A fork in the road
New research published last month in the Probation Journal – A fork in the road: Probation unification in England and Wales two years on – reports on probation practitioners’ reflections, two years after unification, of living through a period of profound organisational change, described by HMPPS as the “transformation phase”.
Drawing on insights from the second of three sweeps of interview activity with probation staff in one case study region, the researchers ( Matthew Millings, Lol Burke, Harry Annison, Nicola Carr, Gwen Robinson & Eleanor Surridge) consider staff’s reflections of the official strapline “Assess, Protect and Change”, exploring their perceptions of its capacity to reflect the work they undertake as well as judgements respondents made about changes to practice whilst working within the post-unification setting. The interviews were taken out between February and August 2023 so come before the probation “reset” of last summer which presented the service with even more challenges.
Themes
Throughout their interviews, the research team identified four overarching themes: (1) a continued sense of change trauma being experienced; (2) an enduring sense of individual and collective operational vulnerability; (3) a sense of opportunities being missed to pull through practice learning; and (4) uncertainty about the capacity of local level leaders to direct practice.
In their analysis, the researchers highlight three key emergent challenges which they believe should result in a re-drawing of the unification road map; they describe them as “a fork, or series of forks, in the road“.
1 CRC practice ignored
Several groups of staff expressed the view that there have been opportunities lost to fully reflect upon and integrate the learning and experiences of the different constituent groups brought together through unification. The majority not only struggled to identify examples of CRC working that has been transferred into the unified service but also characterised unification as an NPS ‘takeover’. For some this meant that some of the innovations that CRCs had developed, such as work with service users had not been recognised or incorporated.
2 Localisation
The second challenge related to the capacity to empower more local level decision and investment-making to support service delivery. Several managers expressed the concern that the attention to assessment and process was skewing the operationalisation of practice goals and shifting focus away from desistence-focused work that is embedded within the communities’ people on probation are drawn from. The feeling of ‘being part of a national organisation that doesn’t really understand the regional and local differences’ was seen as stifling individual innovation and ingenuity.
3 Disproportionate focus on risk management
Researchers reported a widespread concern that staff were not able to provide an individually tailored service which focused on promoting desistance. The practitioner quote below was described as being typical:
“we are treating everything at the same level and it’s very much based on that management of risk, rather than enabling people to make positive changes.”
Interviewees complained that national directives risked making practice robotic and eroded the last vestiges of professional discretion.
Conclusion
The research team conclude that:
“climates of uncertainty impact on the well-being and capacity of individuals to deliver good practice. The consequences of staff shortages and an overwhelming sense of constant scrutiny, that has the scope to isolate individuals for blame, are layers of individual and collective operational vulnerability.”
There appears to be no let-up in the pressures of constant change, under-staffing and over-bureaucracy that have beset probation practitioners for well over a decade now.
The header image is of the Chapel of Reconciliation on the grounds of the former Berlin Wall.
