Inspiration

Now we've settled into a world of lockdown and made suitable adjustments to many aspects of life, it's becoming a bit of a challenge deciding how to fill the pages and indeed what there might be an appetite to discuss. The prison release saga, PPE, TR2, workload, morale, training, IT, Shared Services, pay and conditions etc have all been 'done to death' and seem somewhat sterile, especially in the current situation. 

I still live in hope of more imaginative and incisive guest blogs emerging, but in the mean time I'd like to remind ourselves of a figure from our heyday, not least in the hope it might serve to inspire newer recruits lest they accept without question the further drift towards civil service bureaucratisation. The following is contained in the current edition of the Probation Journal.           

In memory of Paul Senior 

Paul Senior, who died on 22nd June 2019, was born in Barnsley in 1952, moved with his family to Suffolk, where he did his secondary schooling, returning to Yorkshire as a student at the University of York in 1971, and remaining in the county for the rest of his career. He had initially intended to become a secondary school history teacher, but decided against this, moving via volunteer youth work into social work, and gaining his Certificate of Qualification in Social Work (CQSW) between 1975 and 1977. Some of the thinkers he encountered in teacher training, not only practical educators like AS Neil and Maria Montessori but also Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, George Orwell, Ivan Illich, and Paulo Freire, were lasting influences on his multifaceted career in and around the probation service. Gramsci and Freire, in particular, were socialist intellectuals for whom producing knowledge was always about serving the political and practical interests of disadvantaged people and critically supporting the efforts of those who worked with and for them. They informed the outlook that Paul used to appraise and judge probation practice and probation training and, later, probation policymaking. He consistently understood that the probation ideal, like the National Health Service (NHS) ideal, had devious political enemies hell-bent on obliterating it, and that canny political action was as – often more – important as rational argument and empirical evidence in upholding and extending it.

Paul worked as a front-line probation officer in the South Yorkshire probation service for six years, and conceded that his ‘intellectual curiosity was not always seen as helpful by my colleagues’. Temperamentally combative, and always politically astute, he was a natural activist within National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO) – particularly its radical Action Group: he spoke regularly at its conferences and spent eight years on its Probation Practice Committee, producing ‘a huge number of policy papers whilst we were still at the strategic table with the Home Office’. Furious debates on the future of the probation service, some with a socialist inflection, occurred within and without it in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There was no consensus on the theories that could or should inform practice, or on the acceptable level of official restraints on the service’s professional autonomy.

In 1982, Paul became a senior probation officer (training) in South Yorkshire probation service and a senior lecturer in Sheffield Polytechnic (as Sheffield Hallam University then was), a demanding joint appointment which he fashioned into a position of considerable influence, locally and nationally. He served as the probation columnist in the magazine Social Work Today and published his first article in the Probation Journal in 1984, the beginning of a steady stream of articles and book chapters that lasted to the end of his career, eventually augmented by blogging and tweeting. He enjoyed some deep conversations with Bill McWilliams, then a pioneering research officer in the Sheffield probation service: generations apart politically, he and Bill were nonetheless kindred spirits in their intellectual passion for probation. In post, he worked locally with students, practitioners, and managers on the changes entailed by ever more frequent criminal justice legislation and policy directives and, later on, on the creation of post-qualifying training arrangements in the South Yorkshire and Northeast Midlands region. As a member of Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW) Council (1986–1989) he cautiously championed the development of distinct Probation Streams on a new generic social work qualification; he and others hoped at the time that this concession to specialised probation interests would dampen Home Office inclinations to split probation training from social work. For a while, at least, it did.

The eponymously named Jarvis, the venerable and prestigious probation practice manual which no post-war probation desk would have been without is not much remembered now (and only geeks of a certain generation will have noticed that Marvel superhero Iron Man has a ‘digital assistant’ called Jarvis who also, as it happens, knows everything he needs to know). It says much about Paul’s accumulating prestige in 1992 that, along with a Sheffield colleague, Alan Sanders, he was commissioned to create an updated fifth edition of it. Given the accelerating pace of legislative and policy change in the 1990s, only a loose-leaf volume, or even an online version, to which constant alterations could be made, would have been a viable replacement for the compact book it had originally been, each edition of it assured of a reasonable shelf life in less frenetic times. Plans for a fifth edition foundered when the Home Office, mindful, no doubt, of the way Jarvis epitomised the service’s control over its own mission and knowledge base, deemed its continued production unnecessary.

Ever the happy warrior, Paul was never too daunted by the tightening of Home Office control over the service, never without a move to make. His insouciance served him well when, during a period of freelance consulting (1994–1998, although still with ties to Sheffield Hallam), he won the contract to devise a new qualifying framework for probation training, which the Home Office had finally placed outwith social work, while retaining it in higher education. Many of his peers in probation training saw this as a retrograde development, a poisoned chalice, not to be colluded with. Paul was not happy with it either but, reasonably enough, feared something worse if a confident probation insider like himself did not try to shape it. The resulting Diploma in Probation Studies (DIPS), a two-year degree with a professional National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) attached, was not to everyone’s taste – master’s level training courses were abandoned, agencies (notionally) had too much control over the academic curriculum. Nonetheless it is generally agreed now that within New Labour’s very tight political parameters Paul salvaged far more space for informed reflection on theory and practice than diehard supporters of a social work connection had thought possible.

Of all his achievements, this was perhaps his most consequential. In practice, the nine original DIPS courses did deliver better, more focused and often more critically criminological training than most generic social work courses had had time or inclination to do. True, the model was short-lived, barely lasting a decade, losing out in the step-by-step dismantling of professionalised probation to an agency-based vocational training with minimal academic input, but it is almost certain that an unreflective vocationalism would have prevailed much sooner if Paul had not engaged so shrewdly with the Home Office, and pushed at the limits of what New Labour were prepared to permit.

Sheffield Hallam appointed Paul Professor of Probation Studies – the first chair with this name – in 1996 and he returned there full-time in 1998, to develop a suite of criminology courses and to coordinate criminological research, always, in his case, with a view to serving the interests of the probation service and its practitioners, but now within the broader field of ‘community justice’ (a useful term he was among the first to use in Britain). A former colleague, Kevin Wong, now Reader at Manchester Metropolitan University, sums up the significance of what was achieved in this period.

Paul’s drive, energy and imagination put Sheffield Hallam University on the criminal justice map. He established the Criminology subject group which went on to become the Department of Community Justice and Criminology. He won the first Probation training contract for the university, which Sheffield Hallam has continued to deliver to this day. He established the Hallam Centre for Community Justice in 2003 and was its Director until his retirement in April 2016. At its busiest, the Centre had eight full-time staff and also drew in departmental colleagues. Under Paul’s leadership, the Centre made significant UK policy contributions, evaluating important justice innovations: the South West Accommodation Gateway; Integrated Offender Management; and Intensive Alternatives to Custody. Cementing the centre’s national reputation, in one year, by a whisker, the centre just missed out on securing £1m worth of research income, something Paul was always hopeful of rectifying one day.

These developments were augmented by the creation in 2002 of the Community Justice Portal, an online information exchange for the sector, and the inauguration of an annual Community Justice lecture, the first of which was given by Sir Martin Narey, progressive Director General of the Prison Service and alumnus of Sheffield Polytechnic. The British Journal of Community Justice, which Paul launched jointly with De Montfort University in 2002, with the late Brian Williams and himself as co-editors, brought together theorists, practitioners, and researchers to engage in critical reflection. Paul and Brian persuaded anybody and everybody with a stake in community justice to write for it, from senior civil servants to probation trainees and ex-offenders, and their own editorials were invariably astute and timely comments on the current turn of events. While making clear there was no case in evidence or principle for privatising probation, Paul’s Bill McWilliams Memorial Lecture in 2013 was nonetheless kinder about its prospects and possibilities than his peers might have wished. This testifies, I think, not to an unholy compromise with commerce but to a temperamentally stubborn hope that the old probation ideal could never be entirely extinguished, no matter the institutional setting. And catastrophic as privatisation has largely been, it wasn’t.

Some of the contracts and consultancies undertaken by the Hallam Centre came from abroad – Europe, Singapore, New Zealand, and Hong Kong, giving Paul’s career a new, international dimension. Between 2006 and 2015, he had a working relationship with City University of Hong Kong, flying out three times a year to teach a packed schedule of social policy and criminal justice modules on several undergraduate and postgraduate courses, invariably staying in the Eaton Hotel on Nathan Road, where he felt well looked after. He encountered 1500 students over this period, and regularly participated in graduation ceremonies. Unsurprisingly, he also formed good relationships with Hong Kong’s probation, welfare, and correctional services; heads of NGOs; and judges and magistrates, frequently running training workshops and trading ideas over informal lunches and dinners. He would have liked university support for a Doctoral Degree in Criminal Justice to extend the education of existing practitioners, but that was not to be. He was much appreciated by students and colleagues in Hong Kong as a teacher and mentor but is also remembered as a connoisseur of Chinese dim sum, and could, say former colleagues, have become ‘a tourist guide to Hong Kong’s wonderful restaurants’.

In a professional-autobiographical essay he wrote towards the end of his career, it is clear Paul had no serious regrets beyond the one common to all his peers and co-contributors to the Politics and Probation book in which the essay appeared: those of us who began in probation and youth justice in the 1970s did so with a spirit-of-the-times optimism that never anticipated the scale on which our hopes, after 1989, would be dashed. Paul was arguably sharper than most in understanding that a Gramscian ‘war of position’ in civil society (to defend probation and its place in the post-war welfare state) was a better strategy than direct attacks, from a position of weakness, on a hegemonic opponent, and if even he underestimated how effectively neoliberalism would co-opt and deplete opposition, well, there were more who were far more naive. With good reason, he personally never felt defeated: he had firm moral-political principles, and he knew what he was doing, right to the end, in his post-retirement work for the Probation Institute.

Passionate as he was about probation, this was not all there was to him. For all he had a work rate that made indefatigable seem like a weak adjective, Paul also had a hinterland in which he was liked, loved, and admired for quite different reasons – a successful single parent; a stoic and sardonic bearer of protracted illness; a spiky and competitive friend; a bit of a gourmet chef; and a committed if erratic cricketer, even finding time to write a commemorative history of Tickhill Cricket Club:150 not out, the South Yorkshire club where his wake was held earlier in July last year. It was abundantly clear there that a lot of people had been very proud to know him, and if Gramsci and Freire could have made it, they would have been too.

I am grateful to Dr Kevin Wong, Paul’s former colleague and the current co-editor, with Jean Hine, of the British Journal of Community Justice, for assistance with this obituary.

Mike Nellis
Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Community Justice
University of Strathclyde, UK