Losing the Plot

Probation of Offenders Act 1907 Clause 4d : "It shall be the duty of a probation officer, subject to the directions of the court - to advise, assist and befriend him, and, when necessary, to endeavour to find him suitable employment." 

As we continue to struggle with an increasingly bureaucratic, punitive and fractious probation service, it's worth remembering that when this enlightened and pioneering legislation was enacted, it predated the arrival of the social work profession; the court disposal was not a criminal conviction; and the recipient had to give consent. Interestingly, the Act remains in force in the Republic of Ireland. 

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"Are you honestly saying probation officers should undertake 21 months of training and be paid £30-35k to go to the cinema?"

I really can't fathom out what point this person is trying to make? Why should encouraging our often dis-enfranshised, dis-engaged and socially excluded service users to do different things and getting to know them outside of a formal interview room, be "beneath" the work of a probation officer, irrespective of what they are paid? What are you saying the role of a PO should be, as all I see are risk management and sentence plans about "addressing lifestyle", "engaging in pro-social activities" or "moving away from peers", with no substance or skill attached on behalf of the PO to actually making this happen.

I once took a service user to the theatre (in my own time and while I very briefly mentioned this in Delius records I feared my employer actually finding out which itself speaks volumes). And why did I do this? Because I was getting NOTHING meaningful out of him in office visits and wanted to open his mind to "another world" and felt he had the potential to enjoy and experience other things in life (he'd never been to the theatre before, was a chronic alcoholic, it was actually a free event, but he had no idea these things even existed or how to access them). Am I bad probation officer? Would you not class this as an "intervention to assess and manage risk"?

As I recall it, the recent thread of posts started off due to a (yet another) commissioning proposal about NPS employing "mentors" to "support" our vulnerable and isolated during COVID19. So while such mentors get to know the "real person" outside of an office context, our jobs once again become fragmented - we try to "manage risk" with only partial information because the person is engaging with so many other agencies, or get in trouble if we weren't effective enough at "joint partnership working". We've fragmented off the job to so many disproportionate and disparate agencies, that it's no wonder our job is often described as reading a million emails and phoning people all day long, interspersed with "check ups" with our service users about whether they have done X or Y with another agency - personally I don't think that's worth £35K either, and writing crappy OASYS isn't either.

So in response to this poster, why should it be OK for a mentor to "take our service users to the cinema" and not develop such relationships ourselves? Why is "mentoring" seen a valid endeavour, but probation officers delivering mentoring not?

Be warned that the more we accept our jobs being farmed off to (generally lower paid) keyworkers, ETE workers, mentors, resettlement agencies, drug workers, charities, mental health workers, generally none of which are particularly more trained than us to deliver useful interventions in their respective fields, that our role will become even less necessary than it already is. Just look at the list of "day one services" under the new model - ETE, housing, "emotional support", accredited programmes, and I believe "one to one" interventions are being delivered by a separate team too - just what exactly is left to do for the Probation officer paid £35K?

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Equally, be warned that if we don't farm off the lower-skilled aspects of our work to 'generally lower paid' keyworkers etc, then we are at greater risk of becoming the lower paid partner in the arrangement ourselves. We may all aspire to be part of a nobler profession, but there's a limit. And to be frank, what would the justification be for, say, accompanying a service user to buy new bedding, or escorting them to a healthcare appointment if someone else can help out (aside from just limiting the pressures of our own workloads)?

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NPS employing "mentors"? Nope. Let's look at it again: "I understand the probation service is in discussions with a major volunteering charity about providing volunteers who can support the more vulnerable people on probation, mentor and befriend them." They're going to pay someone like Bubb to oversee carefully selected folk to do the work for nowt. Gratis. So you can be chained for many more hours inputting data & taking the shit when it all goes tits up. Haven't heard much from Napo or Unison about this. Anyone?

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Animal farm Orwellian dystopia probation. It's already impossible to see who the real leaders are. If the work is shed externally there will be less of a need for all staff. Are we all so daft on this blog. Thatcher's legacy the privatised structures are all about self employment. If you once worked for telecom you now work in a franchise. Public sector lost staffing to private ownerships on reduced pensions and piece meal working. There can be no advocating our work out. Instead you must define the professional work and get it established as key core PO functions. Stop the rot.

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I agree. I'm the person who started this initial thread. To confirm, by stating the other individuals were "generally lower paid", I did not mean to infer they have lessor skills; in fact, I made a point of saying they are no more or less trained than us to deliver the work in their allotted fields. By de-professionalising probation and commissioning out aspects of the work which I derogatively described as "farming out", they have been able to allow such work to be paid at far lower rates, with far less employment or pension rights, in the name of "charity" or "third sector" work. Obviously they tried to do this also with CRC, who (alongside NPS with reliance on PSO), were allowed to employ "responsible officers" or such like, to do the same work, again at far less pay. So we should all be worried, unless as others have stated we re-claim the professional ground and not accept that, as [above] seems to, taking a one-dimensional view about "buying bedding".

I for one feel very privileged to be working for what is still a public service, with (in comparison to many) a good rate of pay which includes other benefits such as a good pension, sick pay, fantastic holidays and generally good employment rights and stability, not to mention job satisfaction. I had the choice to work in the private sector (which I did for many years as a graduate) - had I stayed there the pay may well have been better now, but without all the other benefits mentioned, and the work and employment culture sucked; targets and QA and monitoring existed in insurance too, worse so. What I lament in probation is that we measure the wrong things and place too much emphasis on whether X or Y was done, rather than the meaning behind those things, and the constant "referring out" worries me greatly.

As for [above] your comment has sickened me. I can think of a hundred different reasons why "buying bedding" and "accompanying someone to a medical appointment" should be done by the PO and not a third party. Using these opportunities to see the person in the "real world", how they operate, teaching and practicing new skills, gaining confidence - you think sitting in the office allows that? Not to mention all the millions of reasons I mentioned in my original post about taking someone to a free theatre event. If you really think "buying bedding" is all about the bedding, then I really fear for your service users and what they can possibly gain from you sitting in your office with the pontificating and derisory attitude you have displayed on this blog.

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I recall a drive to recruit and work with volunteers back awhile, pre TR. It created more work in trying to organise it than it achieved positive outcomes. If the organising of volunteers is outsourced and monetised it will be one of two things: highly bureaucratic with lots of vetting, training, etc, or cheap and very dodgy.

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Many many moons ago... I started my probation journey as a volunteer. It was an in-house project with a Probation Area, overseen by a senior manager. After three months' intensive training & clearance I was allocated to work with an inner city team where any of the POs in the team could submit suggestions for work they would like me to undertake with their cases. The volunteer manager would oversee the suggested tasks & select what they felt was possible/appropriate. The most common work involved taking family members to see cases incarcerated in prisons beyond the reach of a day return on public transport. Any direct work with a case was supervised by or very specifically laid out by the PO, with very clear instructions.

I had direct access to & supervision by the senior manager running the project & if there were any concerns about a situation I was removed from the task & thoroughly de-briefed. The project ended after two years when the senior manager took another role & no-one else applied for the secondment. I suspect it was also an expensive project. I don't know how many other volunteers were involved. It was certainly as intense as my training placements and prepared me well for my career. I dread to imagine what the 2021 version will be like.

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High risk is where it's always been at really. In the 70 and 90s the focus was sharpened to resources follow risk. The old softly softly bus fares and befriending fund dried up fast to pay for managerialism expenses and business MBAs for middle managers. It saw the offender services decline and the training aided by the new direction of Labour paving a way for PFI hostels, bringing in outsiders and coming from new partnerships. We all lost the plot perhaps, being too relaxed.

The work was different then and so was the nature of employees. Today staff are grotesquely disfigured from care and nurture to value only numbers a grossly new metric to qualify throughput and quantities. Quality takes time, money and patience. Three things they do not understand. To get back to anything half way near, will require a cultural shift. The latest cohorts were not trained or selected for the traits needed to reform reflect or value experience of other. We are stuck with a monstrous machine of technocrats craving and striving for new data streams and by cramming numbers not the three things required.

I understand the ongoing mud slinging of which this is part will not bring the changes anytime soon. We all realise the Grayling destruction will take another generation before the rebuilding. This in my view remains impossible while politics control the dogma of Tory business ideologies. Just as long as the Tories remain in government I hope.

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Service users have been judged and sentenced so why would advise, assist and befriend be such a difficult concept to grasp? One of the best bits of advice (after degree, 2 years CQSW and a pass or fail 1 year probationary period) was to really get to know the client, and their families. Earn their trust based on professional boundaries and compliance will follow. It seems that over the years the importance of compliance was lost to enforcement.

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In my mind, it's not that officers now "can't" or don't want to or don't understand the concept of advise, assist, befriend. It's that the service has tried to reduce every outcome to a measurable metric. Take point above, about "really getting to know the person and their families." This is measured by "how many times did you do a home visit", have you done an OASYS in 15 days, did you do the web (in London), have you seen the person once a week, did you use CRISSA. I've no doubt that officers in the 1980s "got away with doing little" as they do now by entering blank entries or pulling through OASYS. But the question "how did you actually get to know the person", or to what extent did meaningful engagement with their families actually make a difference, or did it? The current metrics don't improve practice for anyone, but in my view completely overwhelm motivated officers to do their jobs.

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I'll end this compilation with a private communication:- 

There’s a meme going about: “Helping one person might not change the whole world, but it could change the world for one person.”

Maybe we should stick that on our letterheads where “Advise, Assist Befriend” used to be. Same stuff, basically. And chuck in the ripple effect to this argument for a Probation Service that has at its heart the welfare and progress of its clients and we are onto something. Every client that does less harm, thrives, is a human victory, plus reduction of victimisation and a saving to the public purse.

The debate here about whether the “old school” Probation Service and its ethos had an effect will never be answered by recourse to the spreadsheets. It is too complex a mash of (lack of} social provision, media, politics, legislation to find a definitive answer. Not to disparage academia: the profession was built on a rich blend of theory and practice. When that is reduced to bureaucracy, and monetisation, baby and bathwater are well and truly thrown out.

But for now, I would like to invite stories. Hard to share those stories that warm the hearts of Probation professionals given the privacy confidentially and respect that we extend to our cases. Let’s give it a go, carefully. Your starter for 10: Names and details changed to protect the less than innocent:

Approached in the street by Joe, a long gone but then “prolific” and notorious client: I had worked with him a good few years back: He came with a pile of conditions and expectations from the court. Early on, while we mooched about in seemingly aimless conversations, the thing that engaged him, was core, emerged, so we went with that. It was nothing much to do with any assessment or whatever, it was just a thing he wanted and needed which was a positive: being able to read, scared and embarrassed by his inabilities. Getting there took patience and skill, and jettisoning the rigid and paltry “plan” for a genuine interest in and support of an individual requires confidence and professional autonomy. 

His pre-cons printout was like the telephone directory: both width and quality, but when I met him in the street I hadn’t seen him for a few years. He was applying for a professional qualification, what must he declare by way of criminal convictions? We went back to the office and checked. All were “spent”. Hard to credit. We high fived. He got a bit tearful. Now a family man with a small business. There’s a whole lot of cases which don’t get there of course. But some that do. They don’t come back, of course, so we lose sight of the joy, and the benefit of that.