HMPPS Prison Officer Online Test Practice

The timings are HMPPS's 2019 figures. HMPPS's July 2019 blog is the only official source with question counts and limits. The current how-to-apply page says only that the SBT takes around 25 to 40 minutes. The 2019 figures fit inside that, and the practice content has survived two platform moves unchanged, so they are what we build to. Our clocks show them, and our instructions say where they come from.

It is a gate, not a ranking. HMPPS tells you only whether you passed, against a pass mark it does not publish, and does not say whether the two parts are passed separately or together. Your place on a merit list comes from the online assessment centre. So our feedback talks about margin, names the habit or the slip behind each lost mark, and never pretends to know the pass mark.

HMPPS does not publish how the scenarios are marked. Its practice feedback confirms the keyed most effective response but not the rule for scoring. We give one mark for each correct pick, two per scenario, which is the standard rule for this format.

The real test runs on Sova's player, and HMPPS writes the content. The official practice sits at an address beginning assess-sscl.sovaonline.co.uk under a Ministry of Justice account, and until at least December 2023 the same scenarios ran on Criterion's Psycruit platform. That is why this is its own provider on CogniPrep rather than part of our Sova practice: the scenarios are keyed to HMPPS's behaviours, not a vendor's framework.

Our calculator is on screen; the real one is on your desk. HMPPS allows a calculator but the player does not provide one. Ours sits under the options so the same working can be practised on a phone. HMPPS states no device restriction for the SBT, and the Sova player works at phone width, so practising on a phone is fair here. The assessment centre is different: it needs a laptop with a webcam.

HMPPS says it uses the VBA "to understand how well you demonstrate the values needed to be an effective prison officer". It takes up to about 20 minutes if completed in one go, with no time limit, and "contains a variety of question styles using different formats". It covers three behaviours, one technical area and one strength. It is scored: there is a pass mark, and candidates with a higher score may be invited to the assessment centre sooner. Example questions come with the invitation.

That is everything HMPPS publishes. No format and no vendor are named anywhere we could find, so we do not simulate it: a practice test built on guessed question styles would train you for something that may not exist. The best preparation is to do the example questions in your invitation carefully and to know the four behaviours well, because they run through every stage.

From 2019 HMPPS used a game-based stage 2, described in 2019 as nine levels measuring things like resilience, and later called the task-based or behaviour-based assessment. HMPPS's own how-to-apply page linked stage 2 candidates to Arctic Shores' candidate guidance in June 2024 and January 2025. It was replaced by the values-based assessment for applications made after 29 April 2026.

If you applied before that date, your invitation may still name it, depending on the prison you applied to, and our Arctic Shores practice is the relevant one. We do not claim any particular Arctic Shores task was the HMPPS one. This note will come down once applications from before April 2026 have worked through the process.