So the research concluded "OASYS is a pile of shite". Something we all knew.
The problem is that the organisation has invested so heavily in "how to do OASYS", rather than "how to assess risk". Certainly in my area over the past few years, the focus has been on OASYS QA Standards, training about how to use them, QA feedback, with the feedback on literally "how" to fill out each box to "fit" these ridiculous standards.
OASYS is frankly not based on research - it doesn't take a professional to identify that a violent offence took place because of "thinking and behaviour" and "attitudes". This leads to ridiculous comments like "he needs to improve his thinking skills", "he needs to improve his consequential thinking", "he needs to improve his victim empathy", "he needs to change his attitudes to others and society".
OASYS guides you little to identify the factors that prevent people perpetrating offences - why can the starting point not be what already exists in Mr X's life to prevent another offence and how we can now build upon that as the basis of the work we do. OASYS and certainly not Probation actually tells us HOW to address the psychological risk factors referred to - they've reduced us to "referral agents" - refer to TSP for thinking, drugs agency for drugs, and CRC for ETE/finances - and my "intervention" will be to "discuss" this with him and "motivate" him to attend. That's NOT how I see my role and I do try to do more, but that's how belittled I feel by "senior management" who have equipped me with few skills (other than what I have read up, learned, trained in prior to probation) - ultimately I can totally see why the service users say "what's the point in me attending probation - what exactly do you DO"?
The organisation has reaped what is sowed and yet STILL persists to sow the OASYS seed, piling on the pressure to do more of them, adding in new sections about pillars and arms and failing to provide what we actually need.
The organisation has reaped what is sowed and yet STILL persists to sow the OASYS seed, piling on the pressure to do more of them, adding in new sections about pillars and arms and failing to provide what we actually need.
The organisation rolls out a new "statistical score" and assumes people are just going to naturally know what these things are, how to use them - they treat us like total machines which is demeaning.....and then blame US for "only seeing RSR as a risk allocation tool" when that was entirely how THEY rolled it out to US....and then scratch their heads and say "we just can't understand why the staff aren't using RSR in their assessments" or "we just can't understand why staff feel we don't listen" - because we are SICK to our BACK TEETH of writing meaningless shite into OASYS, against your meaningless QA standards and when we raise this in team meetings, HOS briefings or whatever we are shouted down and told "the tool is based on research" - what research? Research completed in 2003 by some cronies at the MOJ???? Cronies that think the phrase "When is the risk likely to be greatest" actually makes grammatical sense and needs a four paragraph reinterpretation in the QA standards?
What people need is proper training and grounding, on a regular basis, on the psychological (and other) risk factors referred to in this report. What we get is yet another iteration of OASYS or OASYS QA which consumes our time, energy and focus. What we need is the reflective approach mentioned here, allowing us to formulate this neatly into perhaps one or two paragraphs, not an OASYS.
What people need is proper training and grounding, on a regular basis, on the psychological (and other) risk factors referred to in this report. What we get is yet another iteration of OASYS or OASYS QA which consumes our time, energy and focus. What we need is the reflective approach mentioned here, allowing us to formulate this neatly into perhaps one or two paragraphs, not an OASYS.
But no, what we get is page, after page, after page of tick boxes, pull throughs, drop-downs, "evidence boxes" (I think there must be about 10), and ridiculous standards that talk about "list your sources in date order, with name and author" in order to get "EXCELLENT", or meticulous guidance about what a bloody "current situation" is!
--oo00oo--
As an aside, one of my most memorable career low spots occurred some years ago during a prison visit to HMP Doncatraz. To my utter astonishment, I witnessed a colleague entering an interview room with the full OASys manual under their arm!
Sad situation worsened as as PSOs do the same task on much less pay . Po need to have their autonomy back to make considered and varied choices than the trench of pre determined oasys crap. I don't see it anytime soon so what about fair pay for equal work and a common recognition it's what you actually is what your paid for not what you believe your worth.
ReplyDeleteHow about a system whereby there are defined roles, defined responsibilities, defined boundaries - and pay reflects the role/responsibility each person holds, not some over-inflated sense of an individual's status or power?
DeleteIn the days of three telly channels there was once a system that seemed to work for probation practitioners - Chief Probation Officer, Assistant/Deputy Chief Probation Officer, Senior Probation Officer, Probation Officer, Probation Services Assistant.
Each role was clearly defined in terms of responsibilities, requirements to hold a post, e.g. specific qualifications, time served, demonstrable experience; there were clearly defined boundaries in terms of tasks, autonomy & decision-making.
As a PSA I would have a small caseload of Money Payment Supervision Orders and tasks assigned by the three POs I was allocated to work with. I was supervised by an experienced SPO. That was the role, regardless of my own personal beliefs or qualifications. Just because I had a PhD didn't make me a more important or more valuable PSA. If I wanted to move on to more responsibility then I had to go through training to get the appropriate qualification to be a PO.
As a PO I was supervised by an experienced SPO.
If I wanted to be a SPO I had to put in at least five years' graft as a PO before being regarded as having enough relevant experience to apply.
No fast track, no favouritism, no blurred boundaries, no parachuting in of accountants or politically expedient appointments.
It made for a (generally) measured, focused Service that had (for the most part) professional integrity. The experience & knowledge of those in the most senior roles was respected as they had earned it by 'progressing through the ranks'.
But I suppose we did have a strong union then, one that didn't grab its ankles whenever there was a whiff of an assault on terms & conditions, on pay, on training or on job evaluation.
There were, of course, a whole raft of other roles within the Probation Service that helped keep the Service together.
Requiring a certain number of years experience in a role before progressing onto a higher role is no longer permitted due to equalities law as it would breach it on the grounds of age discrimination. So removing that requirement wasn't a probation decision. It was something that happened in every profession due to that legislation.
DeleteWonderful decent post and in the main I agree with you. The past was clear and although your account is good it was open to abuse. The famed band 4band the option for an open end scale led too many chiefs to paying their chums. It was fought over and we ended up with a nationally agreed evaluation for duties and responsibilities of role scheme. It allocated proper scoring to rate a post requirements. Sadly this ended being fatally flawed. Too many po union types biased their views on the roles than actually understood the scheme. This was aided by national Napo grossly incompetant they allowed the scheme to down grade vlos . Too many arguments
Deletespring up to retain lower rates in jobs . All this does is suppress the po rate by downgrading their own scales. I would want to hope the clever po structure starts to adopt an intelligent strategy a trade union strategy of getting all posts moved up a scale or 5 or 6 or 7. Denegrating colleagues roles as national Napo did only buys a lost cause. What a shame when vlos were rightly and many still remain at 4 the only proper thing to do was ammend some job description and grade them all up. Napo downgraded its own members for the moj and call themselves a union.
If memory serves me right - and it seems to be getting less reliable by the hour these days - the flaws and abuses only began after there were more telly channels available, i.e. the imposition of Trust status, when some Chief Officers had a rush of adrenalin & thought they were the next Branson, Dyson or Philip Green and acted out their power fantasies - with NOMS's blessings.
DeleteBrought over from Friday at 11:05:-
ReplyDelete"Here here. Well said. It surprises me in these training sessions that colleagues are subservient and go along with the bullshit. If we don't all keep saying it the ones who do are more easily shouted down. We are treated like machines robots this is not what I came to do and before someone says get another job I've wasted years in this one why don't they change the job to what it should be working with people not computers! I am not here to fill in meaningless crap so it's easier for moj to create stats."
There's some observations on OASyS to be found in Inside Time. Under the main article there's some other links that may be of interest.
Delete"OASyS is generally considered the finest offender risk assessment in the world"????
https://insidetime.org/oasys-whats-the-story/
'Getafix
The comment that OASYS was considered the "foremost risk assessment tool for the purposes of sentence management and resettlement" was written in 2010 (just 8 years after OASYS was rolled out) and itself was highly subjective and had no evidence to back it up - as I recall it, it was NOMS and the people who authored OASYS itself described it as such - I guess the fact that it "calculated" statistical risk scores in conjunction with personal assessment made it unique and "world beating" at the time, and I have no doubt that the statistical scoring underlying it is highly sophisticated.
DeleteBut let us consider what is the purpose of OASYS?...to identify the "risks and needs" associated with an individual's offending and ultimately to slap a label of medium or risk against them. I just don't see how filling out 38 pages of shit is helping that process....after meeting the individual and collating all the info together, writing a few paragraphs to identify which areas of that person's life were likely to have contributed to their offending/risk against a list of crappy "areas" such as "thinking" and "emotions" does NOT take 4 hours of tappety tapping - it drains the soul, it drains the energy, it drains ALL of our resource so that we have been left with virtually nothing else to offer.
Nobody is saying that a written piece of well thought out evidence justifying the "regime" of licence conditions and so on is not required. But I felt so sad reading the research referenced in the previous blog post, that we are NOT equipped to identify or address the range of complex psychological risk factors they referred to - OASYS does NOT help us to do that, unless "thinking" and "attitudes" are the risk factors the report authors were referring to?
It just makes me so angry because we could be so much more and ARE so much more....and yet the organisation has piled so much emphasis onto OASYS and its metiuculous completion that it has sucked out everything else that we could possibly do. The organisation's answer to pretty much everything is "make sure you update OASYS" not "make sure you do X or Y to ensure the individual and potential victims are safe". It's tragic.
Just like the congratulations message to Biden that had Trump's name embedded under the text (seriously, check it out) this govt simply cannot get anything right:
ReplyDelete"Due to a processing update, 141 previously published deaths within 28 days in England were excluded from the published data on 21 November.
This issue has now been corrected for data published on 22 November, which includes deaths omitted yesterday in today’s total and daily number of newly reported deaths."
uk for-a-small-number-of-days-over-Christmas-then-we-can-get-ill-later-and-die govt covid-19 data 22/11/20
new cases: 18,662
deaths (28 day rule): 398; 3,091 in the last 7 days
deaths with covid-19 on the death certificate hasn't been updated since 6 Nov
no other data is particularly up to date either
20 Nov - Independent Sage says: "Nothing has changed with England’s Test & Trace. There is no sign that the system is being improved during lockdown to help us remove restrictions safely. This is BAD"
But forget all this social responsibility bollocks, head over to HMRC who will keep you right for your corporate piss-up:
"Expenses and benefits: social functions and parties
As an employer providing social functions and parties for your employees, you have certain National Insurance and reporting obligations.
What's exempt?
To be exempt, the party or similar social function must be ALL the following:
- £150 or less per head
- annual, such as a Christmas party or summer barbecue
- open to all your employees
If your business has more than one location, an annual event that’s open to all of your staff based at one location still counts as exempt. You can also put on separate parties for different departments, as long as all of your employees can attend one of them."
So, £150 per head is your tax exempt budget to spread the love.
And adding significantly to the existing carnage in excess of 63,000 souls is the cost is the cost of spreading the virus.
FranK.
Here's where the payrise went!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8975691/amp/Major-probe-reveals-public-sector-squanders-5-6bn-cash.html
SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: You've spent the year watching every penny, now hear how the public sector has squandered £5.6bn of taxpayer cash on everything from luxury travel to lavish bonuses, and fine dining
DeleteInvestigation found £5.6 billion in public cash been frittered away on luxuries
Found that Whitehall mandarins banked at least £42 million in bonuses last year
Comes as Chancellor Rishi Sunak prepares to set out a plan for nation's finances
Investigation carried out with the TaxPayers' Alliance – involved more than 4,000 Freedom of Information requests
"Staff at the Ministry of Justice received the most – £2.3million – in one year, according to the Government's latest facility time report.
At the Ministry of Justice 602 representatives spent up to half their time with their unions."
Not that you'd notice any benefit in probation.
"The most expensive purchase was a £107,250 oil painting by Denzil Forrester titled Family Living.
It was bought for the UK consul general's official residence in New York."
Antonia Romeo, perhaps?