How Did We Get Here?

Given the current fallout from recent SFO's and discussion as to how probation's many problems can be fixed, it's always worth being reminded of how we got here in the first place and I mean before the TR omnishambles. So, I think it's time to dust off this brilliant resume by former Napo general secretary Judy McKnight and first published on here in 2021. It's based on major extracts from a Howard League article, which in turn is based on her 2008 Bill McWilliams Memorial lecture, Speaking Up For Probation. Much of it still has relevance and helps give some context to our current plight:-

What Works in Reducing Reoffending?

When the New Labour government was elected in 1997, Tony Blair sought to make a distinction between the policies of New Labour and those of the previous Conservative government, on the grounds that his policies were based on empiricism, on ‘what works’, as opposed to the ideologically‐based policies of his predecessors.

The Probation Service stood to gain from such an approach. All the evidence showed that the Service was successful; that it had itself learnt the lessons of ‘what works’ and now surely the Michael Howard view that ‘prison works’ would be properly debunked.

As this article will seek to demonstrate, the opposite proved to be the case. It transpired that New Labour did not literally mean ‘what works’, for example in reducing reoffending. They meant ‘what works’ in appeasing the views that emerged from a simplistic interpretation of focus groups, even if those views meant increasing prison numbers further and meant playing down the success and effectiveness of probation, toughening up its image and its language, despite the negative impact such policies would have on reducing reoffending.

This article will also show how the Probation Service has suffered from structural reform which has also been based on dogma rather than empiricism, the dogma that asserts that public service structures should facilitate ‘contestability’, providing the possibility of a market between different providers of services. This article argues that structural reform predicated on the ability to introduce contestability is having a detrimental impact on the effectiveness, and potentially on the future, of the Probation Service.

Why Should Society be Proud of the Probation Service?

The Probation Boards' Association Annual Report for 2004–2005 (Probation Boards' Association 2005) under the heading ‘Saving a treasure for the nation’ simply states:

In Western Europe the Probation Service of England and Wales is held up as a role model. In Eastern Europe countries are replicating it with enthusiasm, benefiting from the expertise of the service. Major contracts have been secured to deliver our probation model in numerous places across the world. 

At any one time, nearly 200,000 people are under the supervision of the Probation Service which provides genuinely cost‐effective solutions for managing offenders, both in the community and in prison. 

Work in the courts and with offenders is delivered by highly qualified and committed people. It all works because it is local, professional and integrated. It has survived because, year after year, like any successful business it has trimmed and changed, developed and evolved. And over the years, it has stayed true to its fundamental principle – that rehabilitation of offenders is good for them and good for society too. (p.1)

The Probation Service is, by all objective measures, succeeding and performing. Successive reports in recent years, including that of the National Audit Office (2008), praise the quality of its work. The National Audit Office was impressed by the fact that 94% of the community orders it sampled were completed, breached or revoked by the court and that:

the Service has successfully achieved its own timeliness enforcement target. (p.21)

The Ministry of Justice statistical bulletins year‐on‐year show a continual improvement in performance, despite the continued and perpetual reorganisation and restructuring of the Service in past years.

Napo, the trade union and professional association for family court and probation staff, published Changing Lives (Napo 2007), to celebrate the centenary of the Probation Service. It contains not only an illustrated history of the Service but also a number of oral histories by retired probation officers. The oral histories time and again refer to the fact that ‘they wanted to make a difference’. The qualities that staff brought, and still bring to their jobs, runs throughout the whole book. These are qualities of which any society should be proud.

The Probation Service is also the custodian of an important value base at the centre of the criminal justice system.

As Winston Churchill said as Home Secretary in 1910:

The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country. 

A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the state, and even of the convicted criminals against the state, a constant heart‐searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts toward the discovery of curative and regenerative processes, and an un‐altering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of everyman, these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored‐up strength of a nation and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it. (Hansard, House of Commons, col. 1354, 20 July 1910)

To summarise, the Probation Service is ethically and morally sound. It is not only worthwhile but good at what it sets out to do. So there is a lot to speak up for and a lot of which to be proud.

Ministers' Treatment of the Probation Service

Despite the proud record of the Probation Service, the past decade and a half has been marked by a significant lack of public support for the Service by a succession of Ministers.

The first real knock to the Service came when Michael Howard, as the Conservative Home Secretary, abolished the probation training qualification in 1995. Although the Labour government elected in 1997 restored a professional probation training qualification, the verbal assaults on the Service have increased in past years.

These attacks came to a head in November 2006 when the then Home Secretary, John Reid, made a speech in Wormwood Scrubs Prison which was a full frontal attack on the Probation Service. He said that the Service was ‘not working as well as it should’ and his recipe was to bring in competition and the skills of the voluntary sector (Reid 2006).

Apart from such specific attacks by government on the Service, it has missed Ministerial championing and support when it has been faced with unjustified assaults from the tabloid press. Individual service leaders have regularly claimed that they were unable to speak out because of Civil Service protocols.

In December 2005, the murder of John Monckton by Damien Hanson and Elliott White, both of whom were under probation supervision at the time, led to the vilification of the Service in parts of the national press. It was correct that the Service be held to account in such cases, but explanations which sought to put the case in context were left to Napo, and the Probation Boards' Association.

To probation staff, it seemed that Ministers, who changed the Probation Service's role to include public protection, had then failed to resource the Service adequately and refused to explain or accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

The government's lack of public support for the Service also reflected its unease with probation as a social work entity. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s there was a move towards the Service being more about enforcement and punishment. The incoming Labour administration built on Michael Howard's ambivalence about the Service and changed it finally into being an agent of public protection. Whatever the merits of that decision, it has been seen by most practitioners as ‘setting the Service up to fail’.

The press attacks, coupled with lack of Ministerial support, have undermined the self‐confidence of the Service.

Rod Morgan, the Probation Service's former Chief Inspector and former chair of the Youth Justice Board, said in Napo's (2007) Changing Lives:

For various reasons much of the service's self‐belief and the public understanding it enjoyed was lost in the run in to and immediately following the new millennium. The service was cast adrift in a sea of structural uncertainty, incoherent management speak, ideologically‐driven poor leadership and political vacillation. (p.93)

David Faulkner (2008), senior research associate in the Centre for Criminology at Oxford University, wrote in the March 2008 Probation Journal, though the article had clearly been written in the summer of 2007, that he was hopeful that things were about to change with Gordon Brown taking over as Prime Minister and the new Ministry of Justice. He wrote that he has hope of ‘a more principled and rational approach’. He said the Probation Service should no longer be hampered by ‘a sense of perpetual turmoil and crisis’ (p.71).

He also spoke of the opportunities for probation to be recognised again ‘as a confident and respected profession’ (p.80).

There were times in 2007/08 when it seemed that Ministers would once more speak up for the Service. Jack Straw addressed the Howard League AGM in November 2007, saying: ‘Today we have a Probation Service which is delivering more and delivering it better than I suggest, it has done in its history’ (Straw 2007, p.3).

In the spring of 2008, Secretary of State, David Hanson produced the booklet, Community Sentencing: Reducing Reoffending, Changing Lives (Ministry of Justice 2008a). Its purpose was to promote community sentences to the public.

Barely a week after this booklet was produced, however, it was to be another report which received all the press attention. Louise Casey, a former civil servant and former head of the Government Respect Unit, produced her review of criminal justice: Engaging Communities in Fighting Crime (Cabinet Office 2008). This review stated that the government faced a crisis of confidence in the justice system. It put forward that the public thinks the system is remote, opaque and stacked in favour of the ‘offender’, it does not believe crime is going down, and 55% say it is the most important issue facing Britain.

The Casey Review urged Ministers to make justice more visible, by putting offenders doing community ‘payback’ in uniform, displaying ‘conviction posters’ in neighbourhoods, outsourcing unpaid work from the Probation Service and appointing a commissioner to press the interests of victims across government.

The Review ignored the fact that prison numbers in England and Wales continued to break all records, being higher per head of population than, for example, China, Burma, Sudan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe.

Prison numbers in England and Wales stood at 82,682 in May 2008 (NOMS 2008a, p.1), and increased by 30% in the ten years from 1997 to 2007 (Ministry of Justice 2008b, p.82). To quote the Prison Reform Trust's 2008 Bromley Briefing:

When Labour came to power in May 1997 the prison population was 60,131. Previously it took nearly four decades (1958–1995) for the prison population to rise by 25,000. (Prison Reform Trust 2008, p.4)

This increase was not because of rising crime. Figures published by the British Crime Survey (BCS) show that crime rates peaked in 1995 then fell by 42% over the next ten years. From 1997, all crime as measured by the BCS fell by 32% (Home Office 2007a, p.1)

Prison numbers continued to rise because people were being imprisoned for longer. Sentencers were imposing longer sentences and there was an increase in the actual time served in prison, mainly as a result of new laws – mandatory life terms, indeterminate sentences. There has also been more criminal justice legislation since 1997 than in the whole of the previous century. The Labour government created 3,605 new criminal offences between 1997 and 2008 (House of Commons 2008, para. 13).

Criminal justice policies based on talking tough and the language of punishment have been the flavour of the decade. These policies have been pursued in the name of the victim and the law‐abiding citizen. But to what end? According to Louise Casey most people cling stubbornly to the view that crime is rising and blame the government. A minority accepts that it has fallen, but does not give the government credit. New Labour has, it seems, been hoist by its own petard, becoming the victim of its own expectation‐raising and criminal justice system‐bashing rhetoric.

So what was Loiuse Casey's solution? More punishment, more humiliation, more populist measures to appease an apparently angry and anxious public – a vicious and never‐ending cycle.

When people like Lousie Casey speak out, there should be voices of reason and common sense that Ministers can listen to and take advice from; voices of what actually works in reducing reoffending. There should also be voices speaking out publicly to explain where Loiuse Casey was wrong, as well as where she was right. There should have been public voices pointing out that so much of what she was recommending was already in place, including visible unpaid work, and legislation for a victims' commissioner: (legislation passed in 2002, but not, to date, enacted).

Napo spoke out, and Napo's press release read:

Any moves to increase the involvement of the community and magistrates in the oversight and planning of community penalties is to be welcomed. However, putting offenders in uniforms, naming and shaming them on billboards and making community service as demeaning as possible will not reduce crime. The proposals will humiliate offenders rather than rehabilitate them. (Napo 2008)

Apart from Napo there were no other probation voices putting the Casey Review in perspective.

Penal Populism

Following the publication of the Casey Review in June 2008, Ian Loader, Professor of Criminology at Oxford, wrote in The Guardian on 19 June that there has been a:

shift in the meaning of political responsibility. No longer can criminal justice be left to experts who, as they see it, ‘effectively’ and ‘humanely’ manage the crime problem on the public's behalf. Nor is it the task of government to restrain education or lead opinion on criminal justice matters. Not any more. Paternalism has been replaced by a political disposition that holds it to be the task of government to elicit the experiences of customers and act accordingly – to be a translator of consumer will. Hence the predominance of populist measures, the care taken to avoid appearing ‘soft’, and the advent of a penal system in which a right, but unpopular course is pursued with trepidation and by stealth. (Loader 2008) 

Ian Loader summarised what now appears to be criminal justice based on ‘penal populism’ rather than on ‘what works’.

Penal populism comes at a cost however. It costs approximately £39,000 a year to keep someone in prison (House of Lords 2008) and approximately £2,400 to supervise an individual community order (House of Lords 2007). Probation is more effective in reducing reoffending, with 50.5% of those released reconvicted after two years, compared with 64.7% for prisons (Home Office 2007b, p.11). So why is it that logic does not prevail; why is it not recognised that there could be huge savings from not just investing in probation but by promoting probation? Proper investment in the Probation Service could lead to the achievement of even lower reconviction rates.

Politicians do their opinion polls, and what research shows is that when you ask people their attitudes to crime, if you ask crude simple questions then people are punitive and want punishment. If you ask more nuanced questions, if you talk about individuals and individual crimes, if you actually talk to victims themselves, then what people really want is something that works, something that reduces reoffending.

Unfortunately it seems that in opinion polls politicians are not very nuanced, and Ministers conclude that penal populism is where the votes are. Speaking up for the Probation Service is therefore not seen as a vote winner.

Structural Reform

It seems that Ministers believe that more votes are to be had from attacking the Probation Service than from praising it. Attacking the Service has also enabled it to justify its never‐ending structural reforms, undertaken to enable contestability and competition to be introduced. Continuous structural reform over recent years has also taken its toll, not only on the confidence of the Service but also on its ability to have a spokesperson at a senior level, whose advice Ministers will heed.

The full history of the Probation Service during the years 1907 to 1997 is documented in various books including Whitehead and Statham's (2006), The History of Probation. The history of the Service shows that despite an increased centralisation and introduction of managerialism that came in with the election of the Conservative government in 1979, local probation services continued to have much local power.

In 1997 that changed, and in Martin Wargent's (2002) Bill McWilliams Memorial Lecture, which he delivered in June 2001, on ‘The new governance of probation’, Martin spoke about the implications of the 1997 Prison and Probation Review (Home Office 1998) and I quote:

the process of modernising the probation service and its governance began formally on 16 July 1997. (p.184)

The restructured Probation Service arising from that Review was introduced in 2001 and led to the introduction of the National Probation Directorate (NPD), ensuring a national voice for the Service. The reduction of the 54 Probation Committees to 42 Probation Boards, co‐terminous with the police and other court boundaries, maintained the local structure.

As Martin Wargent noted in that lecture it was: ‘by no means a bad example of review process’ (p.184).

The Review's original proposal, to combine the Prison and Probation Services, received very loud and vocal opposition from nearly all those involved in the criminal justice system, and the government heeded that advice. This Review was an example of proper consultation; Ministers and civil servants listened to the points that were made and introduced a structure that was broadly welcomed by all key players.

Hardly was the ink dry on the establishment of the NPD and the changes of 2001 however, than the report by Patrick Carter (2003) was published in January 2004 proposing the National Offender Management Service (NOMS). The Carter Report proposal was to bring prisons and probation under a common umbrella in order to facilitate a purchaser/provider split. The proposals were based on introducing a structure that enabled the government's new philosophy of contestability to be introduced. Seemingly, the government that came to power in 1997 on the philosophy of ‘what works’ was now to be driven by the dogma of introducing marketisation into public services.

There was no consultation on the substantive proposals in Patrick Carter's Report. The same day that the Carter Report was published, the government's response (Home Office 2004), by David Blunkett, the then Home Secretary, was produced, accepting its recommendations.

Implications of a Weakened Service

The fact that the Probation Service does not have a clear and loud voice at the centre of NOMS has many implications. The lack of a loud and powerful probation voice must inevitably impact on criminal justice policy as it affects the advice that Ministers receive. The lack of a probation voice at the centre also impacts on many aspects of the Service itself, including resources, professional standards and value and diversity and inevitably the very nature of the future of the Service.

Resources

The lack of a probation voice at the centre of NOMS, inevitably questions who speaks for the Service when it comes to the regular negotiations with the Treasury over resource allocation. In recent years the resources allocated to the Service have palpably not kept pace with workloads and the demands placed upon it. While the whole of the public sector is currently facing cuts, it does not explain why Ministers and senior civil servants do not publicly recognise that the extra resources that have gone to the Probation Service since 1997 have been more than matched by extra workloads and the increased complexities of the caseload.

Napo commissioned its own research from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies on the subject of resources. Dr Mark Oldfield and Dr Roger Grimshaw produced the report Probation Resources, Staffing and Workloads 2001–2008 in April 2008 (Oldfield and Grimshaw 2008).

The researchers found that despite the increase in spending on probation in recent years, there had been reductions in service's budgets and many areas had been struggling to cope with balancing growing caseloads, involving more complex working practices, with a decline in resources. The report considered budgets, staffing levels and workloads. It recognised that probation caseloads had increased by almost a quarter since the creation of the National Probation Service in 2001. It accepted that over the same period the number of staff had increased, with a 77% increase in the number of probation service officers and a 70% increase in the number of managerial staff, but also recognised that the number of qualified probation officers had fallen by 4%, and the number of people training to be probation officers had also fallen by 30%.

The report noted:

• the extra complexities of probation work;
• the lengthy assessment tool;
• the various new forms of interventions;
• the nature of working with people who had offended;
• the spiralling costs of NOMS and information technology.

Their summary ends with the quote:

Our overall impression is that a period of stability, reflection and objective analysis would be beneficial for the Probation Service. We are doubtful that this is likely to be the case.

Professional Standards 

The professional standards of the Service are under threat again as a result of the revived threat to the probation training qualification.

The diploma of probation studies has been under review since 2006. It was originally planned that a good, modular based, qualifying training arrangement would be introduced at about the same time that the ‘new’ NOMS Agency came into being in April 2008, Nonetheless, plans for its introduction were aborted at short notice seemingly because there were questions about its cost, its affordability and flexibility.

It is critical that the Probation Service retains a high level of professional training. It is sensible to make it modular and inclusive, to cover all staff, and to ensure the proper provision of training for probation service officers as well as probation officers, but it's got to be a training that is effective, that ensures the highest standards of professionalism, as well as underpinning the ethos and the values of the Service.

A large‐scale campaign based on speaking up for the importance of probation training was fought in the mid‐1990s when Michael Howard abruptly stopped the probation officer training qualification. The campaign involved not only Napo as the trade union and professional association, but also the employers, the chief officers, and the higher education institutes. With the election of the Labour government in 1997, the Service had a professional training qualification, based in higher education, restored.

If the Service was to face another training gap, and potentially another attack on the quality of the training provided, it is not clear whether the current probation employers and probation chief officers would be as robust as their counterparts in the mid‐1990s in standing up and speaking up for the Service.

Values and Diversity

David Calvert Smith (2005) the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, who led the Commission for Racial Equality (2005) Inquiry into the police in 2005, spoke at a conference in 2005 where he stated that the criminal justice system was explicitly about moral issues and that, as the State imposes its will in judging right and wrong, it is the most important institution in British society in promoting race equality.

In other words, clarity about values and recognising the importance of anti‐racist practice and anti‐discriminatory practice generally, in a service such as the Probation Service, should not be seen as an optional extra. Nevertheless from the publication of Patrick Carter's original report recommending NOMS in 2004, through the various consultation papers that have emerged since, all have been silent on the implications of any proposed structural changes for diversity and anti‐discriminatory practice.

At the time of researching for this memorial lecture, in May 2008, I looked on the NOMS website for ‘values’ and all I found was a reference to ‘best value’. When I asked NOMS officials about NOMS values the week before the lecture, I was told that ‘the current lack of a values statement had been identified at an away‐day the week previously’.

Hindpal Singh Bhui (2006) gave the Bill McWilliams Memorial Lecture in 2005, highlighting the threat of NOMS to anti‐racist practice. Hindpal's argument was that anti‐racism was not perfect in either the Prison Service or the Probation Service, but that:

the conditions for long‐term anti‐racist practice are more established in Probation, and they are in danger of being fatally undermined within the new structure unless there is serious and sustained consideration of the importance of probation culture and ethos to the journey towards race equality. (p.186)

He recognised that the Prison Service has the advantage of a tighter management structure providing for the control and command model, which has some benefits in promoting specific practices. He argued however that without the necessary ethos and values on the ground in the Service, the control and command model alone could not maintain anti‐racist practice. The lecture also identified the importance of training for an organisation's ethos and values, and contrasted the inadequacy of the eight‐week training for a prison officer, compared with the two‐year professional training for probation officers.

Conclusion

The Bishop of Worcester spoke at the service to mark the centenary of the Probation Service in Westminster Abbey in June 2007. He spoke of the Probation Service needing qualities of solidarity and mutual support. He went on to say:

If the environment in which you are to work puts persons of compassion in competition with each other for work – and it starts to look that way – then the vision of human flourishing for which the Service stands, involves as never before the disciplines of mutual support and supervision that will enable disappointment when it comes not to debilitate and embitter. And if there is, as it seems, to be no National Probation Service to represent to our society the vision of human flourishing which this Service represents, then it will be for you in your National Association to continue to hold before us all a vision of what it takes for human beings to grow and change. (Worcester 2007) 

Clearly Napo has, and will continue, to speak up for the Probation Service. Given the continuing current lack of public support from Ministers, it is necessary for all those who care about probation being prepared to stand up and be counted in its defence.

In many ways the annual Bill McWilliams Memorial Lecture is part of that campaign to speak up for Probation. The lecture keeps the ideal of probation that Bill McWilliams embodied alive and it's that flame of commitment to the probation ideal that Napo seeks to promote and it's what's kept the Service going for the last 101 years.

Napo's campaign against NOMS since 2004 has been based on the slogan ‘Keep Probation, Keep it Local and Keep it Public’. It is difficult to envisage the future of a Probation Service if it is dependent on a mixture of private and voluntary sector bodies to speak up for it. To remain ‘a treasure for the nation’, as described by the Probation Boards' Association, the Probation Service must necessarily remain as a coherent public service, based on local boards, with a clear spokesperson for the Service at a senior organisational level.

Ultimately it can be argued that the Probation Service is about people more than structures. It's about people continuing to join the Service, a public service, who are committed to the probation ideal, who use their head, their heart and their passion and their professionalism and their values to make a difference, to reduce reoffending, to change lives.

Ultimately we have to rely on the fact that the people who will continue to join the Probation Service, future generations of probation workers, hopefully future Napo members, will be the people who will have to join forces, to speak up loudly for probation.

Judy McKnight

Probation Reflections

Paul Senior took an active interest in the blog from early on and, as far as I'm aware, was the first academic to reference its existence in print. He was a towering influence in the probation world and although a long read, his message remains relevant today and just might help practitioners, both old and new, better understand our current plight.   

PROBATION IN 2020: INSIGHTS, FEARS AND HOPES 

Editorial Comment 

On the 28th April 2016, on the eve of his departure from his Chair at Sheffield Hallam University, Paul Senior gave the final lecture in the Community Justice Portal series. A recording of this lecture has recently emerged, and we are proud to offer here an edited transcript of that lecture. The lecture was penned in the early days of Transforming Rehabilitation: Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) came into existence in June 2014 and probation as a whole was still in the throes of change. In this lecture Paul was looking to the future of probation, and given probation is changing once again with the recent demise of CRCs and the reunification of the National Probation Service, it is interesting to reflect on his thoughts at that time. 

Abstract 

Reflecting upon 41 years in probation as practitioner, researcher and trainer, this lecture discusses what Paul had learnt about the institution of probation. Despite the massive changes which had occurred during that time, probation was resilient, adaptable and innovative. The paper draws substantially on work of Paul and nine probation colleagues at a weekend retreat. There they considered their combined and diverse histories in probation to learn from the past and present a view of what was important in probation and how it might look in four years’ time (2020). Their work resulted in a special issue of this journal (BJCJ, 2016) containing a range of articles written by the contributors to this event. Paul’s lecture sets the context by highlighting ten significant points in his career and his reflections on that career before presenting insights, fears and hopes arising from those and the weekend retreat. 

A Probation Career 

I want to start with a few personal reflections about my 41 years around the probation world. I want people to know what I'm drawing upon. I've recently written a biographical account of my career for a book (Senior 2016a), probably one of the most difficult chapters I've ever tried to write. It took me back to my intellectual legacy which I picked up at York University way back in the beginning of the 70s. It reminded me of the people that I followed, if only in spirit: people like Paulo Freire, A S Neill, Ivan Illich, Karl Marx, and Antonio Gramsci, who I was particularly fond of. I had no idea I was going to be a probation officer, I was going to be a teacher, and yet the person I took most inspiration from was someone who wrote all of his work in a prison cell, in Italy, in the 1930s, under Mussolini’s regime. I want to start with a quote which I think sums up how I approach things. 

I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen, and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent. (Gramsci, 1917) 

I will highlight just ten things that I think have been significant in my career as a way of rooting what I'm going to say. 

1. Being a probation officer 

I was a probation officer for only six years. I loved every minute of it. I found skills in myself, that I never realised I had. I worked with some of the most difficult and damaged people, and yet found it inspiring at times, and I loved the work that I did. 

2. Joint Appointment 

I came to Sheffield in 1982/3. I had a joint appointment, which I loved, between Sheffield Polytechnic as it was then and South Yorkshire Probation Service. Being a trainer of probation students, as well as a trainer of probation staff was enormously valuable. All the time you're sharing your ideas, you're thinking, you're being challenged. Everything about reflexivity comes out in that world. I think I honed a lot of my ideas with my students as we worked through things and made progress. 

3. National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO) 

I sat on NAPO’s (National Association of Probation Officers) Probation Practice Committee for eight years, for five of which I was chair. I was very privileged at that time, because NAPO still sat at the Home Office table. I took part in lots of debates with the Home Office about good practice and ways forward. We were there when the first national standards were written in 1995. If you look at those, they're an educational document, a way of working to get people to think about their practice. Sadly, later versions where we weren't involved became more prescriptive. That was a great time, building policies, working with probation people from all over the country, and working at ideas and ways of operating. Probation is an immensely small world. If you go anywhere in the country, you meet like-minded people who are struggling with the same issues, and I did so much of that in NAPO. 

4. Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW) Probation 

NAPO asked me to become the CCETSW Council Member, which I did between the years of 1986 and 1989. That's when I really learned about the educational world, regulatory frameworks and so on: that’s what CCETSW did then for social work. That's held me in good stead as I came to write the Diploma in Probation Studies, but also in my new role with the Probation Institute. 

5. Jarvis Probation Service Manual 

In 1992 we published the Jarvis Probation Service Manual. Alan Sanders and myself strove at this for many, many months. We produced three editions: the second one in 1994, and the third one in 1997. We had every intention of it becoming an online source for probation staff, but the National Probation Service (Mark One) had other agendas, and we never were able to carry that through. I learned a lot about the law, some of it very obscure. We expected the Home Office to be able to tell us the detail of the law but were disappointed. Alan was called to the Home Office to a session on supervision relationships of the British Army of the Rhine. He sat down thinking great, we can write this in Jarvis and will know what we're talking about. However, the civil servants said to him tell us what the rules are for supervising people in the British Army on the Rhine - they hadn't a clue. We had to do a lot of stuff from scratch, but we learned a lot, and that's always held me in good stead. 

6. Professor of Probation Studies 

In 1996, I became Professor of Probation Studies, the first Professor of Probation Studies. I’m very proud of that. I was worried though, as we got towards the millennium, because as New Labour decided that rebranding was their thing there was a threat to change the Probation Service to the Community Rehabilitation and Punishment Service - Professor of CRaPS would not have had the same ring to it. 

7. Diploma in Probation Studies 

From 1997 through 2002, we delivered the DiPS (Diploma in Probation Studies) from conception to delivery and continued with probation training. 

8. Hallam Centre for Community Justice 

In 2002 I created, with others, the Hallam Centre for Community Justice, the Community Justice Portal and the British Journal of Community Justice. The portal was opened by Hilary Benn MP, then Minister of Prisons and Probation, and Sir Martin Narey gave the first Portal Lecture in 2002 (Narey, 2003). One of the features of Portal Lecturers is that usually they changed job almost immediately after or slightly before giving the lecture. The only one to survive, actually, is John Collins from last year who amazingly is still in his job. But I wanted to stick with tradition, so tomorrow I resign from Sheffield Hallam University. 

9. Bill McWilliams lecture 

In 2013, I delivered what for me was a very important lecture about the future of the Probation Service (Senior 2016b). I had hustled Mike Nellis for a couple of years to be able Senior 8 to do this, and in the end I told him that my prognosis was not very good and if he wanted to invite me he had better get on with it, and it worked. It was right in the centre of that very exciting and problematic time, when probation was being torn asunder by the transforming rehabilitation movement from government. We tried very hard to continue to support the notion of a public sector probation service, and ultimately we failed, but we gave it our best shot. We worked as hard as we could, but whether we failed or not I shall come back to. 

10. Probation Institute 

And finally, in 2015, September, I became Chair of the Probation Institute which I shall carry on after I finish at Sheffield Hallam, and I will talk more about the challenges of that later.

Reflecting on History 

“Over the past decade, the insecurity of the probation service has intensified as a result of the pressures of economic recession and the authoritarian populist penal policies.” (Senior, 1989)

That was written in 1989 when the service was in an uneasy transition between a secure past and an uncertain future. It could have been written yesterday, it could have been written five years ago. If there's anything that's constant about the probation service, it's that it's under attack. It's always been a struggle to maintain a focus or direction which is wanted by probation people. It's very interesting that way back then we were saying the same sort of thing. 

I want to tell you briefly about how this paper came into being and in particular, how this, my final edition of the journal, came into being. 

In 1976, as a student who had discovered anti-psychiatry, I persuaded all my fellow students to go away for the weekend to enjoy the intellectual stimulation of R D Laing and David Cooper, and all the other people who were emerging at the time. We hadn't studied that on the course: we'd only heard about it when the minstrel from Sheffield Polytechnic, Roy Bailey, had come over to play his guitar and talk to us about these new ideas. All the students said great, let's go away. We didn't prepare any agendas. We just went away. I read all the books, all the articles, brought them all with me. We got to this place that I knew about from my youth work days, it's completely remote. I looked around and found a nice communal space where we could sit and talk about the works of anti-psychiatry. I said let's start at 3pm, yes everybody said. At ten to three it was eerily quiet. I went out into the garden. No one else was there. They'd all gone down to the pub. (This was social work students). They stayed in the pub till midnight. I stayed seething in the hostel. The next day they got up, they made communal breakfast, they went for walks, they chatted amiably. No one talked about anti-psychiatry. We spent three days there. Not one word was uttered about anti-psychiatry. Everyone pronounced it a wonderful weekend, and we all went back to our course. I was a little upset. I never went to the pub - I stayed stubbornly in this place all on my own. 

I was so angry and upset by this that it wasn't until January of this year that I tried to do the same thing, some forty years later. This time, we went to a slightly better place. I told my colleagues it was shabby chic, when in fact really just shabby. But it is a wonderful old place with big settees and big rooms with high ceilings. Nine colleagues came with me. The purpose of this gathering was to explore whether and what probation as an institution might look like in 2020. Most of what I'm talking about here is drawn from that experience. Maybe because they were older, maybe I was better at martialling the troops, but people worked, and all of them appear in various ways in the journal special issue, together with three others Wendy Fitzgibbon, Mike Nellis and John Deering who were unable to make the event but have contributed to the journal. 

We sat down with no agenda, no inputs, and explored the world of probation together. After all these years in probation, I still found it an extremely elevating and wonderful event. We were able to explore afresh some of the ideas, some of the worries, some of the doubts, and some of the difficulties. Within three or four hours, we were beginning to work in small groups, we were beginning to produce the articles that would find their way into this journal. It took only two months to produce this. Every promise was kept by everybody. The quality of the articles is excellent. I shall allude to some later. One thing that I shall always treasure is the fact that people came together who had never worked together before. We produced articles that simply would not have been produced before: one in particular on emotional literacy and emotional labour, the product of three people who had never worked together (Knight et al, 2016). It was a tremendous occasion. The result of those few days away is this volume (BJCJ 2016) It's amazing that we managed to produce it with of all of us working together to peer review it and get it out. 

We are I think, what Ann Worral would have called ‘probation lifers’, a term she produced in her book with Rob Mawby “Doing Probation Work” (Mawby & Worrall, 2013), which is one of the best reads in the last 10 to 15 years. They said probation was often regarded as being a vocation, a lifelong commitment, one main career. I do feel that describes me and many of the people who came to this event: we are probation lifers. There’s something irresistibly attractive about probation, even in its worst moments. It's a life sentence. I'm very indebted to Phil Proctor who drew for me a wonderful diagram which shows that if you were to cut me in half, you would see probation going all the way through the middle, like a stick of rock. I think that applied to the people at this event. 

Something we learnt was the importance of a historical perspective. One of my favourite books is by Kate Atkinson, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum”. It's an interesting study about how you use and work with and understand the past. This quote, I think, expresses an important element 

“The past is a cupboard full of light. And all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.” (Atkinson, 1995) 

To me, history is not about nostalgia. I don't look to the past thirty years in order to wallow in the golden era of the past. I've written negatively about probation, and often enough to gainsay that belief. But I do look to the history to help us in thinking through the present. History is about seeking out the continuities from the past, even as the specific organisational frameworks change, finding those continuities, working with them, modernising them, bringing them up to date, rather than just simply skipping. To me, there's an historical amnesia around, which serves only those who wish to destroy and remove the past. People will sometimes take it as axiomatic that we must draw a line: that was old school probation, now we're in new school probation and it's not going to look like that. We might even just change the name and actually do the same thing, so we go from community service orders to community punishment orders, unpaid work, and community payback. But when you talk to a client and ask, what are you doing? They say, ‘I'm on community service’. There is a needless rush to have historical amnesia, particularly by government. They reinvent the wheel that we know a lot about, they rebrand unnecessarily. They create new models of delivery, without the insights from the past and therefore make the same mistakes again. They rewrite what probation is about. 

I think also history enables us to understand our Achilles heels. Those parts of probation practice which may have caused problems, and with hindsight and correction should enable new practices to emerge. I've come across the phrase, ‘this is the Achilles heel of probation’ very often. We can draw on knowledge and experience and evidence from the past in helping us look forward. We shouldn't just draw a line, we need to work with those histories. 

Insights, Fears and Hopes 

I want to move into 2020: will we still have a recognisable probation institution and profession? I'm going to offer some insights, talk a little bit about some of the extreme fears we have, and then some hopes for the future. 

Insights 

When I got up this morning and saw the National Audit Office report being published (NAO 2016) I thought I’d better include it, though I've not had a chance to read it in full. It says the Ministry has successfully restructured the probation landscape - really? - and avoided major disruptions in service - really? It also says the National Probation Service (NPS) is not yet operating as a truly national sustainable service and the Ministry needs to address operational issues, many of which are long standing, such as weaknesses in ICT systems. The Ministry also needs to have a deeper understanding of the risks associated with reduced business for Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). Achieving value for money will require the resolution of these fundamental issues. 

You'd expect an audit report to have this kind of balance. They have produced an infographic which contains some interesting things. It talks about the new arrangements, it talks about reorganising prisons to give more offenders support into the community but there's been very little happening on that score. And it says long standing operational challenges still exist. The first of its long-standing operational challenges is low morale in NPS and CRC staff. My memory is that there was high morale in the Probation Trusts prior to the changes. It's not a long-standing issue. Probation was proud of itself, performing well. Nobody thought that the changes were necessary inside the probation service. There are always problems in any organisation. There were better organisations but many worse. They had high performance, excellence and so on. It's not a long-standing issue: it's an issue that's come up since the changes. The legacy of severely inefficient ICT is a long standing one, made infinitely worse by the dislocation and the bifurcation of services, which means the NPS go down one route for ICT and the CRCs go down multiple other routes. Staff load and workload pressures are high in the NPS, and much lower in the CRC. The BBC reported there are over seventy cases per individual in the NPS, which comes out of this report. The NPS is supposed to be taking high risk people. When I was a probation officer, we had even bigger caseloads, not because we were superhuman probation officers, but because fifty were voluntary after-care cases that we saw once in a blue moon. Seventy high-risk cases is ridiculously large. One thing I want to highlight is that performance remains unclear. Worryingly the change took place in 2014 but the infograph says data on the impact of the new arrangements on reoffending rates are not available until late 2017. We're going to have to wait three years before we know anything about how they're performing, which is, to me, a very long period of time. 

My second insight relates to what the world is saying about what's happening. I picked out a few headlines. The Lyme Regis and Bridport News says the Union warns of probation service job losses in Dorset, and the Plymouth Herald reports concern over claims that the part-privatised probation service will cut staff in Plymouth. The Guardian reported that G4S were fined 100 times since 2010 for breaching prison contracts. The Northern Echo reports probation workers meeting offenders in community centres and Salvation Army halls due to cuts. This is an interesting one for me as I was a product of a probation service that had community-based practice. I spent most of my day in the pit villages that I worked in, I had reporting centres, and I went up to the pit and talked to the employment officers to see if I could get my lads work, and so on. I never spent any afternoons in my office, I always spent it out in the villages with no mobile phone, and no way of anybody knowing if I was okay until I went into work the following morning. You'd say great, the return of community-based practice, but they're doing this not because this is a positive choice but because there are no offices for them: they are forced into home working, or agile working as it's being called. The Guardian has said that privatised probation staff are stressed, de-skilled and facing job cuts. The Bristol Post fears severe cuts could see hundreds of probation officers replaced with call centres. In Cambridge the private probation service is branded reckless amid crime increase fears. Finally, Lord Ramsbotham, who's been a great defender of probation, said simply Grayling completed the destruction of the probation service. Just these few accounts show how difficult it is. 

Another continual theme you see coming out is the notion that no longer will you have a person to see: you might have a call centre, you might have something to report into, a kiosk. You might just put your finger in a machine to say you've been there and that personalised individualised relationship building will cease. Sodexo is ruining probation centres officers claim, saying there is no privacy. This is about office accommodation and the installation in not just in Sodexo, but in other CRCs, of the hub arrangement for interviews, which owes its design to McDonald's, rather than to good social work practice. It's been quite roundly attacked because openness with the officer is vital if meaningful work is to be done to address attitudes and behaviour. Will somebody who is vulnerable, and may be difficult, talk when just over in the next cubicle they can hear somebody having the same conversation. 

Yesterday, we published a blog on the Probation Institute site of a reluctantly retired member who had come to us to resign from membership because he was resigning from the probation service. He'd worked in the probation service for about 16 years. He said you wonder if the whole world has gone crazy. The What Works research has largely flown out to the window and been replaced by something else, this something else is little more than an eloquently worded fag packet design, or possibly the back of a used envelope variety. This is a probation officer trying to do his job, finding it too much, and after 16 years just leaving it behind. Without redundancy, without payment, he's just gone. He's not untypical. 

So, what do we find? How can we sum this up? What are the threats here? I think there are huge consequences of bifurcation, the splitting into NPS and all the different CRCs and dislocation of staff. The splitting of the NPS and the CRCs often set them against each other. They're not working together, office space is no longer shared. Distancing is going on. Swish office design which is not fit for purpose: I certainly do not believe that open plan alone can work in an office where you need private space to build relationships and work with people. You have to deliver both the open space that enables people to work together and innovate but also the private space to enable work to go on. Swish practice models may also not be fit for purpose. The Interserve Model (see e.g., Marsh, 2018) was published this week with lots of fine words and diagrams and arrows but I'm not sure there's anything substantially different there to what you might have designed before. 

What we're seeing, even if these reforms are correct, are defeated staff, loss of jobs, deep loss of morale, and a tragic waste of talent. Whatever else is happening, that is certainly happening, and we have to worry about that. We're also seeing the threat of de-professionalisation. We've spent a long time building up the profession of probation to see it being undermined not only by job cuts, but the downgrading of jobs to people less qualified. The allocation of more and more work to Probation Service Officers (PSOs) who don't get adequate training, don't get adequate support, but also to tasks that were once seen as the preserve of probation officers. NPSs E3 Blueprint (NPS, undated) proposes most stand down reports will be prepared by PSOs. We're also seeing administrators undertaking reporting centre functions with low-risk cases. We’re moving away from the kind of people that we'd expect to do these tasks. 

There's a lack of coherence in delivery. IT systems not speaking to others. We don't know what's going on. That's part of the problem because of the commercial situation. The communication between NPS and CRCs is poor and getting worse. This is playing out as was predicted way back in 2013. This isn't a surprise, but it is a problem. McDermott (2016) said the shortage of skilled staff would be a barrier to delivering the new and innovative services that the CRCs promised. So even where ideas are good, even where ideas are well worked out using the best of research, skilled staff leaving are going to make it increasingly difficult to deliver those until staff are trained again. 

However, as typical of probation, good practice continues despite this picture. I would not want to paint a picture of complete terror everywhere in the country. I've seen examples of good practice. We see it through the Graham Smith Awards where people are researching good practice. People, despite the world they're living in, are working hard to produce as good a practice in the circumstances as they can. The evidence base regarding probation practice has never been so strong. The difference between when I started as a probation officer in 1977, in South Yorkshire, was that we didn't really know what we were doing. We were earnest, we were bright, we were interested, we worked 10 or 15 hours a day. We did that so we could sit down with our colleagues and find out what was good and bad practice. We had very little to draw on other than psychodynamic casework, which was being criticised. It took a long time to develop the evidence base. When I began to read about the desistance theories, they seemed to me to give me answers to some of the things we were grappling with all those years ago. Very simple things: the building of relationships, trying to be positive in the way in which we work with our service users. Not difficult things, but things that research now tells us work. This was strong in 2012: this is not new. Given what I've said about change and continuity, history can continue to light up the route. 

Probation has a long history of resilience, adaptation, and innovation. The notion that innovation is only the preserve of one sector to me is laughable. Innovation can occur in any sector. There's good work comes out of public sector, the voluntary sector, and from time to time the private sector as well. Don't dismiss past work as being somehow non innovative. Let's look more towards Europe and the rest of the world, not always the USA. This is a continual mistake that we make as the USA has a different model of probation. We could go down some of the extremes of probation of USA if we're not careful, but we have much more positive models to draw upon in Europe. Consider, for instance, the recent work by Fergus McNeil and a huge group of academics across Europe. Offender Supervision in Europe, the COST project (McNeill and Beyens, 2016), has produced lots of extremely innovative ideas about supervision. It is wonderfully ironic that the NOMS driven work in Eastern Europe with fledgling probation organisations inculcates a rather more positive public sector vision of probation that we do in this country. At the time we're dismantling that in this country our ex-probation staff are going to Romania or Georgia or Russia or Bulgaria and helping them produce a positive modern probation service: the ultimate irony. 

I've said for many years that policy implementation is by definition paradoxical. We cannot expect policy to go in a single line: it will sometimes go well, sometimes badly, and it will conflict. If we start with that assumption we’ll not be disappointed if things don't quite go in the right direction. I also believe the straw in the wind is the introduction of the Probation Institute, dedicated to the support and development of a probation profession. 

The Essence of Probation 

I want to offer you an insight from the article that all retreat contributors put their name to, which myself and Dave Ward actually scripted (Senior et al, 2016). We asked ourselves the question on the first morning, is there something about probation that you can drill down and get the essence of, what's the essence of what probation is about. Whatever society you've got, whatever configuration you've got, if you said we want a society which has social justice attached to it, that looks after people who commit offences against the law, what would you do, what would you create, what would be that essence? And we found some of those things.

Probation exists in four huge worlds, the correctional world, the social welfare world, the treatment world, and the community. They are all big systems, they all have their own ways of operating. Probation stands related to all four of those worlds, stands independently of those worlds but it has a relationship at its boundaries with each of those four worlds. This we represented by putting probation in the middle, not to imply that probation is the centre of the universe, but as a heuristic device. We also reckoned that it must have boundary issues in each of the four systems. Over the years, those boundary issues have been played out in different ways. At times we have become more correctional and law enforcement oriented; at times we've adopted a more social welfare model, at times we’ve been more community-based (restorative justice), and at times we’ve been more treatment-oriented, and sometimes all four at once. Our argument is that if you go with one of those systems too far then you threaten the essence of probation. Let me illustrate this. The correctional world of policing, prisons, courts and legal professions, the one we most often associate with ourselves, that's the dominant system. They're better resourced, they're more nuanced to the political philosophy on criminal justice, and we know that legal enforcement has been a big issue over the last twenty years. Indeed, we'll remember Paul Boateng saying, “We are a law enforcement agency, that's what we are, that's what we do.” 

The move towards national standards and towards higher breach and enforcement was part and parcel of that commitment to enforcement. My argument would be that at some point, if we push too far along that way, we actually lose the essence of probation: the essence of probation becomes so dimmed that we're something different. Mike Teague (2016) speculates that what's happening in America, where probationers now have to pay for their supervision at such extraordinary rates, could end up being the situation in the UK, that people on probation will have to pay for supervision. Another model, in the article by Mike Nellis (2016), is the growth of techno-corrections and the increasing use of electronic monitoring, which again would take us to a very different supervision scenario. We could paint lots of different ones in all four systems, but my point is to say that this is a way of viewing whether this is a probation service or probation institution that we want to support or whether it isn't. If you don't maintain a balance between the core elements and these boundaries you lose what probation is about. In this article (Senior et al, 2016) we say when probation works the lives of service users change for the better, the creation of future victims is prevented, and the whole community benefits. It has become an essential component of our civic society, and the key cornerstone of our community justice system. 

What did we decide was in the essence of probation? I have to say we didn't agree fully on this. We debated this for a long time, having different nuances on it, but we think it represents the kinds of essence that we want to support. 

1. We started with a reframing of ‘advise, assist and befriend’, though the term is now a historical legacy. We came up with “support and enable through relational coproduction”. Not as easy off the tongue as advise, assist and befriend, but it expresses the core tasks that we do: supporting, enabling, and working much more in partnership with service users. The work that Beth Weaver has done in recent years is very important to that (see for example Weaver 2011). That was number one.  

2. We have to be bounded by values and ethics, including diversity and human rights: without that it's not probation. We adopted in the article the values that the Probation Institute has codified, but there are other versions of that as well. 

3. Reflective practice is at the core of the work that we do with individuals. Without having reflective practitioners, we would not get behind the front stories that offenders give us, and it would be far more difficult to work effectively. A recent Graham Smith award person, David Coley (2016) argues that reflective practice remains the cornerstone of good practice. 

4. We should maintain a clear occupational culture, which is an article by four members of the team (Burke et al, 2016) who talk about culture, and discuss the various elements of it. We need to go back to being more community based but in a way which is positive and enabling in local communities. We're not doing it because we've got nowhere to see our clients because that forces on us unsafe and unhealthy relationships, we should do it as a positive commitment. We have an established body of knowledge that we should use for good effect. 

5. Next, having emotionally literate practitioners, people who can work with the emotions of the situation they find themselves in. The article by Charlotte Knight, Jake Phillips and Tim Chapman (2016), who had never worked together, reflects the hours they spent debating its centrality and importance. 

6. Finally, and we did argue about this a little bit, probation is distinguished from social work by its symbiotic relationship with the court. That's where it gets its work from and that's where it should go back to. I do think it's a tragedy that the CRCs don't have that direct relationship, because they are supervising service users on behalf of courts. 

Those constitute our essence, we can debate and discuss them, but we think those are the bottom lines for deciding if probation can operate. 

Fears 

I want now to talk about six fears of the future. 

1. We end up not with a probation service, but with a community surveillance service, driven by techno-corrections, cheap impersonal reporting systems, delivered by functionaries. That is a real risk. We’re going there, some of the things that we hold dear about that essence just simply won't be there. I'm exaggerating in order to illustrate that it is a real possibility. 

2. Fear number two, is that the NPS will be privatised. We're actually on a stepping stone here. My prediction is that to rationalise public commitments further, it will be privatised, and possibly NOMS might go as well. 

3. On the research side, we may find that probation researchers leave probation to pursue other themes. I talked to someone who's been working in probation and desistance for some years the other day, and he said he's no longer working in that field, he's moved on to something completely different in the crime field. He may want to have done that anyway, but there comes a point that if researchers can't work inside the organisation and help it understand what's happening, they will move into other careers, and then we start to lose that knowledge and evidence base. 

4. De-professionalisation continues and we're not left with anything we can call a professional worker. The politics of ignorance and despair undermines the Probation Institute and it goes out of business. I'm very worried about that because I can't seem to get beyond people's knee jerk reaction to what they thought the Probation Institute was about two years ago. 

5. Tragedies will occur. We are facing the possibility that given the dislocation, the bifurcation, the problems of sufficiency of staff, that a tragedy will occur sooner rather than later. And that will expose problems in a way that none of us would want. 

6. Probation has numerous Achilles’ heels. Around 2000 it was enforcement performance. We sorted that out, but actually it made no difference. Another one is about public protection, that we couldn't do public protection well enough; we weren't tough enough, we weren't policing enough. The implementation of evidence-based practice is an Achilles’ heel: the failure of What Works to work in 2002. Everyone was optimistic about it: the evidence base was, and is, good in part, but it was taken away from practitioners, it was imposed in a way which was unhelpful and it didn't achieve its goals. The late Barbara Hudson (2002) talked about the Achilles’ heel of partnerships. I think probation has always been a bit difficult in partnership, it's always preferred purchaser-provider relationship to real partnerships, until IOM (Integrated Offender Management) came along, and people realised there was something that could be partnership that is different to purchaser-provider. We struggle with after care, often seen as the Achilles heel of the service. Dave Ward in one of the articles (Burke et al, 2016) talks about insularity as the Achilles heel of the probation service: probation needs to get out of its bubble. We've heard that criticism so many times. Pragmatism is the Achilles heel of probation, something I said a few years ago, when talking about the willingness of the NPS in 2002 to say to David Blunkett , we will do whatever you want us to do, you tell us what to do Mr Blunkett and we'll do it. And finally, liminality is the Achilles’ heel of probation. Jake Phillips (Senior, et al 2016) talks about that, the notion that probation is never in control of its own life, it's always others. All these things are worth a study in their own right, because if you could get to resolve some of these, maybe you could be more secure as a probation institution.

Hopes 

Finally, I want to finish with three hopes. 

1. Hold on to the politics of paradox within criminal justice. 

I go back to Stan Cohen (1985) who said this about policies,

 “consequences, so different from intentions, policies carried out for reasons, opposite to their stated ideologies, the same ideologies supporting different  policies, the same policy supported for quite different ideological reasons.”

That statement to me is as fresh today as it was in 1985 when he wrote it. Neoliberal outcomes are not inevitable. We sometimes work on an assumption that we have to have a neoliberal society. I think we need to challenge that. I think we need to continue to look for alternative ways of operating, we need to resist its ideological hegemony, expose the inconsistencies in its work. New Public Management brought a style of targets, outcomes and standards, which were criticised. It was changed almost completely by the offender engagement programme just for a few years, as we opened out, and we said, let's not define in advance, what our practice is with our clients, let's ask them and develop a professional relationship. Where’s it gone now I'm not so sure, but certainly, that shows you can change things.

It seems to me that the job insecurity that we've been talking about earlier on, disturbs the relational context of worker-service user interaction: you cannot develop good relationships with people if you're only there for six months, if you're only there occasionally and then you moved into something else. One of the strengths of probation was that people stayed there for a long time, and they worked with people for a long time. Austerity is a policy and a dogma, not an inevitable response, there are choices, and if we don't make those choices soon we're going to see more problems as a result of that approach. 

We have to get ourselves ready for the fact that CRCs may fail and be repossessed by the state. We're not quite sure what they would do if they fail. It could be that another CRC or another owner will take them over, could be that they come within the flock of the NPS temporarily. But we know from what we see through SERCO and G4S that when private sector companies get into difficulties, they withdraw. They don't stay around as we would have done in the public sector even when everything was hitting the fan. They withdraw, they leave the sector behind. I think if they push, push the reduction of numbers further and further, there's going to be a CRC that says I can't make a profit here, I can't survive, I'm on my way. When it does, we need to know what to put in its place. So hold on to some of the paradoxes that are there. 

2. Hold on to the institution of probation. 

Can more be done than just salvaging the legacy and talking about the past that's gone? Can the institution of probation rise above the ashes of the recent past? I think we can and should maintain and support the occupational culture of pre-TR arrangements, keep the organisational memory which is so important. The voice of probation has been changing to something that Mawby and Worrall (2013) talk about, a more female voice, and, compared to the rest of criminal justice, a more black minority ethnic voice. Micro practices will change with the greater dominance of those populations. We need to continue that commitment to equality and diversity. 

The role of the physical environment may assist or hinder practice so if there are to be changes to the physical environment let's actually make them work. Community based offices I would welcome. We can dust out the NAPO papers written in around 1979 about community-based practice. Let's go back to the future because it's a positive way of working, not because we haven't got an office to go to. 

Let's maintain a set of bottom-line values and ethics and sign up to the code of ethics. Understand our Achilles heels, the paradoxes of policy and strive to maintain what we've described as the essence of probation.

It's interesting, that language is still resistant. That brand of probation still flourishes, tenaciously, holding on to the imagination. When we interview offenders on projects they talked to us about being on probation, and there hasn't been a probation order for about seven years. They don't understand it when they're asked are you from a CRC? No, I'm from probation. The language of probation has a lot of resonance to it and I think our service users get that as well as anybody. 

We have to recognise and build on the interprofessional nature of practice. One of the things we discovered when we researched Integrated Offender Management over a number of years was that it helped probation work out what it did in comparison to what the police did, in comparison to what the voluntary sector did. Working in partnership didn't mean that probation was no longer needed it said there's a distinctive space here, which is a probation space. I don't think we've ever invested enough in that. We've not seen partnerships as about exploring that, we've seen partnerships as a threat, we've seen partnerships are something that loses our very essence. 

3. Hold on to the Probation Institute 

I want to find a way out of the unproductive and self defeating arguments about its origins. I wasn't there when it came into being and I'm looking forward. However it came into being and it is where it is now. There is nothing else that can do that job. We need to use our voice for the profession of probation, and that's what I intend to do as chair of the Probation Institute. We've already started it. We're beginning to produce position papers, blogs, social media conferences: we're engaging the membership. We’re developing professional networks; we’re developing a centre of excellence with support in the profession. We need to recreate a sense that there is homogeneity of probation practice around a set of agreed values and ethics, not different organisations with different versions. We need to ensure consistency of qualification structures around a registration process. Ensure the profession has protected titles, which go beyond organisational boundaries, allowing people to move from CRCs to NPS or whatever the organisational arrangements. We need to support investment and continuing professional development at all levels. And we need to work in partnership, which is what we have been developing recently. At the end of the day the Probation Institute I think is about building a community of practice that maintains a probation identity. Anne Worrall (2016) said in a piece about the Probation Institute these following remarks:

 “standing back and seeing how it goes will result in the Probation Institute failing. The danger is that too many people will only realise that it might have been worth getting involved when it is too late to do so. So the challenge is to work with us positively. By all means criticise, by all means argue with us, but make a voice”.

Conclusion 

I conclude with this quote, also taken from another article: 

“probation work might be unglamorous. But as Mawby and Worrall note, it is necessary work and someone has to do it”. (Burke et al, 2016) 

It is important therefore that those who do it in the future do so with the compassion and humanity that has been the hallmark of probation staff, both past and present. I hope I have persuaded you that the death knell of probation I anticipated in 2013 hasn't happened. We're still here, we’ve still got enough to hold on to and to fight for in the future. Over the last 41 years, I've sought to defend probation, to move with the times and the changes that have been instituted. I've tried to persuade people of that. I want to finish with a quote also from Antonio Gramsci from his prison notebooks, because this is what I think I've tried to do. And I hope I've tried to do some of it with you tonight. 

“The mode of being of a new organic intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, but in active participation in practical life as constructor organiser, permanent persuader, and not just a simple orator.” (Gramsci, 1971) 

I hope that I’ve persuaded you to keep going a little longer.

Paul Senior : founder of the British Journal of Community Justice, Sheffield Hallam University

The Damage Caused

Preamble

With 2,456 hits yesterday, it's pleasing to see interest sustained. So, continuing with the academic theme, here is an extract from the latest edition of the British Journal of Community Justice. The full article is lengthy, but well-worth consulting, particularly for the references. 

A FAILED SOCIAL EXPERIMENT: DAMAGED PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY POST ‘TRANSFORMING REHABILITATION’

Sam Cooper: Probation Officer

Abstract 

Following the Government’s Transforming Rehabilitation process of privatising half of the Probation Service, research found that profession identity and resilience had been damaged in the aftermath. Five years later, just after the Government announcement that Probation is to be re-unified, this paper explores the impact of the last five years on 7 members of staff working in one of the CRC companies that originally reported the lowest resilience and the most difficult working experiences. Narrative inquiry was used to allow staff to tell their own stories, and then followed up by semi-structured interviews to fill in any gaps in data. Key themes which emerged were loss of professional discretion, resistance to financial driven decision making and diminished self-efficacy as a result of inconsistent management oversight. Recommendations are made at the end of the paper to assist new managers to ease the transition and support staff resilience.

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Phillips (2010) considers the institutional values that probation staff have to work to, and taking into account the past experiences and drivers for staff joining the profession, he argues that such values cannot be imposed on staff from management down, but are internal. Mawby and Worrall (2009) echo this after interviewing probation staff who went through the creation of NOMS. Staff were very concerned about higher management being prison staff who, they perceived, had no idea what the values and working ethos of probation were, instead seeing the prison ethos as inherently punitive. Even when faced with more stringent values of control and punishment implemented by NOMS, probation professionals resisted this because they saw their professional role as more supportive than punishing (Mawby and Worrall, 2009; Clare, 2015). For some, then, the internal values and ethical drivers underpin their sense of professional identity as they seek out altruistic and service-based vocations. 

Professional identity as measured by performance and ability 

For other writers, the performance required to complete a professional role, and the level of competence and skill to do this effectively are vital to the sense of professional identity (Riddle, 2016). For instance, in software engineering students who developed self-efficacy through developing problem-solving skills had a stronger sense of professional identity and increased confidence (Dunlap, 2005).

In the early 1980s writers were researching the professional identity of probation staff and asked if there was a body of specialist knowledge specific to the role which would constitute this in the way that other professions such as teachers, lawyers or doctors had (Thomas, 1983; Lawrence, 1984). They were more concerned with a limited body of academic writing which guided and supported practice and development, rather than a perception of performance or confidence comprising part of professional identity (Lawrence, 1984).

Between 1970 and 1990 the key qualification for probation officers was the certificate of qualification in social work (CQSW) (Mawby and Worrall, 2009) and that those who qualified saw themselves as specialists in working with vulnerable people. This qualification was followed by the Diploma in Social Work (DipSW), before 1997 the introduction of the Diploma in Probation Studies finally cut ties with social services and professionals who were new to the service were no longer being trained in a social work driven ethos (Mawby and Worrall, 2009). Suddenly probation officers were having to successfully pass difficult qualifications that no longer mirrored the altruistic, social or religious motivations of the 60s and 70s (Mawby and Worrall, 2009). Older social workers still saw the offender as a victim of their circumstances and needed help and support, whereas the newer staff saw them as potentially dangerous individuals whose risk needed to be managed and controlled (Mawby and Worrall, 2009).

Mawby and Worrall (2009) not only looked at the change in academic qualifications and the drive to ensure they were academically robust, but also observed the fact that probation staff were keen to work across a range of areas to gain different knowledge from courts, to hostels to prisons in order to specialise. Staff actively sought to build on their formal qualifications with work-based skills and specialist experience to increase their competence and professional reputation (Clare, 2015).

Clare (2015) also argues that probation staff use their training and experience in order to juggle the realities of a need for social justice and punishment with the ethical treatment of the offender which adds legitimacy to their practice, which has often come under question following the TR process of privatization. Clare (2015) further suggests that this legitimacy and ethically driven practice should be used to shape the way the CRCs deliver their business because it reduces business risk when staff are highly trained and highly experienced in their role. However, it is unclear whether officers share the same business concerns, as research suggests they are more motivated by ethical practice than business profits (Phillips, 2010; Clare, 2015). Yet it is in the interest of a business to ensure relevant and reliable training meets the needs of its staff as this ensures capability and confidence (DeMonte, 2013; Thompson et al., 2017). 

With probation staff it appears that their construction of professional identity is in fact a combination of their education, training and perceived high standards of delivery of work, but also underlying ethical and moral motivations to provide a service which make their role a vocation rather than simply a job (Phillips, 2010; Clare, 2015). Understanding these drivers can help to predict that staff who have been moved from a role they consider to be akin to social service, to an employee of a large business concerned with profit may no longer feel their ethical and moral motivators are aligned to the new company’s and this could erode their sense of identity and trust.

Identity post-privatization 

As stated earlier, probation has undergone various changes to both organisational shape and ideological paradigms (Phillips, 2010), however, some writers claim that this split and the cultural effects of going from an effectively civil service role to one of business and profit driven employee, has been the biggest paradigm shift (Clare, 2015). Historically staff have fought to hold on to their professional values and identities in the face of policy change because first and foremost, they were probation officers (Phillips, 2010; Clare, 2015). However, after TR even that was removed as fully qualified probation officers are now called senior responsible officers (SRO) and partially qualified probation service officers are now called responsible officers (RO). 

Kirton and Guillaume (2015), conducted research into the impact of privatization on Probation staff and found there was a general fear that profit would come before staff and that their future was no longer secure, and they would not have the long-term career opportunities that NPS staff had. This was a stark difference from the lifelong services of staff in the past who had joined Probation looking for a vocation (Phillips, 2010). Kirton and Guillaume’s (2015) study regarding the effects of TR on NAPO members found that conditions had deteriorated and the lack of a professional voice in the process had been demoralising to staff whose educated opinion had previously been respected (Phillips, 2010). 

Robinson, Burke and Millings (2016) studied staff identity during the transition period from probation trusts to CRC and identified a number of themes which emerged in the discourse of the staff interviewed from separation and loss and status anxiety. Some staff believed the new CRCs were ‘socially invisible’ without a clear identity, and they were worried that they would be seen as ‘second class probation’ (Robinson, Burke and Millings, 2016, p.173). 

Deering and Feilzer (2017) followed Robinson, Burke and Millings’ (2016) study by considering the 3 elements of legitimacy; external legitimacy of officers work as interpreted by external agencies, internal legitimacy of practice as interpreted by offenders under supervision and self-legitimacy as internalised by staff themselves. They found that self-legitimacy and a belief that they are acting appropriately affected how professionals behaved and exercised their authority and this then increased the co-operation of offenders on supervision. However, they argue that the transition into private practice has impacted on this level of self-legitimacy but add the caveat that this had been a progressive occurrence prior to TR (Deering and Feilzer 2017). 

They conducted questionnaires followed by open questions to explore the qualitative explanations for the quantitative results from the questionnaires by asking subjects why they joined probation, had it met their expectation, what type of person they think staff should be and what their role should include and whether their values have come under challenge following the move to the private sector. 

They found that the gap in shared values and interpretation of quality had diverged between established probation officers and new managers and new staff, leading to mistrust and a fracturing of group identity, which is necessary for the maintaining of self-legitimacy. They also found that self-legitimacy was based on the belief that justice was  state-sanctioned and as such should be state administered and not something which should be done by private providers and this membership of a private company did not sit comfortably with subjects (Burnett and McNeill, 2005; Deering and Feilzer, 2017). 

Hall (2015) supported the Probation Institutes bid to become a regulatory body, where staff would register and be subject to mandatory continuous professional development. Deering and Feilzer (2017) posit that probation staff’s sense of self-legitimacy may have been severely damaged during the transition and suggest such internal narratives may be rebuilt by the Probation Institute gaining regulatory body status to add legitimacy to staff identity. They suggest this could potentially rebuild the sense of joint identity as a member of one body, irrespective of who the officer’s employer is. This was a large-scale study conducted over a period of time which is outside the scope of this current research, however, the research was conducted directly after TR. This current research will be following on from these initial findings, three years later and in light of the new knowledge that the two Probation providers are to be re-unified. 

Consequences of damage to professional identity 

Even before TR began, Phillips (2010) recognised that qualified probation officers’ professional identity had declined as more and more probation service officers have taken over work without possessing the full probation officer qualification. Mawby and Worrall (2011) similarly found dissatisfaction, with newer staff felling they had been misled by the job role as the emphasis was more on compliance and enforcement than building strong relationships. Overall, there was unrest within the staff group irrespective of grade. 

Fitzgibbon (2009) also argues that there has been a wide-scale deskilling of probation staff as professional discretion has been replaced by tick boxes, where staff record attendance and compliance and no longer had the opportunity to work with the whole picture. This led to damaging high profile further offences and high levels of scrutiny which have led to increased stress and anxiety (Fitzgibbon, 2009). Fitzgibbon (2009) goes on to state that the rate of continuous change in practice has had a detrimental impact on staff, with experienced officers suffering lowered resilience and leaving the service. 

Kirton (2015) conducted a large scale survey and found that following TR, the staffing levels in CRCs reduced on average across the UK by 1.84%, but in Derbyshire, Leicester and Nottinghamshire this was 4.76%. They also found that 40% of respondents surveyed in the CRCs would take voluntary redundancy and leave if they had the opportunity and 29.2% of staff were actively seeking other employment outside probation. The main experiences cited during this study were a sense of de-skilling, loss of career opportunities, and excessive workloads with the CRCs owned by Sodexo suffering higher than average inability to cope at 48% and fearing job loss at 74%. 

This strengthens the argument that employers, particularly Sodexo employers, need to mitigate more staff losses and attempt to retain their experienced and qualified staff members. The next wave of change was set to start in spring of 2020 when the two sides of probation return back to one service (Barton, 2019). In reality, this has turned out to be June 2021 when staff will again through a change of organisational identity, as they become civil servants.

Sam Cooper, Probation Officer