey, through to reviews of the prison’s strategy to tackle illicit drug use and data on violent incidents or self-harm.

We want to make it as easy as possible to understand our findings, so we’ve made some changes to our prison and YOI inspection reports. These changes will help us to concentrate on the main issues and highlight key data, so that we can more clearly describe our findings. Here’s what we’ve done.

• We’ve moved things around so we get the point more quickly. Some of the background information about the establishment is now at the end of the report, allowing us to move straight to the main findings.
• We’ve focused more tightly on these findings, describing outcomes rather than processes and making sure our descriptions are clear and concise.
• We’ve added simple tables to draw out key information from our surveys, make comparisons with similar prisons or the outcomes from our last inspection, and highlight key data provided by the prison/YOI.

To help make our reports even more accessible, and to make it easier to search for information, we’re also starting to publish them in HTML format instead of as PDFs. This brings us in line with other public bodies and means that when you search for a new report about a prison, YOI or independent review of progress on our website, you will go straight to the text, rather than having to open a separate PDF. You will still be able to print the reports, and some of the extra information, such as easy read summaries and research material, will stay in PDF and Excel formats. We’ll also continue to send printed copies of our reports to prisons and YOIs, so that they can be made available in their libraries. We’re starting this process with prison and YOI reports, but we expect to be able to move on to other types of report in the near future too.

None of these changes will affect how our teams inspect. Inspectors will continue to spend the same amount of time in each prison or YOI, gathering information, triangulating findings and making judgements against our healthy establishment tests. While we may not include as much detail in our reports in all areas – for example we may not exhaustively list every example of poor living conditions – we’ll keep a record of everything we find and we’ll use this evidence to help us form our judgements. We’ll also use it to inform future work, including thematic reviews. The process for finalising our reports remains unchanged (find out more in our memoranda of understanding with HMPPS and the Home Office), and if, for any reason, it becomes necessary to amend a report after publication, we will clearly specify the date and nature of the change on our website. 

We believe that the changes we’ve made will help us to more clearly convey findings from inspections, support public scrutiny, and help leaders to improve outcomes for prisoners and the public.

We’ll be including questions on the new report format in our next stakeholder survey towards the end of the year, so look out for that and let us know what you think.