Lets Look at E3

E3 Blueprint Effective. Efficient. Excellent.

Foreword

It is nearly eighteen months since the National Probation Service (NPS) was formed. Throughout that time, our staff have delivered consistently effective services to the courts, offenders and victims. That is a credit to the commitment of everybody. 

But I know that maintaining delivery has involved a lot of hard work and that there is more still to be done to make our systems work better, to build our identity and to maximise our impact within the resources available to us. And we need to deliver our contribution to the savings committed to as part of Transforming Rehabilitation to reinvest in those cases previously not managed by probation. 

As with any major change in how the system is organised, our immediate priority has been to stabilise the system. There is a long list of small gains that have been achieved over the last year that build the resilience of the NPS. Where issues have arisen, you’ve increasingly shown the collective ability to fix them. 

That is not to say that everything is perfect. I know from the time I’ve spent with probation staff that there are still frustrations. We must be realistic about the level of service that we can expect from others, but you have my commitment that we will continue to push for resolution to issues with central and other service provision. 

The focus on resolving the immediate issues we have faced as an organisation has necessarily meant our concentration has been on what we do and how we do it, rather than thinking about the type of organisation that we want to create. 

That is the shift we need now to make. The proposals set out in this document paint a picture of what service delivery across the NPS will look like, and how we will shape ourselves for the future.

The Blueprint is in part about completing the job of Transforming Rehabilitation (TR). TR formed the NPS as an entity but it did not establish common ways of working across the organisation. E3 is also about preparing for the future challenges that we will face, including the continued expectation of reducing cost, driving improvement, and creating an organisation that can support the emerging shape of prison reform. 

To meet these challenges requires an organisation that has established an evidence-based model of practice, applied consistently across the country, backed by a fair distribution of resource. The Blueprint sets us on a path to achieve that. 

For some of you the proposals are likely to require changes to the way you work. For a very few, they may signal a more fundamental change in your role within the organisation. A great strength of probation staff is your commitment to the service and your ability to speak your mind. I encourage all of you to read the Blueprint and to work with us on how these proposals might best be refined and implemented. 

COLIN ALLARS Director of Probation

Chapter 1 Overview

The National Probation Service (NPS) was created in June 2014 as part of the Transforming Rehabilitation Programme. The NPS brought together parts of 35 former Probation Trusts to form a new organisation with over 9,000 staff and a caseload of 90,000 offenders. 

The NPS, as part of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) is a national organisation covering England and Wales, with the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for NOMS overseeing the entire NPS delivery structure. However, the management arrangements for the NPS in England and Wales vary in acknowledgement of the distinct differences in the delivery landscape. 

In Wales many of the areas of work necessary to make communities safer and improve reoffending rates are devolved to the Welsh Government. This includes housing, substance misuse, physical and mental health services, education, skills and training, child and adult safeguarding and local government (community safety). NOMS in Wales was established to reflect this unique situation. The Director of NOMS in Wales has overarching responsibility for the delivery of all of NOMS services in Wales, including direct responsibility for the NPS and public sector prisons and contract management responsibilities for privately contracted prison HMP Parc and the Wales Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC). 

In England, the Director of Probation has direct responsibility for the delivery of probation services. Responsibility for public sector prisons and contract management in England sits with other directors within NOMS.

With the creation of the NPS in England and Wales, we inherited a positive legacy from the former trusts of high performance which we have, to your great credit, maintained over the last year. The harder legacy is that we have also inherited significant differences in how we do our job, how many people do it at what level, and at what cost. And, of course Transforming Rehabilitation has fundamentally changed the operating model for probation.

There are differences in the way court reports are prepared, the services provided to victims, the contributions we make to youth offending teams, how approved premises are managed and resourced, and the types of cases managed by Probation Officers (PO) and Probation Services Officers (PSO). 

As a national organisation we need to address these inconsistencies to be able to provide a quality, equitably resourced public service across England and Wales. We have been working with the Performance and Analysis Group in NOMS to develop a resource allocation model that builds on the tried and tested Metropolitan Area Capacity Model that was previously used by a number of Probation Trusts. The model analyses the case load and activity within offender management and courts and will allow an equitable distribution of staff and resources throughout the National Probation Service. Getting the most from service delivery is in the interests of staff, offenders, victims, our partners, and the public as a whole. 

The E3 Programme was created to define and implement the changes necessary to achieve a consistent way of working. E3 stands for Effectiveness, Efficiency and Excellence. Those three words define what we are trying to achieve through the programme.

• Effectiveness in better delivering on both our performance targets and securing the outcomes of reduced reoffending and public protection. We have successfully maintained performance throughout a period of sustained change. That is a huge achievement and is credit to the professionalism and commitment of our staff. But feedback from staff and partners as well as recommendations in recent audit and inspections have shown us there are opportunities to further improve service delivery 

• Efficiency in ensuring that every penny we spend makes the greatest impact. We need to find ways to reduce what it costs to deliver services to offenders while ensuring that we continue to protect the public and reduce reoffending. The relative efficiency of former Probation Trusts varied significantly. We are committed to using the opportunity of creating a national service to improve the overall efficiency of the organisation. Our proposals will deliver our contribution towards savings for reinvestment in the additional offenders now being supervised by probation. But they will also improve the quality of our provision 

• Excellence in the way that we operate as an organisation and the outcomes we deliver. Most former Probation Trusts worked to the European Excellence Model (EFQM) and many had achieved 5 star ratings. Our long term ambition within the NPS is to replicate those standards

So what does this mean for us? 

It is worth recognising that much of what we do will not change. 

Our purpose and the core of our work will not change. NPS staff will continue to assist Courts and the Parole Board by preparing reports which incorporate accurate and evidence-based assessments and appropriate proposals. We will continue to work with the NPS caseload of mainly sexual and violent offenders, focussing on reducing their risk of harm and enabling them to avoid further offending. We will use Approved Premises (AP) to monitor and support the most dangerous of these cases. Our unique contribution to multi-agency partnerships such as MAPPA, MARAC and Prevent will remain. We will work with victims to ensure that their voice is heard. We will fulfil our statutory duty to contribute to Youth Offending Services (YOS). 

We also recognise that most of the proposals that we outline in this document are not new. They are delivery models that are already operating in parts of the NPS, and which were in place under Probation Trusts. We know that they work. We also know that they will release staff time and resource. 

We are committed to ensuring that any proposed changes to service delivery have been made with due regard to our Public Sector Equality Duty [PSED]. We acknowledge that any changes to service delivery has the potential to impact positively or negatively on both service users and staff groups of particular protected characteristics. The intention of the E3 programme and this Blueprint is to show due care in identifying possible impacts and where necessary highlighting activity that should take place to either promote positive impact or mitigate against possible negative impact of proposals. We will continue to recognise differential need and are committed to ensuring services meet that need effectively.

Our proposals are based on evidence. E3 has looked at the evidence base on what is effective in reducing re-offending and risk of harm. This has included a review of research into effective Probation practice both in the UK and internationally, and discussion with HM Inspectorate of Probation and the NOMS Serious Further Offence (SFO) review team about their analysis of good practice. Even more importantly we have worked with and involved experienced probation professionals in the development of all of these proposals. 

In applying consistency we will also want to preserve the local responsivity and partnership work that has been the driving force of so much innovation over the last few years. That will continue to be true, not least through the evolving relationships with the 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). Our aim through this programme is to become an organisation that is ‘consistently innovative’. Consistent in that we work to an agreed and equitable structure and that our processes and practice are founded on evidence. Innovative in that we provide our managers and staff with the opportunity to utilise their professional experience in the way we work, including with local partners and in contributing to the organisation’s continuous improvement. This model provides scope for flexibility to operate within different areas, including Wales reflecting the uniqueness of the devolved delivery landscape, and the NOMS in Wales focus on increased integration of delivery of offender management services across custody and the community.

It was always recognised that there would need to be change in how some of our work is undertaken and by whom, once the NPS had been established. The changes will for some staff be significant. They will remove some roles from the organisation and change what we ask of others, in particular PSO grades. We intend to create generic job descriptions for core roles (Case Administrator (CA), Senior Probation Officer (SPO), Head of Cluster/Function, PO, PSO), and these will be formally evaluated through the established job evaluation process. These will cover the range of roles at each grade. They will support our goal of flexible and multi-skilled staff. 

For staff who read this document and see proposals that may change their role we would offer reassurance. It is important to stress that we do not believe compulsory redundancies will be necessary to achieve our ambitions. The NPS caseload is higher than we had planned for. Implementation of the changes described here will release the capacity to absorb that work among our existing workforce, but in some parts of the NPS and for some staff it will mean operating in a new way. 

We have called this document a ‘Blueprint’ because it sets out for staff and partners an early and high level plan for what service delivery in the NPS will look like in the future. This Blueprint sets a high level direction for the future shape of service delivery in the NPS. We are sharing it in the interests of transparency and to give staff and stakeholders the opportunity to comment on those proposals. We want your help to support us in best making the shift to this new way of working. Significant further work is required to translate these design principles into a clear organisational structure.

1.1 Vision

The core role and purpose of the NPS is consistent with the 100 year history of probation in England and Wales. 

Our role is to protect the public, support victims and reduce reoffending. We, alongside the rest of NOMS, have a simple vision: 

“Preventing Victims by Changing Lives”. 

Everything that we do should be with the aim of contributing to the delivery of that vision, whether that is in the advice we provide to sentencers, the support we provide to victims, the approach we take to the management and rehabilitation of offenders, the relationships we build with partner agencies, or the way that we support our staff to improve their ability to deliver. 

As an organisation we have described ‘how’ we go about delivering on that vision through a series of organisational principles 

• We believe in the capacity of people to change. We know that through excellent professional practice, strong partnership working and by making clear what is expected of offenders, we can help them change their lives 
• We are accountable. We are proud of our role in protecting the public which is always at the heart of our decisions 
• We are collaborative. We work with individuals and with national and local services to create a real and sustained difference 
• We are effective. Our work is focused on delivering results and building on our skills and experience. Our work is based on evidence of what works, and on continuous improvement. This means embracing evidence and innovation to provide a service the public can be confident in We are fair. We value the diversity of our staff, our communities and individuals, knowing that this strengthens our ability to be responsive and effect real and long-term change in how people live their lives 
• We are professional. We trust and support our staff to make the best decisions for public safety, investing in their ongoing development, encouraging innovation and always striving for excellence The aim of E3 is to help us better deliver against that corporate vision and organisational principles. 

(more to follow)