Reconviction Following a Cognitive Skills Intervention: An Alternative Quasi-experimental Methodology

Enhanced Thinking Skills (ETS) has been the most widely delivered cognitive skills programme in the prisons of England and Wales. Four quasi-experimental outcome studies have produced mixed results, a qualitative survey of offenders’ and facilitators’ experience on the programme proved useful in programme refinement, and a study using random allocation provided evidence that ETS impacts significantly and positively on short-term attitudinal change. This study aims to make a further contribution, using another methodology, to the accumulation of evidence ... Overall, prisoners who had attended ETS were found to reoffend at a rate 6.4 percentage points less than the cohort (rising to 7.5 percentage points for programme completers) and 9.5 percentage points less than the predicted rate ... [T]his non-experimental methodology makes a contribution to the ‘What Works’ evidence.