Sex offender programme completion statistics: FOI release

Information requested

Programme completions of individuals that had been convicted of a sexual offence, across custody and community, between 2010 and 2025.

Response

There have been two national programmes delivered across custody and community to individuals that have committed sexual offences, within the requested time period.

The Moving Forward: Making Changes (MF:MC) Programme was delivered in Scotland from 2014 across custody and community. Under section 17 of FOI(S)A I can advise that programme completion data is not held by the Scottish Government. There is a summary of available data from the evaluation completed by Ipsos Mori in 2018 and I have included the relevant excerpt from the evaluation report, below:

“Establishing a definitive number of participants who have completed MF:MC to date is not straightforward. Leaving aside the issue of participants who are not recorded in the MF:MC IT System at all, there is no single field in the IT System which definitively records completion. Applying various possible definitions indicates that, of the 911 men recorded as participating in MF:MC, between 230 and 266 appear to have fully completed the programme,13 while 97 men appear to have left the programme before completing all their prescribed modules”.

In 2021, the MF:MC National Advisory Board decided that the MF:MC programme would be redesigned. The re - design is called Moving Forward 2 Change (MF2C). Project staff aim to problem solve data collection to support effective evaluation and this is on-going. In the interim, data is being collected manually. Completions for MF2C for each year have been reported below. Figures have been grouped per year, given the low number.

Year	Completions
2023	21
2024	7
2025	4

It should be noted that the numbers reflect that MF2C was being piloted in a small number of sites. National roll out of the programme has begun programme was being piloted and then it has begun to roll periods however the changeover period between MF:MC and MF2C is expected to be long, given the length of the programme. In addition to this, the MF2C Central Team are awaiting several data inputs from sites that have begun delivery of MF2C.

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