Founder of Coracle Online
Crest Advisory has been commissioned by Coracle to evidence the value for money of its Osprey-VLE platform in the prison sector. The report explores the extent to which Coracle represents value for money and assesses its contribution to outcomes for prisoners, prison staff and the wider public, with a primary focus on improving access to prison education and rehabilitation.
A rapid evidence review and analysis of publicly available data underpin the work, informed by Coracle management information on device deployment and prison onboarding dates. The review sets out how outcomes link to monetisable and non-monetisable benefits and presents a logic model showing how inputs and activities lead to specific outcomes for prisoners, prisons and society. Methods align with HM Treasury’s Magenta Book (2024) and Green Book (2022), using robust quasi-experimental approaches — generalised synthetic control and staggered difference-in-difference — to estimate impact.
Findings indicate that onboarding with Coracle is associated with an estimated reduction of 1.59 assaults per prison per month (around 10%), a reduction of 0.15 serious assaults per month and — in male prisons — an estimated 1.79 fewer self-harm incidents per month. At the regional level, Coracle deployment is associated with a statistically significant increase in post-custody employment: +2.05 percentage points at six weeks and +3.11 percentage points at six months per quarter.
Using government unit costs and applying optimism-bias corrections, the estimated annual benefit of deploying Coracle across 96 prisons is £35.6 million. On an assumed annual contract value of £2.25 million, this equates to a benefit–cost ratio of 15.8 — around £16 saved for every £1 spent.
