What Is Probation For?

The other day Russell Webster published a guest blog by former Chief HMI Andrew Bridges introducing the concept of Modern Probation Theory. I'm not aware it generated any public responses, which is a shame, especially given increasing evidence of probation staff becoming frustrated and disillusioned with HMPPS bureaucracy, and it's getting worse. There's a growing feeling that doing the 'work' must be 'under the radar' and in spite of the bureaucracy:-   

I know 99% of frontline staff are intelligent, committed and are here to make peoples lives a bit more bearable. So sad it is with the millstone of mindless bureaucracy around our necks.

Since the announcement of the reunification of CRC and NPS it's evident that NPS senior leadership team are now getting high on their own supply. What other reason could there be for ratcheting up of the bureaucratic BS?

Staff feel, quite rightly, that what we want to do (advise, assist befriend eg) has to be done off grid, and is surplus to what is required of us. I cannot convey the oppressive level of scrutiny (via data monitoring) of our work. It is getting bigger and bigger all the time. It's argued that this is a Covid thing, while we are all working in exceptional circumstances, to new model, not in the office. But it will not go away is my guess.

Promising nods to the importance of the relationship between practitioner (ok with that) and individual (ok with that). Warm words, but then the Civil Service spawned document went straight on to its holy grail of Consistency. Whatever they come up with is going to be prescriptive, reduced to something they can count, and over-scrutinise in practice. 

Lord knows we have banged on for long enough about Probation ethos and values. So interesting to see “culture” in the mix in this document. I see the ambition is to create a “new culture for the new probation service. So we have a “national culture implementation plan (...) developed with Senior Leaders, to get staff support on the cultural ambitions going forward.” That is not culture, it's indoctrination.

I am proud to be a Probation Officer. I am not an Offender Manager, or a Responsible Officer or a bloody Probation Practitioner. The HMPPS want to degrade our status as much as they can and I personally won’t have it. I am a Probation Officer, that’s what I am and that's what I do.

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The following is taken from the guest blog together with the full MPT document:- 

Managing probation

How should Probation work be managed? – this is a subject that is rarely explored as a topic in its own right. I and my colleagues discussed the issue in general within our recent jointly-authored report Private v “Private”? about the Wales and south-west CRCs. But I’ve now also published an Introduction to Modern Probation Theory, to explain how I think Probation management should be done. Why have I done this?

As we know, the whole TR programme of 2014-21 was an ideologically motivated exercise. Although it is possible (just) to find some incidental benefits from TR, the overall cost of it in terms of quality as well as wasted time and money has been colossal, being the most egregious of the repeated national reorganisations of Probation in recent years.

And now, HMPPS is consulting on the question of “What kind of Probation Service do we want?” This means that there is every prospect that lots of people’s ideas will be added all together and announced as being the answer. However, the result will most likely be a highly aspirational and yet cumbersome and top-heavy concoction, while lacking commensurate resourcing and coherence.

A properly coherent approach is needed instead – i.e. a strategy – being one that starts from the perspective of the practitioners who do the work, and which specifies what practitioners are expected to achieve within the resources available. Modern Probation Theory is an attempt to describe such a coherent approach – not everyone will like every aspect of what it says, but it is feasible overall. The core points are shown here below; the full Introduction to MPT, and also the Private v “Private”? report, can be found on my website, together with my Memoir: andrewbridgesprobation.com

What is Modern Probation Theory (MPT)? 

MPT isn’t about telling Probation practitioners how they should do their work with individuals who have offended, since a valuable canon of material already exists for that purpose, including plenty of research and effective practice guidance that will continue to evolve on how to help people to desist from offending. 

Instead: - 

MPT explains how Probation case supervision needs to be managed, which is mainly from the ‘bottom-up’. It’s a specific version of practitioner-centred management. 

MPT is a ‘grounded theory’: It has not been contrived from an abstract ‘thought experiment’ – instead it has emerged as a theory by drawing on practical experiences of managing Probation that worked successfully in embryo form in the past, and which could be implemented now as a strategically coherent approach.

 “All models are wrong; some are useful” George EP Box

Key points: 

• MPT is entirely consistent with – indeed it positively advocates – the idea of ‘Quality Probation practice’ that most practitioners would recognise, i.e. aiding the ‘desistance journey’ needing to be made by of each of the people they supervise by doing the Right Thing with the Right Individual in the Right Way at the Right Time.

• MPT has components which each start from the viewpoint (i.e. the ‘viewing position’) of the practitioner. 

• MPT’s four key components are Define (The Three Purposes), Desire, Design and Deploy, each of which, together with the fifth – Resourcing transparency - are explored in the more detailed description that follows further below. 

• MPT’s core component Defines what Probation work is specifically expected to achieve in terms of The Three Purposes; the other components flow logically from that. 

• MPT treats practitioners as responsible members of staff who want to do a good job (Desire), who are always open to continued learning, and who are also always prepared to give account – and be accountable – for doing a good job. 

• MPT would in that spirit require practitioners to make qualitative judgements about certain key elements of their own work with each case ‘in real time’ – i.e. as they go along - assessing whether each element has been done sufficiently well. They would be using the same criteria as the ones any managers or inspectors would be using if such people should subsequently look at the practitioner’s work.

• MPT would make this possible by a Design of a single Current Sentence Record (CSR) to replace OASys and nDelius. The ‘lean’ Design of the CSR would radically reduce the amount of ‘required text’, would minimise entering data twice, and more importantly include only the minimum number of mandatory fields – those needed for focusing on The Three Purposes. 

• MPT accordingly assumes the need to Deploy such a CSR, alongside the other essential tools and facilities, both IT and environmental, to enable practitioners to do the work needed. 

• MPT recognises the reality that the resourcing of Probation will always be finite, and will sometimes be squeezed. Its Resourcing transparency approach would make it manageable – though still difficult - for both practitioners and managers. 

• MPT integrates its components into a unified approach for managing Probation overall, so that the work each practitioner does with each case aggregates into a clearly identifiable benefit that Probation brings to the whole community. It is unified from bottom to top in the same way that the lettering goes all the way through a stick of old-fashioned seaside rock.

• MPT also has caveats. It is particularly important that its features should not be misread, misunderstood, or worst of all misused, since that would defeat its potential benefits. This applies especially to the subjects of performance measures (PMs) and performance management, where awareness of Goodhart’s Law is essential. 

• MPT is about managing Probation, and not about who should own it. In principle, the MPT approach could be applied by any future ‘owner’ – although, in reality, locating Probation in direct public service management seems to be the most natural fit. 

• MPT recognises that qualitative judgements are by necessity involved in any assessment of what Probation work is achieving – so MPT incorporates them explicitly and transparently, which is a wiser approach than employing metrics that appear factually objective, but which almost always include hidden qualitative assumptions.

• MPT relies for its effectiveness on two-way presumptions of trust. Practitioners and managers need to be able to start their interactions with a presumption of trust that they are both honestly working towards the same ends, notably the Three Purposes. 

• MPT’s overall approach can be summarised in this way: While practitioners will not have discretion about What they are expected to achieve, they will nevertheless have a large degree of discretion as to How they go about achieving it, and they will be able to self-assess in real time how their work with each case is progressing. This discretion will be informed by the ever-evolving messages and lessons emerging from research and other evidence-informed practice about desistance from offending, and about interventions that help that process.

Introduction: 

The point of MPT is to counter the problem where for many years now Probation practitioners have been subject to a bewildering series of messages about what their work is supposed to be achieving: frequent reporting, tighter enforcement, tougher control of ‘high risk’ cases, including recently (worst of all) “successful completions”, plus the many other minimum contract specifications that were needed to prevent their employer (if a CRC) from being financially penalised. These messages have repeatedly varied over time, and with a complete lack of coherence. 

Overall, it has not been at all consistently clear what Probation work is supposed to be achieving. There has been major restructuring of Probation organisations on several occasions in the 21st century already, each with the aim of somehow ‘improving’ the Service, but still with no real clarity about what Probation supervision is consequently intended to achieve as a result. And now the 2020s decade is starting with the decision for yet another restructuring already made, leaving the planners for the new National Service again consulting on the questions, “What is Probation for?” and “What sort of Probation Service do we want?” The answers to these questions are certainly not straightforward, but any outside observer could be forgiven for gaining the impression that in recent years the various answers offered have been either too simplistic and ineffective, or alternatively unnecessarily complicated, and piecemeal. It’s been a case of plenty of changes in structure, but no coherent strategy. 

In contrast, MPT aligns itself with the fairly conventional view in business and other circles that the correct approach should be to decide Strategy first, and then decide on Structure afterwards. And the first step in devising any strategy for a personal service organisation like Probation must be to start with the people who provide that personal service, and being consistently clear about what they are being asked to do. That’s not straightforward of course.

Probation work is indeed complex work for its practitioners and managers, and MPT recognises that. Every person who offends and is sentenced is an individual human being, and the art of each Probation practitioner is to be able to engage with that individual, whatever the offence and whatever that person’s circumstances, and then do the Right Thing in the Right Way at the Right Time with that individual, to aid that person’s desistance journey. That work is indeed often complicated, but instead of ‘wallowing in the complicatedness’ of that work, MPT aims to chart a way through this complex work so that it becomes possible for everyone – practitioners, managers, Court, Government and the wider public (in principle) – to gain a shared understanding of ‘what Probation is for’. 

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The final caveat: The need to avoid doing performance management badly 

It has been emphasised throughout this paper that the benefits of MPT would be undone if the day-to-day management of performance, and of staff, is done badly. 

MPT does not seek to prescribe in detail how to manage Probation case supervision well. But certain broad principles can be identified, all centred on the theme of what has elsewhere been called ‘positive supervision’. 

On the specific subject of managing Performance Measures (PMs), these principles can be employed constructively and usefully at ‘whole organisation’ level, but it is strongly recommended that at team and individual level such aggregated results should NOT be used as a mistaken way of ‘ranking’ local teams or individuals. The ‘performance’ is by the organisation as a whole, covering the full range of cases in different circumstances, high RoH, low RoH, prolific, first-time and longtime, and all the other different characteristics of different cases. It should be obvious that to introduce – explicitly or implicitly – any idea of competition between teams or individuals based on rankings that may hinge on small percentage points is going to affect other aspects of how work with cases is going to be managed. Just as schools can improve their exam rate success by only entering the students they know will pass, Probation units can avoid taking on the more difficult cases if they want to, and can certainly refuse to accept a difficult homeless prisoner on licence to their area. 

Doing performance management badly has been a feature of many organisations as well as Probation, and has been described quite fully by Jerry Z Muller in his The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton University Press). However, he also describes how it can be done well, and indeed sometimes is – these quotations come from his final chapter:

 “Measurement is not an alternative to judgment: measurement demands judgment”

 “Measurement becomes much less reliable the more its object is human activity, since the objects— people—are self-conscious, and are capable of reacting to the process of being measured. And if rewards and punishments are involved, they are more likely to react in a way that skews the measurement’s validity. By contrast, the more they agree with the goals of those rewards, the more likely they are to react in a way that enhances the measurement’s validity.”

 “…ask yourself, is what you are measuring a proxy for what you really want to know? If the information is not very useful or not a good proxy for what you’re really aiming at, you’re probably better off not measuring it.” 

“Measured performance, when useful, is more effective in identifying outliers, especially poor performers or true misconduct. It is likely to be less useful in distinguishing between those in the middle or near the top of the ladder of performance. Plus, the more you measure, the greater the likelihood that the marginal costs of measuring will exceed the benefits.” 

“Every moment you or your colleagues or employees are devoting to the production of metrics is time not devoted to the activities being measured. If you’re a data analyst, of course, producing metrics is your primary activity. For everyone else, it’s a distraction. So, even if the performance measurements are worth having, their worth may be less than the costs of obtaining them.” 

“A system of measured performance will work to the extent that the people being measured believe in its worth…. Metrics works best when those measured buy into its purposes and validity.” 

“Even the best measures are subject to corruption or goal diversion.”

The last comment above confirms that even MPT’s PMs should be exercised with care, even though their benefits should outweigh their costs if implemented properly. Goodhart’s Law is a reminder that the usefulness of any metric is jeopardised by the nature of the management attention given to working to achieve it: 

“Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes”: Goodhart, C. A. E., ‘Problems of Monetary Management: The UK Experience’ (1984) in Monetary Theory and Practice (London: Macmillan, 1987), 91–121 

Constant pressure down the organisation to focus attention on metrics that frontline staff perceive as being at best doubtful can be described as ‘megaphone management.’ This style is best avoided in other aspects of managing Probation cases supervision too, as it is very alienating to practitioners who consider themselves self-motivating and responsible. As with any issue of human communication, the question of whether an action constitutes ‘megaphone’ behaviour is 50% the manager’s intention or belief, and 50% the practitioner’s perception – so it is not straightforward for managers to identify the most constructive and therefore effective management behaviours. 

MPT does not seek to prescribe in detail how to manage constructively, but it does rely on skilful constructive ‘enabling’ management – positive supervision - which is the product of accumulated well-chosen formal and informal actions and behaviours by managers. People looking to develop these could usefully look at anything written by Henry Mintzberg since 1984: e.g. Mintzberg, H. Bedtime Stories for Managers. Oakland: Berrett-Koehler, 2019.

Andrew Bridges
Independent Advisor, and proponent of Modern Probation Theory