Both of these comments underline something uncomfortable but unavoidable. What we’re describing here isn’t just burnout or disappointment, it’s prolonged exposure to organisational conditions that steadily strip people of agency, confidence and health. When staff talk about self-preservation, it’s because the system has normalised harm and then reframed leaving as personal weakness rather than a rational response.
The second comment is important because it shows how this damage travels downwards and sideways. SPOs and middle managers are left holding responsibility without support, absorbing HR functions, managing sickness, wellbeing and risk in an environment shaped by TR’s withdrawal of infrastructure. That doesn’t create reflective leadership, it creates containment and firefighting. People end up managing decline rather than developing staff or practice.
Taken together, these experiences point to the same conclusion: this isn’t about a lack of commitment or professionalism at any level. It’s about an organisation that has been redesigned to operate without adequate support, realistic capacity or genuine care for those expected to hold it together. In that context, leaving early isn’t abandonment of probation values, it’s often the last way people protect what’s left of them.
If this service is serious about retention, wellbeing and quality, it has to stop individualising harm and start owning the conditions that make self-preservation necessary in the first place.
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15 years in as a PO and could have written that myself. I felt it to my core reading that. I am at a crossroads. I have given so much of myself and so many unpaid hours over the years to do my best at work but feel like our purpose and meaning of our work is being eroded. Everything feels so much more transactional and box ticking. It feels like a culture of learned helplessness has been created since TR which is toxic. It feels like the message is as long as we skim over the cracks and make it look on paper like work is being done it’s like that’s good enough…. I’m not driven or motivated like that. I come to work to give my very best and as a result I am feeling increasingly disillusioned.
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As an SPO, I recognise every part of this thread. The idea that middle managers are “leading” anything right now is largely a fiction. Many are firefighting, absorbing HR work, managing sickness, risk and performance with inadequate tools, and doing so under constant pressure to keep the machine moving. That doesn’t create reflective leadership, it creates containment.
What worries me most is the number of experienced staff describing resignation rather than anger. That’s the point at which people stop believing change is possible. When probation reaches a stage where committed practitioners either numb themselves or plan their exit, the damage is already done. No amount of rebranding, recruitment or process tweaking will fix that unless the organisation is willing to confront the conditions it has created and stop relying on individual sacrifice to mask systemic failure.
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What’s being described here isn’t a morale problem, a bad year, or a failure of resilience. It’s managed decline. People are staying far longer than is healthy out of loyalty, guilt and professional identity, not because the organisation deserves it. Others are leaving quietly because they’ve reached the point where self-preservation is the only rational option left.
The most alarming thing in these comments isn’t the anger, it’s the resignation. That’s what develops when staff learn, over time, that raising concerns goes nowhere, formal processes protect hierarchy rather than truth, and commitment is rewarded with more pressure instead of support. At that point, people don’t fight the system; they disengage from it.
If probation leaders, managers or union representatives are reading this, the challenge is simple: stop explaining why things are hard and start responding to what is actually being said here. This isn’t noise, negativity or whingeing. It’s a detailed account of why experienced practitioners are switching off or walking away. If there is no credible, collective response to this, not another consultation, review or statement, then the silence will be taken for what it is: confirmation that decline is not an accident, but a choice.
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Reading this as someone still working in the probation service, I can only say how deeply it lands. What you’ve written articulates what many of us feel but struggle to say out loud — partly because there never seems to be a safe or meaningful space to do so.Those of us who are still here haven’t stayed because things are fine. We’ve stayed because of the same loyalty you describe: to the work, to the people we supervise, and to the colleagues sitting beside us who are carrying the same impossible loads. Caring is still what gets us through the day — and, paradoxically, what is wearing us down.
The feeling of having no real choice is already familiar, even for those who haven’t yet left. Many of us recognise that slow narrowing of options: adapting, absorbing, keeping going, telling ourselves we can hold on a bit longer. We speak up where we can, often carefully, often repeatedly, and too often into a void. The language of wellbeing and support exists, but the reality is relentless pressure, shrinking professional space, and a growing gap between what probation claims to be and what it has become.
It matters that we acknowledge managers in this too, because from where l stand, they are as trapped as anyone. Many are trying to shield staff, meet impossible demands, and keep services afloat within systems they did not create and cannot fix. The strain runs right through the organisation, and it shows.
What is hardest is knowing that people are already weighing up exit not as a career move, but as self-preservation. That staying may eventually come at too high a cost — to health, family, and identity. I don’t see clear solutions either. From inside, it often feels as though the choices are limited to enduring harm or stepping away.
So please know this: your decision is understood. Your honesty matters. And to everyone still here — practitioners, managers, administrators — doing their best in a probation service that feels increasingly dysfunctional and, at times, abusive towards its own staff: you are seen. You are not failing. If you reach the point where leaving becomes the only option, that is not weakness. It is survival.
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I didn’t choose this probation service. I chose a profession built on judgement, experience and human responsibility. What exists now is a hollowed-out system that extracts everything from staff while stripping them of voice, influence and protection.
Those of us who remain after decades aren’t here because we believe in the leadership or the direction of travel. We’re here because lives have been built around a career that no longer resembles what we entered - mortgages, children, geography, and the reality that walking away isn’t simple when your profession has been dismantled around you.
Risk has intensified, accountability has hardened, scrutiny has become punitive, yet professional autonomy has vanished. Experience is mined, not respected. Loyalty is demanded, not returned. Decisions are imposed by people who will never carry the consequences of them.
With hindsight, knowing what probation has been turned into, I would not choose this career again. This isn’t resilience or commitment. It’s containment. We are not a workforce being supported, we are numbers being managed until we break or disappear.
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"Risk has intensified" - primarily because the risk industry needed it to. And labelling theory works.
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That’s exactly it. Risk didn’t just increase, it was manufactured, expanded and monetised. Once risk became a product, it required constant inflation to justify tools, frameworks, audits, roles and oversight structures. Labelling theory does the rest: define people as permanently risky, then design systems that can never declare success. Practitioners are left carrying liability for risks that have been structurally exaggerated and procedurally impossible to manage. This isn’t public protection, it’s risk theatre, and staff are the expendable props.
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This legislation expands community sentences, suspended sentences and post-custodial supervision while saying virtually nothing about workforce capacity, professional skill, or risk ownership. In other words, the courts are being given more options and probation is being handed more responsibility, liability and scrutiny without any guarantee of time, staffing or professional autonomy to deliver it safely.
This isn’t reform; it’s displacement. Prison pressure is being pushed downstream into probation, where risk is already concentrated, caseloads are already unsafe, and accountability is already punitive. Every new requirement, condition or recall power lands on an officer who will be blamed if it fails but has no say in how it was designed.
If Parliament passes sentencing reform without legislating for caseload caps, professional standards and proper resourcing, then it isn’t strengthening community justice, it’s knowingly loading more risk onto a service that has been hollowed out for over a decade. And when it goes wrong, we already know who will carry the consequences.
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I attended a briefing this week about E-POP where those pops who are low or medium risk (with no active safeguarding or MAPPA) will complete online tick box reporting rather than face to face appts to alleviate appointments and improve capacity…. Another step away from developing actual relationships with those you supervise. I can see the value for those with standalone requirements but for the majority, especially those who have been subject to probation for years this will feel like the service is trying to shut the door on meaningful contact. SFOs are mainly perpetrated by medium ROSH offenders if I recall rightly so what’s the evidence base for this??? Risk is fluid - how can know if risk is escalating from someone ticking a few boxes which they decide!?
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When I started in probation in the 1980s we called the people we worked with clients of the service. It was respectful and no one questioned it was the appropriate thing to do. I shudder now everytime I hear pop although nothing wrong with person on probation. This happened on Sonia Flynn’s watch and the present CPO Kim Thornden Edward’s lacks the understanding and wherewithal to realise it is wrong to allow this to go on and do something. As for the RPDs a disreputable bunch of uselessness you could ever hope to encounter. I have even heard trade unionists use the acronym that I think is a shocking example of collusion with a demeaning and dehumanising practice. Stop referring to the people we work with as pops and simply call them people. That is after all what they are.
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The claim that this is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for probation doesn’t stand up when set against what was said to the Public Accounts Committee. The evidence given makes clear that senior officials have known for years about unsafe workloads, retention failure and a workforce model that no longer works. This is not a sudden moment of insight or ambition, it is overdue acknowledgement of problems that have been repeatedly raised and repeatedly ignored.What Parliament was told confirms what staff already know: probation has been running on deficit staffing, stretched capacity and goodwill for far too long. Dressing this up as transformation doesn’t change the reality. Recruitment promises, digital tools and legislative tweaks are being offered instead of the fundamentals the Committee was effectively probing for - workload caps, retention, professional confidence and stability.
If this really were a once-in-a-generation moment, the response to Parliament would include binding limits on caseloads, meaningful pay restoration and a clear commitment to rebuilding probation as a profession. Instead, we are hearing familiar language about efficiency, innovation and “doing more differently”, while the structural risks Parliament questioned remain unresolved. That isn’t renewal. It’s managed decline, repackaged and the people giving evidence won’t be the ones carrying the consequences on the frontline.
