Scottish Advisory Panel on Offender Rehabilitation (SAPOR): annual report 2024-2025

5. Future Priorities

SAPOR will be looking afresh at our accreditation criteria. We want to encourage innovative practice such as peripatetic programme delivery staff in conjunction with a wider range of disciplines involved in programme facilitation and more opportunities for prisoners to commence programmes in prisons and complete them in the community.

We will be looking to reduce the evaluative demands on accredited programmes overall with less reliance upon psychometric testing. We continue to encourage independent evaluation as a marked preference over in-house evaluation. For it to be most powerful and persuasive evaluation needs to be truly independent.

We want to see an increase in access to programmes in prisons and especially in the community too.