Probation's Journey

The latest Academic Insight paper from HM Probation Inspectorate very succinctly charts the journey 'probation' has found itself on over recent time and how it might yet be restored to something worthwhile following the TR omnishambles, the pathetic justification for which still makes my blood boil. The following is the first of two lengthy extracts, but as always readers are encouraged to read the whole document.   

Professionalism in Probation

Foreword 

HM Inspectorate of Probation is committed to reviewing, developing and promoting the evidence base for high-quality probation and youth offending services. Academic Insights are aimed at all those with an interest in the evidence base. We commission leading academics to present their views on specific topics, assisting with informed debate and aiding understanding of what helps and what hinders probation and youth offending services. 

This report was kindly produced by Dr Matt Tidmarsh, reviewing the literature on ‘professionalism’ and applying it to the probation service. After years of instability, the recent unification of the service provides an opportunity to refocus on the professional status of practitioners. It is vital that there is sufficient recruitment and that staff then benefit from ongoing investment, developing their professional knowledge, expertise and autonomy, so that they are able to deliver a high-quality service. At the same time, the history and culture of probation should be respected, embracing its identity as a relational, collaborative and person-centred service. Practitioners thus need to be empowered to develop positive relationships with people on probation and other key stakeholders. Within our inspections of probation services, we will continue to examine whether staff are being enabled to deliver a high-quality, personalised and responsive service for all people on probation. 

Dr Robin Moore 

Head of Research

2.1 Probation’s professional project 

McWilliams’s (1983, 1985, 1986, 1987) seminal quartet of essays on the professionalisation of probation comes closest to a ‘life history’ (Abbott, 1988) approach to the study of the service as a would-be profession. He documented how, over the first few decades of the twentieth century, the service came to exhibit ideal-typical professional traits. For example, after several decades of ad-hoc provision coordinated by the Church of England, the Probation of Offenders Act 1907 established probation as a public service with a clear mission, to ‘advise, assist, [and] befriend’ – words that constituted an ideology of service premised on relationships with those subject to supervision in the community. Religious influences on practice were gradually displaced by social work knowledge learnt through education and training, which proved the ‘scientific’ basis for autonomy over work delivered with people on probation. That McWilliams (1985, p.260) considered such knowledge, methods, and values the ‘justification for claims of professionalism’ hints at the importance of the acquisition of ideal-typical traits in shaping the service’s professional identity and legitimacy (Tidmarsh, 2022).

Probation’s ‘professional project’ (Larson, 1977) was consolidated in the postwar period, as the service was unequivocally recognised as a profession. The 1962 Morison Report, for example, recognised the probation officer as ‘a professional caseworker, employing in a specialized field, skill which he holds in common with other social workers’ (c.f. Jarvis, 1972, p.66). Given this institutional support, the service continued to expand: it assumed responsibilities for prisoners’ pre-release ‘throughcare’, post-release ‘aftercare’, and community service (Jarvis, 1972). Between 1951 and 1981, the number of full-time, qualified probation officers increased from just over 1,000 to nearly 5,500 while the service’s total caseload grew from 55,000 to approximately 157,000 (McWilliams, 1987). As such, imbued with state support for its knowledge, methods, and values, the probation officer was viewed as: 

‘an independent practitioner, supported and supervised in professional practice by the probation service hierarchy’ (May and Annison, 1998, p.161). 

However, the ideal-typical tenets on which probation’s claims to professionalism rested have, in recent decades, been subjected to considerable challenge. This has occurred against the backdrop of several significant changes, including a more punitive socio-political climate; the rise of risk management practices; and numerous, centralising organisational restructurings oriented towards greater efficiency and accountability. Heightened political and media hysteria over crime (Downes and Morgan, 2007) heralded the emergence of ‘tough on crime’ policies and a significant increase in the prison population (Garland, 2001). As political confidence in the service waned, successive governments targeted the autonomy of practitioners, chief officers, and locally administered services (Robinson et al., 2012). The convergence of performance targets and National Standards (introduced in 1988 and 1992, respectively) and monitored via an intensification of audits have thereby limited practitioners’ ability to exercise discretion (Mair and Burke, 2011). 

Following the growth in those subject to criminal justice supervision, in prison and in the community, risk management practices became entrenched within probation. Following the abolition of social work training requirements for practice in 1995, risk has arguably become the dominant knowledge-base within probation (Tidmarsh, 2021a). While evidence indicates that practitioners have welcomed the greater consistency provided by risk assessment tools such as the Offender Assessment System (Mair et al., 2006; Phillips, 2016), for their use promotes ‘defensible’ decision-making (Kemshall, 1998; see also Academic Insights paper 2021/14) in ways that are not ‘anti-professional’ (Robinson, 2003), pressures to record information have nevertheless detracted from the time available to spend with people on probation (Tidmarsh, 2021b).

Since the turn of the century, the service has undergone numerous restructurings which have sought to enhance central control over services – such that, for staff, organisational change has become ‘a defining characteristic of their professional existence’ (Robinson and Burnett 2007, p.332). And yet, despite changes which have attempted to bring organisational culture into line with prevailing punitive ideology (Robinson and Ugwudike, 2012), probation’s ideology of service has persevered. Mawby and Worrall (2013) have shown that several generations of probation staff are united through a shared value base centred on working with people. Indeed, research has consistently emphasised the durability of ‘probation values’ premised on a belief in the capacity of individuals to change (Deering, 2010; Robinson et al., 2016; Tidmarsh, 2020a). These values remain key to professionalism in probation, especially after the changes wrought by Transforming Rehabilitation.

2.2 Transforming Rehabilitation: the ‘diminution of the probation profession’ 

As argued above, ‘professionalism’ was integral to the justifications given for the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. This was primarily expressed in terms of professional discretion: top-down, bureaucratic state provision of services, it was contended, contributed to ineffective practice and the spiralling costs of justice, as practitioners were focused on meeting performance targets. Competing for services, by contrast, would spark the ‘innovation’ required to reduce reoffending and render probation more efficient (MoJ, 2010, 2013). The desire ‘to unlock… professionalism’ (MoJ, 2010, p.9) to improve performance thus sought to bring together the interests of diverse groups – the public, private providers, practitioners, and people on probation – with appeals to the superiority of the market over the state. 

However, Transforming Rehabilitation merely continued the decades-long challenge to the ideal-typical tenets on which professionalism in probation was grounded – such that, in her final report as Chief Inspector of Probation, Dame Glenys Stacey lamented the ‘deplorable diminution of the probation profession’ (HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2019a, p.3). For example, the manner in which staff were allocated after the reforms spoke to the Government’s view on professional knowledge, education, and training in the private sector (Tidmarsh, 2020b), with most qualified probation officers being shifted to the publicly-owned National Probation Service (NPS) – which was presented as a specialist body, ‘drawing on the expertise and experience of its staff… and managing those who pose the greatest risk of harm to the public’ (MoJ, 2013, p.4). Many experienced staff also left the service in protest at the reforms, leaving a much diminished ‘pool of collective professional knowledge’ (Kirton and Guillaume, 2019, p.12). That less qualified staff in the privately-owned Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) were doing work formerly undertaken by qualified officers (HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2019a) meant the boundaries between Probation Service Officer and Probation Officer roles were blurred, part of an attempt to render services more ‘efficient’ through cheaper labour (Tidmarsh, 2020b). As such, the NPS were perceived, by many in the service and the wider criminal justice infrastructure, as the superior organisation in a ‘two-tier’ system (HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2017). 

Relationships between staff and people on probation were not ‘sufficiently protected’ (HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2019a, p.9) after services were split. Some staff in Robinson et al.’s (2016, p.167) ethnography of the transition to employment in a CRC reflected on ‘the pains of separation from service users with whom they had built good working relationships but who were now in the process of being transferred to the NPS’. Staff-client relationships were further exacerbated by the financial strains under which CRCs operated. Initial caseload estimates suggested that CRCs would supervise 80 per cent of people on probation, but the reality was closer to 60 per cent – in part because concerns over the CRCs’ quality of services meant fewer were assessed as low-to-medium risk (NAO, 2019). The subsequent funding shortfalls resulted in ‘substantial reductions’ (HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2019a, p.74) in staffing in the CRCs. Accordingly, while organisational caseloads decreased, individual workloads increased (HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2017). One such implication is a loss of professional autonomy: practitioners in the CRCs were focused on meeting the ‘fee for service’ targets through which providers derived the majority of their income, reducing the time available to build relationships with people on probation (Tidmarsh, 2020b, 2021b).

Relationships with other organisations also deteriorated under Transforming Rehabilitation. HM Inspectorate of Probation and HM Inspectorate of Prisons (2017) found that ‘Through the Gate’ provision was over-reliant on signposting to other agencies, particularly in the voluntary sector. Both the NPS and CRCs referred to such agencies, many of whom were external to supply chains, without being financially obligated to contribute to their delivery (NAO, 2019). This disincentivised many smaller voluntary organisations from involvement in probation while entrenching a ‘tick-box culture’ of monitoring (Clinks, 2018, p.24) among those that continued to deliver services, as downward pressures inhibited their ability to build meaningful relationships with clients and partners. The financial instability that characterised partnership working with the voluntary sector demonstrates how Transforming Rehabilitation damaged probation’s function as a ‘broker’ between different social spheres (Senior et al., 2016). Dominey (2019) conceptualises probation relationships through notions of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ supervision: 

• ‘thick’ supervision refers to a productive relationship with the person on probation, embedded within the community 

• ‘thin’ supervision is predominantly office-based, with poor links to the community. 

Dominey concluded that, if probation is underpinned by networks of relationships, both among people and between people and organisations, then the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms pushed supervision in the CRCs ‘in the direction of thin supervision’ (Dominey, 2019, p.298; see also Tidmarsh, 2021b). 

The contractual pressures faced by CRCs thus created barriers to realising an ideology of service in probation. Indeed, the ability to build relationships – with clients and other stakeholders – is at the heart of probation staff understandings of professionalism (Tidmarsh, 2021a). However, both supervisor-client and probation-community relations were diminished nationally as a result of Transforming Rehabilitation (HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2019a). The practitioners in Tidmarsh’s (2020a) ethnography of a CRC, for example, struggled to reconcile client-centred values with caseload pressures and a heightened focus on performance targets. These ‘thin’ practices also permeated intra-organisation relationships, thereby impacting practitioners’ capacity to develop professionally. Staff in Coley’s (2020, p.237) study of a CRC valued supervision time with Senior Probation Officers; however, the combination of caseload pressures and staff shortages meant that staff supervision time was often ‘compressed, offering less space for individual and personalised activities’. Likewise, in the NPS, Phillips et al. (2016) observed the ‘relentless’ emotional impact of working exclusively with high-risk offenders, for which practitioners did not receive enough organisational support or opportunities to reflect meaningfully on practice. 

As such, Transforming Rehabilitation further undermined the wide range of relationships on which professionalism in probation is founded. Professional knowledge was lost in the CRCs, eroded by an enforced contractual focus on targets. An ideology of service persists within probation, but the convergence of increased workloads and the financial consequences of a failure to conform to performance metrics impeded the autonomy to enact such values. The ways in which Transforming Rehabilitation failed to enhance professionalism in probation raises questions as to how the service can reclaim its ideology of service and the frameworks needed to recapture meaningful relationships with people on probation and other stakeholders. The next section, then, advocates for a relational, person-centred, and co-productive approach to the future of services.

to be continued