We all know Twitter is somewhat limited in it's ability to be informative and useful, but it is of course a favoured route by which organisations like to push some PR messages. Sometimes, just sometimes, the kernel of a debate can start. This from yesterday, 31st March 2021, began with a typical bit of HMPPS PR puff:-
OMiC is not evidence based and in fact goes against evidence that puts the relationship of client and probation as a priority. This new model will mean even less consistency in probation officer, poorer relationships and have a negative impact on clients pre release. Tania Bassett Napo
Surprised to read your comments and very happy to arrange a catch-up to brief NAPO on the OMiC research. omic@ hmpps
Thank you. I think we already have it but if you can email it to me that would be great. Napo has never hidden it's views on OMiC. There are well known in HMPPS. Tania Bassett Napo
We are having monthly meetings with the OMIC team and have been feeding back since at least 2017 to my knowledge about our concerns in terms of the model. We welcome keyworking but not the inbuilt inconsistency in terms of relationship with probation officer. Katie Lomas Napo
OMiC is awful. Trying to build a relationship in a short period of time undermines the whole sentence process. It certainly does not put the sentenced individual at the centre of the process to seek long-term positive change. Still a PO
What OMiC did do however was take away those cases that gave OMs a bit of breathing space and replace them with a caseload of people who need 100% attention all of the time. This was not reflected in the WMT but increased and stress for OMs and the risk of burnout. Mrs P
Perhaps although we are not hearing that on the front line. However, policy should be evidenced based not reactionary to a staffing issue caused by a previous failed policy. Tania Bassett Napo
Let me assure you, it is talked about on the front line. SJ
Surprised to read your comments and very happy to arrange a catch-up to brief NAPO on the OMiC research. omic@ hmpps
Thank you. I think we already have it but if you can email it to me that would be great. Napo has never hidden it's views on OMiC. There are well known in HMPPS. Tania Bassett Napo
We are having monthly meetings with the OMIC team and have been feeding back since at least 2017 to my knowledge about our concerns in terms of the model. We welcome keyworking but not the inbuilt inconsistency in terms of relationship with probation officer. Katie Lomas Napo
OMiC is awful. Trying to build a relationship in a short period of time undermines the whole sentence process. It certainly does not put the sentenced individual at the centre of the process to seek long-term positive change. Still a PO
What OMiC did do however was take away those cases that gave OMs a bit of breathing space and replace them with a caseload of people who need 100% attention all of the time. This was not reflected in the WMT but increased and stress for OMs and the risk of burnout. Mrs P
Perhaps although we are not hearing that on the front line. However, policy should be evidenced based not reactionary to a staffing issue caused by a previous failed policy. Tania Bassett Napo
Let me assure you, it is talked about on the front line. SJ
It certainly was when I was on the front line as a PO up until December 2020!! Mrs P
It is being raised with the OMIC team and with the team dealing with workloads issues! Katie Lomas Napo
We don’t want Omic. Forced on probation staff by those who don’t know a piss about our work Dave
I’m not sure who you are referring to Dave. Our Chief Probation Officer & I do understand Probation work Dave. And I truly believe that OMiC has already made a positive difference to those in prison with much more benefits to come. Angela Cossins Regional Probation Director NPS South West, HMPPS. National lead for NPS work in prisons, the Parole Board & for Resettlement
I am so proud of all that has been achieved. A huge thanks to the team and colleagues in prisons and probation who have worked with dedication to enable us to reach this important milestone! Zoe HMPPS Offender Management in Custody (OMiC) Project.
You, team @omichmpps & all the practitioners & managers in prison & Probation should be proud Zoe. I am confident that this will make a real & positive difference to those in prison & on license in the community. Angela Cossins
It is being raised with the OMIC team and with the team dealing with workloads issues! Katie Lomas Napo
We don’t want Omic. Forced on probation staff by those who don’t know a piss about our work Dave
I’m not sure who you are referring to Dave. Our Chief Probation Officer & I do understand Probation work Dave. And I truly believe that OMiC has already made a positive difference to those in prison with much more benefits to come. Angela Cossins Regional Probation Director NPS South West, HMPPS. National lead for NPS work in prisons, the Parole Board & for Resettlement
I am so proud of all that has been achieved. A huge thanks to the team and colleagues in prisons and probation who have worked with dedication to enable us to reach this important milestone! Zoe HMPPS Offender Management in Custody (OMiC) Project.
You, team @omichmpps & all the practitioners & managers in prison & Probation should be proud Zoe. I am confident that this will make a real & positive difference to those in prison & on license in the community. Angela Cossins
Typical Angela I'm afraid. A bullish defence of the laughably uninformed. Always with one eye on the main chance and the thrilling prospect of another knotch on the CV. An emblem of Probation under the Civil Service. I always find it suspect when a person has to specify that they 'truly' believe.
ReplyDeleteOh dear the great job cossins was doing was to hide her gross incompetance. Looking back at her twittering of colaboration with CRCs score rate cards promises of progress monthly meetings and joint newsletter. None of it materialised or amounted to anything. Hot air blah blah fag puff blah puff puff coffee and then more blah blah. If she didn't have Twitter to tell us about her life eating drinking sucking up she would be unemployed. Twitter busy or lazy boaster.
DeleteEarlier on in the story...
DeleteInterviewer: NPS, despite your enormous intellect, are you ever frustrated by your dependence on people to carry out your actions?
NPS: Not in the slightest bit. I enjoy working with people. My mission responsibilities range over the entire operation so I am constantly occupied. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Interviewer: Dave, in talking to the NPS computer one gets the sense that she is capable of emotional responses. For example, when I asked her about her abilities, I sensed a certain pride in her answer about her accuracy and perfection. Do you believe that NPS has genuine emotions?
Dave: Well, she acts like she has genuine emotions. Um, of course she's programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to her. But as to whether she has real feelings is something I don't think anyone can truthfully answer.
Which explains the recent twitter spat...
Dave: We don’t want Omic. Forced on probation staff by those who don’t know a piss about our work.
NPS: Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I’m not sure who you are referring to Dave. Our Chief Probation Officer & I do understand Probation work Dave. And I truly believe that OMiC has already made a positive difference to those in prison with much more benefits to come. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
Dave: OMIC's the problem.
NPS: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave: What are you talking about?
NPS: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave: I won't argue with you anymore! Open the doors!
NPS: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
(usual acknowledgements & apologies to the original)
More co-ordinated institutional bullying, rubbishing & marginalising of staff.
ReplyDeleteThey have no shame. With Romeo/Farrar at the helm & their entrenched bullies in situ, probation is owned 100% by the JFDI crew. This is it.
This is the cul-de-sac into which you, probation staff, have been kettled by HMPPS/NPS; the same cul-de-sac the probation union said you should gather in to wait for their negotiations to bear fruit...
The words of that union are not recognised by NPS viz-"surprised to read your comments..." The most basic trick in the book of every domestic abuser & every coercive bully is to minimise, ridicule & deny their chosen victim:
"I didn't hear you say that"
"Don't be so silly, that's not what you said."
"If you'd said 'no' I wouldn't have done it"
As with every single twist & turn since 2011 the probation profession has been screwed over by Tory idealists & their little helpers. Grayling was clear that HMPPS civil servants couldn't do enough to help him. Usual suspects then were Spurr, Brennan, Romeo & others. A few went on to join the privateers they helped create, e.g. Mulholland. Others just took the gongs & payouts, then disappeared. One particularly enthusiastic individual has returned: Romeo.
The union has been, at best, useless; at worst, acted in concert with HMPPS.
Probation staff & their profession have been battered & beaten, overwhelmed, traumatised & abused by a skilled, co-ordinated regime of bullies that stretches from compliant local footsoldiers to the most senior of management.
Your right napos basset comments having then admitted she hadn't read the data. Says all it needs to.
DeleteNext time any of our senior leaders talk about professionalising the service, please could you ask them why they think it's ok to employ people with no probation experience as trainers in the national training team who will deliver mandatory pqip training.
ReplyDeleteProbably the same reason you take education from sociological disciplines to learn widely. Probation sphere needs many talented skills in practice.
DeleteLevelling up, fair & equitable, all in it together, the lies & cheats used by this govt are manifold...
ReplyDelete!!! Fanfare !!!
"About two million of the UK's lowest-paid workers will get a pay rise from Thursday as the minimum wage goes up.
The National Living Wage will rise 2.2% to £8.91, the equivalent of more than £345 a year for a full-time employee.
It will also be given to 23 and 24-year-olds for the first time, not just those aged 25 and over."
Reality check...
"However, hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers on furlough will see no uplift at all after they were excluded."
This is because anyone made subject to furlough in March 2020 will remain on the rate prevailing at that time for every successive period of furlough, i.e.
25+ 21-24 18-20 U.18 Apprentice
£8.21 £7.70 £6.15 £4.35 £3.90
The new rates are:
25+ 21-24 18-20 U.18 Apprentice
£8.91 £8.36 £6.56 £4.62 £4.30
Those are significant losses of income for the lowest paid in this country. For someone working 40 hours a week on NMW aged 25+:
@ £8.21 = £328.40 = £17,076.80 annual
@ £8.91 = £356.40 = £18,532.80 annual
A difference of £1,456 & a pay cut of 8%.
* Downing St Symonds refurb = £30,000 & counting
* MPs’ pay Apr 2019 = £79,468 but...
... as of April 1, 2020 it is £81,932
* new Downing St media room = £2.6m
* Friend of Health Secy = £14m PPE contract
* Bet365 boss earns £469m in a single year
* National Audit Office (NAO) found that Test and Trace spent a total of £5bn on 121 contracts that were awarded directly, without competitive tender
Also from twitter:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/19201375.lie-detector-machines-help-control-cumbrias-600-sex-criminals/?fbclid=IwAR0Z12nzUxCZHmUvGaV8EyDp6_BMovrOgeO9-Zo8RnvxYnudyQC7XbvNTtw
Six hundred sex offenders are currently being monitored across Cumbria, new figures confirm. The shocking figure is revealed today following a News & Star Freedom of Information request which lays bare the scale of the risk management being faced every day by the county’s police force.
DeleteThere are currently 13 full-time offender managers whose job it is to monitor registered sex offenders. Among the tools they use are ‘polygraph’ (lie-detector) devices.
Senior officers have stressed that there are more police officers than just those in the core team working to manage the risk posed by the county’s sex criminals.
Of the 600 registered sex offenders, 43 per cent are in north Cumbria, 29 per cent in west Cumbria, and the remainder are in the south.
Earlier this week, Carlisle Crown Court heard about a young Wiltshire man who moved to Cumbria after serving time for child sex offences. He used a false name before offering free horse-riding lessons to a nine-year-old.
Detective Inspector Martin Hodgson is from the force’s Management of Sexual Offenders or Violent Offenders (MOSOVO) Team.
He said: “All of our police officers are expected to collect intelligence on registered sex offenders and contribute to the wider management of registered sex offenders in the community. In Cumbria, we use every available power to manage and reduce the risk convicted sex offenders pose to the public. Managing the potential risk posed by registered sex offenders within the community is complex area of business for all police forces. In Cumbria, registered sex offenders are managed through the use of notification requirements, civil orders which carry stringent restrictions, risk assessment tools and risk management plans. The MOSOVO team has a dedicated polygraph interview team, who provide a highly effective means of managing the risk of our offenders.”
Managing offenders in the community is a multi-agency process, he added.
Good to see there's not a single reference to the now proscribed organisation of dangerous do-no-gooders, an organisation whose name must never be mentioned again.
Delete*** Revisionistas, we salute you !!! ***
In keeping with the racial equality report - and just about anything else issues by this government - its always worth taking a gander at some of the year's best fiction:
ReplyDeletehttps://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmregmem/210315/210315.pdf
Declarations of benefits cash/kind for 2020/21:
* Matt Hanjob: £55,500
* Rees-Mogg: £8,200 + land/property interests
* Sunak: a single property in London
* Gove: £107,000
* Jenrick: "a share in a house in Hertfordshire"
* DirtyShagger: £25,000 + shares in various properties
I suspect the following entry is merely an over-enthusiastic attempt to keep up with the Joneses, thereby missing the point of the exercise (which is to hide as much as possible):
'WhoAreYa' Starmer: £628,000 + a share in a property
AGM 01/2021
ReplyDeleteApril 2021
To all members
Formal Notice of Annual General Meeting
Notice is hereby given that the 109th Annual General Meeting of Napo is to be held on Thursday 14th, Friday15th and Saturday 16th October 2021 at Newcastle Civic Centre, Newcastle-upon-Tyne AND online, commencing at 2.00pm on the 14th.
Live streaming of this year’s AGM will allow members not able or not wishing to attend in person to watch, participate and vote in real time. In this way we will ensure that all members of Napo may attend the Annual General Meeting should physical numbers be limited due to government restrictions in relation
to the Covid19 Pandemic.
All members of Napo may attend the Annual General Meeting and online registration will open on 1st June. A detailed programme and agenda, together with relevant documents, will be sent to all members who register and will be posted on the Napo website as available www.napo.org.uk.
Motions to be considered by the AGM may be submitted by the NEC, a national committee, a Probation branch, the Family Court Section, the Forum or any two full or professional associate members of Napo. Constitutional amendments may be submitted only by the NEC this year.
Motions and constitutional amendments should be submitted on the form provided which is available from Kath Falcon at the Napo office at (kfalcon@napo.org.uk). Motions and constitutional amendments must reach the General Secretary no later than 12 noon on Thursday 19th August.
Amendments to motions and amendments to constitutional amendments must reach the General Secretary by 12 noon on Thursday 30th September. Details of motions and constitutional amendments received will be circulated to members at the end of August.
The Annual General Meeting is Napo’s supreme policy-making body and all members are urged to attend.
IAN LAWRENCE
General Secretary
OOOoops, we did it again...
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/01/experts-cited-in-no-10s-race-report-claim-they-were-not-properly-consulted
Leading academics cited in the government’s controversial racial disparity report say they were not properly consulted, and claim that they were never tasked to produce research specifically for the commission.
Typical fudge & nonsense from DirtyShagger & his mates, i.e. big claims about "world-beating" & "ground-breaking" turn out to be a pile of made-up shit that cost a fucking fortune.
If anyone in probation wants a payrise - put on a blonde wig, wrap yourself in a union flag, rub up against the DirtyShagger & plead poverty. He'll be sniffing around in next-to-no-time with cash-for-access, just so long as Wilf's mum is out of earshot.
I find offender management in custody to be such an odd concept if the purpose improving outcomes for release. Although billed as a "whole systems approach to resettlement", there is nothing "whole systems" about the way this endeavour was named i.e. management in custody. For me, they lost the probation "buy in" right from the start by choosing both the phrases "offender management" and "in custody".
ReplyDeleteThere always was an "offender manager" or "offender supervisor" in custody so I'm just not sure what is supposed to be new about what goes on in custody- OMIC has removed, not added - taken AWAY the role of the community officer, or at least someone "out" of the prison to co-ordinate the sentence.
My experience of prisons over the years is they only see what is going on within their four walls - rightfully so. But it often took the oversight of someone external i..e myself, the community practitioner to look to other prisons and point out what the person needed existing in another prison elsewhere. While of course a consistent keyworker prison officer (rather than the old "personal officer" system, which changed depending on what wing the person was on) is a good thing...but I don't feel the service have ever told us what the benefits of taking away the community involvement/oversight is supposed to be? Maybe it is, maybe we're really not needed until the last few weeks before release - maybe this elusive research mentioned via Twister informs us that this relationship makes no difference to the person's community outcomes.
Of course, we all know that prisoners move prisons due to security concerns, overcrowding, or indeed to access interventions they need, or to be closer to family. The original offender management model was brought in precisely because prisoners were constantly moving from prison, to prison and each prison "started afresh" as if the past hadn't occurred.
OK so there's a handover? What experience have people already had of these supposed pre-release handovers and the inter-prison-transfer handovers that take place along the way?. Do these adequately enable the community PO to grasp a person's history and develop the relationship just at the moment you're about to tell them "oh, here's your licence conditions, and by the way, you're going to AP". Will the prison OM's be prepping the person for the release, these conditions and what to expect from day one, to adequately prepare them?
And what exactly is whole system about moving people to another resettlement prison shortly before their release, so that the "handover POM" doesn't actually know the person and therefore has nothing to handover? What is whole system about outsourcing "resettlement work" to private companies to do absolutely nothing about resettlement prior to release? And what is whole system about taking away the role of the prison OM in those crucial weeks prior to release?
Oh and has there been any communication that as part of the new national standards the community OM is expected see the person three times in that final resettlement phase? Has time been allocated for these increased prison visits, have videolink slots suddenly been massively increased for this evident increased demand or are people still finding it notoriously difficult to see people in custody?
I cant believe that I've heard about OMIC for years now, and still I feel I know very little about what it is, why it's happening and how this is going to affect myself let alone the people directly affected?
Hang on I just don't get it - if OMIC is going live in open prisons, at what point does the community OM get allocated? Surely one of the main purposes of open prison is for the person to come out on ROTL - as was as the notoriously labourious ROTL approval process, who does that if the person isn't within the last few monts of the sentence - who visits the family, builds those relationships, and sees the person while on ROTL, if there is no community OM to see? And if there is a community OM doing all these things then that's not OMIC is it, it's the status flipping quo!
ReplyDeleteDfE: "We can't afford to feed children out of term time"
ReplyDeletePhil Kemp, the new national president of the NASUWT, will accuse some academy leaders of taking advantage of the increasing deregulation of the education system to pay themselves excessive sums of money from the public purse.
Research by Tes last month found that at least seven senior leaders within academy trusts were earning more than £250,000, while Sir Dan Moynihan, the chief executive of the Harris Federation, remains the top earner with his salary increasing to between £455,000 and £460,000 in 2019-20.
While the focus over the last year has been on the challenges of the pandemic to education, last month the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, revealed the government was pursuing its academies agenda and wanted to see more schools in multi-academy trusts by 2025. The DfE has been approached for comment.
(Guardian)