In mid-July, members of the Spark Inside team, evaluators from University of Lincoln, and a group of female coaches spent two days together, deepening and developing the approach to our women’s group coaching programme.
Our Women’s Development Lead, Sophie Wood, shares an overview:
The story so far
We began coaching women one-to-one at HMP East Sutton Park in 2024 and continued this work throughout last year. Women were supported to build their confidence, and tackle challenges like self-esteem, family relationships, and planning for release.
This year, we began piloting our groupwork offer and this work remains in development. We were thrilled to be awarded an HMPPS Rehabilitation Grant to do this, meaning we will continue to pilot, develop and evaluate this new programme for women across three sites over the next three years.
We have already begun coaching young women one-to-one at HMP Downview this summer and will begin working at HMP Send later this year.
About the residential
We wanted to bring together the women’s coaching delivery team and evaluators to deepen a shared understanding of this project, build connection, and experience the models that will underpin the group work.
Being away from our usual homes and offices and staying in a farmhouse surrounded by countryside gave this work a different feel.
We cooked and ate together, creating the right kind of environment for the reflective work we were doing.
Our time together
After settling and checking in, we kicked things off with an overview of work at HMP East Sutton Park so far. We also talked through our goals across the next three years, and I shared some key facts and data for each of our delivery sites.
Having everything laid out in the way it was: context, ambition, number of women, evaluation, outcomes was a big lightbulb moment. It drove the scale home but made me feel energised for what’s to come.
The main purpose of our time together was for our coaches to experience and collectively discuss potential models for the group work programme. We spent time across two days working through exercises on key themes that have come up so far in this work, such as managing conflict, relationships and decision-making.
One example used the metaphor of an iceberg to think about anger: we mapped ours to trace a moment of anger back to the hurt, unmet need and the fear sitting underneath it.
It was a genuinely powerful reminder that outward expressions of anger are very rarely the whole picture, and that there is almost always something more vulnerable underneath it. The exercise teaches us that by slowing down, we can notice these feelings below the emotion and in turn, change how we respond.
Working in the women’s estate
The women’s estate is not the same as the men’s estate. Aside from being categorised differently and the scale (as a comparison, Downview’s capacity is 350, Send’s is 280 Wormwood Scrubs is 1,200!), women in custody have very different needs to men.
More than half of women in prison are mothers, with imprisonment often meaning children are taken into care. Two-thirds report having experienced domestic abuse. One of the things we talked about in depth during the weekend was the way women are more likely to look externally to reference their worth. Finding ways to encourage self-leadership and confidence, whilst recognising these challenges run very deep and life-long for some women, was acknowledged as being fundamental to this work.
Milca, one of our coaches, reflected:
“It’s harder to get women to focus on themselves and talk about themselves. They often default back to talking about the situation or the relationship.”
“There are less spaces for women to just talk without an outcome. When we have our sessions, we are here, and this is safe.”
Key takeaways
Topics like anger, self- worth, boundaries and relationships can be hard to talk about in more mixed spaces. Having an all-female group of coaches felt like there was less need to filter or soften things and made it easier to be vulnerable, without worrying about how something might land or how it might be read.
Women in prison need a similar space to feel comfortable being honest about what is going on for them.
Coming together as a group over two days in such a beautiful and peaceful space made it easy to slow down and really be present with each other in a way that’s harder to do in a normal office day.
It feels really important to have taken time to build trust, and a team that feels connected and grounded in the goals and models to build a strong foundation for this ambitious and meaningful work.
