Food For Thought

Only a day after publication of the highly negative HMI report on NPS core functions, I saw this photo on Twitter, posted by Lucy Frazer MP, Minister responsible for Probation:-



"As we transition to a new way of delivering probation - strengthening management of offenders in the community, better protecting the public, I was delighted to hear ideas from the new Probation Divisional Directors for the NPS"

Basically it got me thinking. This is the team that have been responsible for the state NPS currently finds itself in, but more importantly, do they inspire confidence that they've got the wherewithal to tackle the problems identified in the HMI report and successfully integrate case management from the CRCs? 

We all know TR was a crock of shite; that having privateers running CRCs was a very bad idea, but it's taken a lot longer to focus attention on the ever-so-smug NPS where unfortunately there remains a very unhealthy air of unjustified superiority. What a wonderfully encouraging environment for the impending CRC case management reintegration? I'm not imagining this either; this came in over night:-

"Are CRC staff finding resistance from NPS staff regarding the reunification of offender management? No-one wanted the split but there now seems to be a lot of hostility, perhaps those in the NPS have come to believe they are elite."

Of course this issue has been around ever since the disgraceful 'shafting' and split, but there's growing evidence it's become institutionalised and it will inevitably poison the reintegration process, further hindering NPS in being able to sustain anything like satisfactory service delivery. Lucy Frazer would do well to ponder on this if the government wants to avoid further negative publicity for the hugely damaged probation service brought about by her Tory colleague Chris Grayling.

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Locating material to sustain this blog sometimes takes me to surprising places and in this regard I have to thank Twitter again for pointing me in the direction of a brilliant post-election essay just published by Prof David Graeber in the New York Review of Books. 

Interestingly, although principally concerned with a forensic analysis of the reasons behind the recent domestic Labour defeat, the author contends publication in the UK would have been nigh-on impossible, such is the degree of unpalatable truth contained within it. Anyway, a brilliant read, but it was the following that particularly caught my eye with regard to the demise of our profession and growing realisation that we must break free from HMPPS and the dead hand of civil service control:-  

"Whereas the core value of the caring classes is, precisely, care, the core value of the professional-managerials might best be described as proceduralism. The rules and regulations, flow charts, quality reviews, audits and PowerPoints that form the main substance of their working life inevitably color their view of politics or even morality. These are people who tend to genuinely believe in the rules. They may well be the only significant stratum of the population who do so. If it is possible to generalize about class sensibilities, one might say that members of this class see society less as a web of human relationships, of love, hate, or enthusiasm, than, precisely, as a set of rules and institutional procedures, just as they see democracy, and rule of law, as effectively the same thing. (This, for instance, accounts for Hillary Clinton’s supporters’ otherwise inexplicable inability to understand why other Americans didn’t accept the principle that if one makes bribery legal—by renaming it “campaign contributions” or half-million-dollar fees for private speeches—that makes it okay.)

The peculiar fusion of public and private, market forces and administrative oversight, the world of hallmarks, benchmarks, and stakeholders that characterizes what I’ve been calling centrism is a direct expression of the sensibilities of the professional-managerial classes. To them alone, it makes a certain sort of sense. But they had become the base of the center-left, and centrism is endlessly presented in the media as the only viable political position.

For most care-givers, however, these people are the enemy. If you are a nurse, for example, you are keenly aware that it’s the administrators upstairs who are your real, immediate class antagonist. The professional-managerials are the ones who are not only soaking up all the money for their inflated salaries, but hire useless flunkies who then justify their existence by creating endless reams of administrative paperwork whose primary effect is to make it more difficult to actually provide care."

David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and the author, most recently, of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. (December 2019)

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By coincidence, regular contributor 'Getafix pointed me in the direction of this article from Times Higher Education illustrating pretty much the same issue:-

Box-ticking is the inevitable result of top-down impositions

"Overseeing an Athena SWAN application convinced an anonymous academic that if tasks cannot be properly resourced, they should not be attempted at all.

The current industrial action by members of the University and College Union is about many things, and not everything can be solved by cultural change. Yet the way UK universities currently work – or don’t work – has created a system in which everyone loses. It was inevitable that overloaded colleagues could not give Athena SWAN applications the attention required: they were juggling other tasks and needed to protect their personal time.

The neoliberal university incentivises half-hearted implementation. It delegates tasks to those unable to say no. Whether as a conscious coping strategy or out of sheer necessity, slow walking, box-ticking and perfunctory hoop-jumping are inevitable defence mechanisms that people adopt in the face of such top-down managerialism. All too often, valuable staff time is wasted without universities' having anything to show for it. This is Kafkaesque, yet the solution ought to be a simple one: if tasks cannot be properly resourced, it is much better that they not be done at all.

When my school’s new equality, diversity and inclusion committee met to consider the feedback on our successful Athena SWAN application, only a single member of the senior management team showed up. Half an hour late. But perhaps that is as it should be. Staff are not a resource to be managed. Properly empowered, they will flourish of their own accord."

The author was, from 2017 to 2019, a lead in equality, diversity and inclusion in the humanities school of a UK university.

Food for plenty of thought here I think.