Official Statistics

Recruitment diversity statistics December 21

Published 17 February 2022

Applies to England and Wales

HMPPS Recruitment Diversity Statistics

Experimental Official Statistics

Quarterly estimates: 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021

Feedback on this experimental Official Statistics release should be sent to: PPRWS_Correspondence@justice.gov.uk

Main Findings

The proportion of HMPPS applicants accepting a final offer from Ethnic Minority backgrounds exceeded the 14% in 3 of the 8 quarters covered in this publication	In the two years to December 2021, 13.9% of successful Prison Officer, and 14.0% of successful Operational Support Grade (OSG) applicants were from Ethnic Minority backgrounds, compared to 13.5% of all successful HMPPS applicants
Around one-fifth of HMPPS applicants in the period Q1 2020 to Q4 2021 were from Ethnic Minority backgrounds	Between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021, 21.3% of Prison Officer applicants and 19.3% of OSG applicants were from Ethnic Minority backgrounds, compared to 22.1% of all HMPPS candidates
Around six percent of applicants in the period covered by this report had declared themselves disabled	For the period covered, 3.9% of Prison Officer applicants and 4.9% of OSG applicants declared themselves as disabled, compared to 6.3% of all HMPPS candidates
57.0% of the HMPPS applicants in the period Q1 2020 to Q4 2021 were female	For the period covered, 45.9% of Prison Officer applicants and 53.5% of OSG applicants were female
Among Prison Officer and OSG applicants, there is evidence of a disparity in outcomes when comparing Ethnic Minority applicants to white applicants	The ethnicity Relative Rate Index (RRI) was 0.59 for Prison Officer applicants and 0.68 for OSG applicants for the two years to December 2021 suggesting a disproportionately high number of white applicants successfully completed the application process compared to Ethnic Minority applicants
There is evidence of a disparity in outcomes when comparing female applicants to male applicants, for Prison Officer and OSG candidates	The RRI for gender was 0.81 for Prison Officer applicants, but 1.10 for OSG applicants for the overall period covered by this report suggesting that the success of rate of male applicants was higher for Prison Officer roles but higher for female OSG applicants
There is evidence of a disparity in outcomes when comparing disabled applicants to non-disabled applicants for OSG candidates and Prison Officers	The disability RRI was 0.79 for Prison Officer applicants and 0.63 for OSG applicants suggesting that the rate of success for disabled applicants was lower than for non-disabled applicants

Background

• Following the Lammy review ^{[footnote 1]}, HMPPS made a public commitment that 14% of all new recruits will come from Ethnic Minority backgrounds by December 2020.
• As at 31 December 2021, 11.8% of HMPPS staff who declared their ethnicity were from an Ethnic Minority background. On the same date, 8.9% of all Public Sector Prisons staff, 16.3% of all YCS staff, 15.8% of HQ and Area Services staff, and 16.2% of Probation Service staff were from an Ethnic Minority background.
• HMPPS recruitment campaigns are run in different parts of the country, recruiting from local populations, at different times of the year. It should therefore be expected that the percentage of Ethnic Minority applicants will fluctuate over time.
• The Lammy review also recommended that new data should be collected and published with a full breakdown by ethnicity. This experimental statistical release sets out to meet that recommendation.

As these are experimental statistics, we would welcome feedback as to how useful they are, whether different analysis would be preferable, or any other comments about them. If you wish to send any views you may have about these experimental statistics, please use the contact details at the end of this bulletin

Following an internal review of the content of this annex, it was decided to include additional information about recruitment by stage, across the whole of HMPPS. A cohort approach is used in tables 1-3, covering Prison Officer and OSG campaigns, with the progress of people through all later stages of the recruitment process shown in the quarter the candidate applied in, regardless of when the subsequent stages happened. For example, if a candidate applied in March 2020 their progress would be represented in Q1 2020 in the data tables, even if the later stages happened in Q2 or Q3 2020. This allows the comparison of the proportion of candidates with protected characteristics across each application stage. In tables 4-7, covering all HMPPS recruitment campaigns, a staged approach is used, with each stage of the application processes being recorded in the quarter that it took place even if that is not the same as the quarter of the initial application. This means that the proportion of applicants with protected characteristics in each stage can be compared over time.

Statistics are shown for the following stages of the application process, for campaigns that were run between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021:

• applications;
• invitations to assessment/interview;
• provisional offers; and
• acceptances of a formal offer.

There is a particular focus on the application process for Prison Officer roles and OSG roles but statistics are presented covering all HMPPS recruitment campaigns in the period.

These experimental Official Statistics are used to monitor and evaluate the diversity of applications and appointments. These are newly developed statistics and are currently considered experimental so that users and stakeholders can be involved in the assessment of their suitability and quality.

Recently, a number of stages in the recruitment process have changed, such as more roles moving towards using assessment centres. It may not always be possible to capture these updates in the data straightaway which may result in an undercount of candidates at some stages. It is therefore recommended that the statistics in this annex are treated as estimates.

For tables 1 to 3, it is important to note that some candidates are still working their way through the recruitment pipeline as of 31 December 2021. Where this is the case, the candidate is not included in this release.

** In future releases of these statistics, numbers will be updated to reflect candidates’ progress through the recruitment process. This means that figures shown for the more recent quarters are currently based only on a small proportion of the eventual final data, particularly for the later stages of the process. As the data is updated in future publications there could possibly be changes in the proportions and Relative Rate Index values used to compare the rate of success between groups. For this reason, the figures for the stages after application for the latest two quarters have not be shown in Tables 2 and 3.**

In some campaigns a merit list may be held, whereby candidates who are successful at assessment/interview are put onto a waiting list until a suitable vacancy opens up. Where this is the case, a candidate may not be offered a post until sometime after the initial application and assessment/interview stages.

The diversity of candidates is monitored at various stages throughout the recruitment process. To assess the relative levels of success we examine the progress of all the candidates who have applied for posts on a quarterly basis. Candidates may apply for multiple roles but only one application per candidate per quarter is included in the analysis, and the application that is included is the one that made it furthest through the process.

For the campaigns included in this bulletin we examine the volumes of candidates who have progressed through each of the following stages of the recruitment process:

HMPPS Recruitment Stage	Description
Application	The candidate submits an online application for a role in HMPPS. Depending on the role applied for, there are varying processes to determine if a candidate is invited to an assessment. In the case of Prison Officer recruitment, there are online tests, including mathematical proficiency and situational judgement. For OSG recruitment, a manual sift is performed.
Applicants invited to assessment	All candidates who pass the application stage process will be invited to attend an assessment relating to the role applied for. For Prison Officer candidates, the assessment day consists of a literacy and language test, a fitness test, role-playing tests with actors playing the part of prisoners, and retake the situational judgement and mathematical skills test. For OSG candidates, an interview is conducted.
Applicant made provisional offer	Candidates who have been made a provisional offer will now undergo pre-employment checks including security vetting.
Applicant accepts formal offer	Candidate has confirmed acceptance of Formal Offer and this has been recorded on the recruitment system.

Representation percentages

Within the bulletin, representation percentages are presented for the following stages of the recruitment process:

• Initial applications;
• invitations to assessment/interview;
• provisional offers; and
• acceptances of formal offer.

The diversity statistics in this report are based on self-declared information that applicants have provided on the Oleeo recruitment system. Completion of the data on Oleeo is voluntary, and the information is not considered during the recruitment process. The declaration rates are typically high at above 98 per cent. Some applicants choose not to declare their ethnicity, disability status or gender, or do not complete the information – these applicants are grouped together and included in the ‘Unknown’ group. As this is not a meaningful category those who do not declare their information are not included within the analysis.

The declaration rate is calculated as the total number of valid declarations divided by the total number of cases. Where the declaration rate of a diversity characteristic is in excess of 60 per cent, the representation rate is also presented; this is calculated as the known declarations from the particular group divided by the total number of valid declarations of the characteristic. This represents the best estimate of the true level of representation among all candidates. To date, declaration rates in this data have far exceeded the 60 per cent threshold to allow us to present representation percentages for every stage in the recruitment process. However, it should be noted that for some campaigns in some quarters, the numbers involved can be very small and so any interpretation of them should be treated with caution. In addition, where there are two or fewer individuals in a cell in the accompanying Excel tables, these values have been suppressed to avoid disclosure. Similarly, any value that would allow the derivation of a value of two or lower has also been suppressed.

Representation percentages allow comparison of the diversity proportions at the various recruitment stages outlined above. This is particularly useful for the application stage, as it provides a picture of the diversity of the pool of applicants, and how closely they represent the general population, or the diverse make-up of a local population where a Prison Officer and OSG recruitment campaign is localised to a particular geographic area. It is also particularly useful at the formal offer stage to illustrate any differences in the diversity proportions at the final stage. However, representation among those receiving a formal offer reflects both the representation among applicants and rates of success for each group at the preceding stages.

To make valid comparisons across time or across different groups requires a measure of disparity of outcomes on a standard scale. This standardised measure of disparity of outcomes is described as the Relative Rate Index (RRI).

In this annex, RRI is calculated by looking at the number of applicants reaching each stage and comparing the levels by the applicants’ characteristics. This calculation does not take into account the reason for applicants not progressing throughout the application stages, therefore applicants that voluntarily withdraw from the process are recorded in the same way as applicants that do not successfully progress. This means that the RRI figures are not only representative of the success of candidates at each stage but can also be influenced by characteristic differences in the voluntary withdrawal rates of applicants.

Further details on the RRI can be found in the Further Information section at the end of this publication. Caution should be used interpreting these figures as in many cases they may not be statistically significant, particularly where they are based on very low number of applicants. Statistically significant values are indicated in the tables.

Detailed Results

COVID-19 had a significant disruption on the recruitment process in HMPPS, particularly for Prison Officer recruitment during part of 2020. This manifested in two ways – firstly in the number of campaigns and therefore applicants in Q2 and Q3 (only 622 and 3,632 applicants for Prison Officer posts in Q2 and Q3 2020 respectively, compared to 35,670 in Q1 2020); and secondly in affecting the subsequent stages after application.

Prison Officers (Summary Table 1a and Table 2)

Figure 1: Ethnic Minority representation for Prison Officer candidates at each stage of the application process, Q1 2020 to Q4 2021

** Ethnic Minority candidates made up 21.3% of all Prison Officer applicants, and 13.9% of formal offers accepted between January 2020 and December 2021**. The statistically significant RRI value of 0.59 suggests that Ethnic Minority candidates had a disproportionately low success rate compared to white candidates. This was mainly driven by a large proportion of Ethnic Minority candidates not reaching the assessment stage (RRI of 0.66^{[footnote 2]}). The proportion of applicants accepting a final offer was lowest among Asian applicants with 1.9% of those that applied accepting a final offer in the two years to December 2021 compared to 4.0% for white candidates.

Figure 2: Disability representation for Prison Officer candidates at each stage of the application process, Q1 2020 to Q4 2021

Disabled candidates made up 3.9% of all Prison Officer applicants, and 3.1% of formal offers accepted between January 2020 and December 2021. The statistically significant RRI value of 0.79 suggests that disables candidates have a lower success rate than non-disabled candidates. The stage that causes the largest disparity is between being made a provisional offer and accepting a final offer (RRI of 0.76^{[footnote 2]}). This may be influenced by the fitness test which takes place between the awarding of a provisional offer and the final offer.

Figure 3: Female representation for Prison Officer candidates at each stage of the application process, Q1 2020 to Q4 2021

Female candidates made up 45.9% of all Prison Officer applicants, and 40.7% of formal offers accepted between January 2020 and December 2021. Relative comparison of the overall rates for the 24-month period by gender gave a statistically significant RRI value of 0.81 indicating females have a lower rate of success compared to males through the recruitment process. It is not clear which stages are driving this disparity.

Operational Support Grades (Summary Table 1b and Table 3)

Figure 4: Ethnic Minority representation for Operational Support Grade (OSG) candidates at each stage of the application process, Q1 2020 to Q4 2021

For the period January 2020 and December 2021, ** Ethnic Minority candidates made up 19.3% of OSG applicants and 14.0% of formal offers accepted**. Comparison between Ethnic Minority candidates and white candidates gives a statistically significant RRI value of 0.68 showing that Ethnic Minority candidates have a disproportionately lower success rate. This was shown to be driven by the low proportion of Ethnic Minority candidates being invited to assessment following an application (RRI of 0.78^{[footnote 2]}). The lowest success rate among ethnic groups is among the ‘other ethnic group’ at 2.6% including all Ethnic Minority applicants not categorised as Black, Asian, nor Mixed ethnicity. This is compared to white applicants with a success rate of 5.2%.

Figure 5: Disability representation for Operational Support Grade (OSG) candidates at each stage of the application process, Q1 2020 to Q4 2021

Disabled candidates made up 4.9% of all OSG applicants, and 3.2% of formal offers accepted between January 2020 and December 2021. The statistically significant RRI comparison of disabled and non-disabled candidates (0.63) indicates that disabled candidates have a lower success rate through the recruitment process. The stage that causes the largest disparity is between being made a provisional offer and accepting a final offer (RRI of 0.71^{[footnote 2]}).

Figure 6: Female representation for Operational Support Grade (OSG) candidates at each stage of the application process, Q1 2020 to Q4 2021

Female OSG candidates made up 53.5% of all OSG applicants, and 56.0% of formal offers accepted between January 2020 and December 2021. The comparison of male and female candidates gives a statistically significant RRI value of 1.10. This indicates that female candidates have a higher success rate through the recruitment process though it is not clear at which stage this mostly occurs.

HMPPS recruitment (Tables 4 to 7)

In the last two years to December 2021, there has been 413,680 applicants to HMPPS recruitment campaigns, 116,725 applicants were invited to an assessment, 34,862 were made a provisional offer and 21,241 accepted a formal offer.

Of these total applicants, there were 89,574 Ethnic Minority applicants making up 22.1% (9.2% Asian, 8.2% Black, 3.6% Mixed, 1.2% other). The proportion of Ethnic Minority applicants has ranged from 20.8% in Q1 2020 to 23.1% in Q2 2021. There were 2,662 Ethnic Minority applicants that accepted a formal offer representing 13.5% of the total (4.4% Asian, 5.3% Black, 3.0% Mixed, 0.7% other), ranging over the period from 12.0% in Q1 2020 to a high of 14.8% in Q4 2021.

Figure 7: Ethnic Minority representation HMPPS candidates at each stage of the application process, Q1 2020 to Q4 2021

During the period, there were 24,450 disabled applicants to HMPPS recruitment campaigns. This amounted to 6.3% of all applicants, increasing from 5.0% in Q1 2020 to 9.6% in Q4 2021. There were 1,119 disabled applicants to accept a final offer, 5.7% of the total, ranging from 4.6% in Q1 2021 to a high of 6.9% in Q4 2021.

There were 233,152 female applicants to HMPPS recruitment campaigns. This amounted to 57.0% of all applicants, ranging from 52.0% in Q1 2020 to 64.3% in Q2 2020. There were 11,245 female applicants to accept a final offer, 56.5% of the total, ranging from 50.3% in Q1 2020 to a high of 59.1% in Q4 2020.

Further information

Technical information

The diversity statistics in this report are based on self-declared information that applicants have provided on the Oleeo recruitment system. Completion of the data on Oleeo is voluntary. Some applicants choose not to declare their details or do not complete the information – these applicants are grouped together and included in the ‘Unknown’ group. This is not a meaningful category, and accordingly those who do not declare their information cannot be included within analysis of the outcomes.

Any records downloaded from the Oleeo system with a time stamp after 23:59 on the last day of December 2021 have been removed. Some records do not have a timestamp for some of the recruitment stages. Where this is the case, we have assumed that where a candidate has reached a stage, he or she passed all the previous stages, even if they don’t actually have the relevant timestamps for all those earlier stages.

A single candidate can make multiple applications. Where this is the case, duplicates have been removed to leave a single instance of each candidate in each quarterly cohort (an individual can appear a maximum of 6 times in the table). The application which got furthest in the process is selected. If there are several applications from different quarters at the same stage, the earliest submission is selected.

Up to the December 2020 publication, only band 3 prison officer candidates were shown in tables 1a and 2 in section one. From the June 2021 publication, the methodology changed to include band 4 prison officer vacancies as well. The additional band 4 prison officer vacancies reflect around 1% of all Prison Officer submissions included, therefore, the addition of band 4 prison officer vacancies has had a minimal impact on the overall figures.

In this release a change has been made to the way ‘Applicants accepted final offer’ is defined. The raw data for applications includes a field containing the status of the application. In previous versions of this annex, only applications in which the status stated “Formal offer accepted” were included in the analysis. In this release, all applications that are indicated to have accepted a final offer are included, regardless of the status text. This change is partly due to a change in the recording of recruitment data where more applications are now being labelled as ‘Confirmed Starter’. Using the previous methodology, the number of applicants accepting final offer between January 2020 and December 2021 would be calculated as 1,702 for Prison Officer recruitment and 2,017 for OSG recruitment. With this methodological change, the figures are 4,860 for Prison Officer recruitment and 2,116 for OSG recruitment.

The majority of responses to disability status for Prison Officer Candidates are not available for submissions from August to December 2021. This means that the disability status of applicants submitting in this period are included under ‘Unknown’ in table 1a. This may be due to the introduction of a new process across MoJ regarding disabled applicants to meet the requirements as a Disability Confident Leader.

Relative Rate Index (RRI)

The RRI, or Relative Rate Index,^{[footnote 3]} gives a standardised measure of difference between groups. This has been adopted in line with the Judicial Appointments Commission use of the RRI for presenting similar data, which was reviewed by MoJ statisticians in February 2020^{[footnote 4]}, and the RRI was widely used within the Lammy Review^{[footnote 1]}. These statistics use this metric to give a standardised view of any disparity of outcomes on recruitment by diversity characteristic.

The RRI is calculated by dividing the rate of success (i.e. the percentage of those who applied that accepted a formal offer) for one group by the rate of success for the other group with a diversity characteristic, thus creating a single standardised ratio measure of relative difference in outcomes between those two groups. If the rates were the same, the result would be a value of 1, which would indicate identical rates for both groups (that is a parity of outcomes). Deviation from 1 in either direction suggests a difference in the rates of outcomes.

Considering differences in the two success rates on a relative basis on a standard scale, enables direct comparison of any disparity of outcomes between groups across exercises and across time. By convention, the RRI has been calculated with the under-represented group as the numerator, with the baseline reference group as the denominator. However, calculation in the reverse direction is equivalent and would result in the same interpretation.

When comparing rates and the RRI, it is important to consider uncertainty, to avoid the over-interpretation of fluctuations in outcomes that may be the result of chance alone. Tests of statistical significance have been conducted on the estimates in this publication that are based on the full 24-month period in order to ensure the interpretation of the RRI values take full account of the probability that the observed outcome may be the result of chance alone. Where a RRI is significant at the 95% confidence level, this has been denoted against the RRIs in Table 1 with a ‘**’. For the intermediate RRI values, significance has been determined using the ‘4/5th rule of thumb’^{[footnote 5]}.

In addition to consideration of the extent to which chance variation is involved in any apparent difference in the rates, it is important to consider what is known as practical significance– whether the actual magnitude of the apparent difference in the rates is sufficient to have a material impact, or whether the difference is small and of little material impact. To represent a meaningful disparity of outcomes, an apparent difference must be both statistically significant (unlikely to be the result of chance alone), and of sufficient magnitude to have practical significance.

To further aid interpretation using the ‘4/5th rule of thumb for adverse impact’ ^{[footnote 5]}, RRI values that fall within a range of 0.8 to 1.25 (the zone of tolerance) are not likely to indicate a difference in outcomes resulting in a disparity having practical significance. This sets a range around parity, within which fluctuations at least in part due to natural variation would not be taken as evidence of a disparity of outcomes representative of adverse impact to one group. This does not imply that an RRI falling outside of this range is indicative of the presence of a meaningful disparity.

As such, both statistical significance and practical significance where an RRI falls outside of the range 0.8 to 1.25 should generally be required to establish evidence of a disparity. In order to be more rigorous, Chi squared significance tests were performed on the total RRI values.

Findings suggestive of a disparity of outcome do not necessarily imply issues within the recruitment process and may reflect other differences between groups, such as level of experience. As rates are the combined result of representation among applicants and those accepting a formal offer, it is essential that a disparity of outcomes is interpreted in conjunction with a view on representation among applicants and success at each stage of the recruitment process.

Notes and Conventions

The following symbols are used within the tables in this experimental statistics release:

~	values of two or fewer which have been suppressed
*	percentage suppressed due to small numbers. Where small numbers are present, percentages are highly volatile and potentially misleading.
-	denotes relative rate index not calculated due to suppressed values
..	denotes data not available.

Experimental Statistics

The statistics in this report are classified as experimental Official Statistics. Experimental Official Statistics are statistics that are in the testing phase and not yet fully developed. This report has been designated experimental the methodology has only recently been adopted and the results published. As such, the methods and approach used in this report are subject to modification. More information about the different types of Official Statistics can be found here: https://uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/about-the-authority/uk-statistical-system/types-of-official-statistics/

Feedback relating to the content of this release should be sent to: PPRWS_Correspondence@justice.gov.uk

Related statistics

These experimental Official Statistics have been published alongside Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) Workforce Statistics Bulletin, as at 31 December 2021.

Contact

Press enquiries should be directed to the Ministry of Justice press office:
Tel: 020 3334 3536
Email: newsdesk@justice.gov.uk

Other enquiries about these statistics should be directed to:

Kieran Maclean
Data and Evidence as a Service
Ministry of Justice
10 South Colonnade
London
E14 4PH

Email: PPRWS_Correspondence@justice.gov.uk

Next update: 18 August 2022 URL: www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-offender-management-service-workforce-statistics

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Produced by the Ministry of Justice

Alternative formats are available on request from PPRWS_Correspondence@justice.gov.uk

1. https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/lammy-review ↩ ↩²

2. RRI values falling outside the range 0.80 to 1.25 are outside the range within which the magnitude of the difference in rates would not normally represent evidence of a disparity of outcome. Additional testing is done on overall RRI calculations to give more reliable evidence for statistical significance. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Altman DG (1991) Practical statistics for medical research. London: Chapman and Hall ↩

4. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/869028/Methodology_Review_Report.pdf ↩

5. Dan Biddle. Adverse Impact and Test Validation: A Practitioner’s Guide to Valid and Defensible Employment Testing. Aldershot, Hants, England: Gower Technical Press. pp. 2–5. ISBN 0-566-08778-2. Toward a Coherent Test for Disparate Impact Discrimination: Peresie, J.L. 2009 ↩ ↩²