The Damage Caused

Preamble

With 2,456 hits yesterday, it's pleasing to see interest sustained. So, continuing with the academic theme, here is an extract from the latest edition of the British Journal of Community Justice. The full article is lengthy, but well-worth consulting, particularly for the references. 

A FAILED SOCIAL EXPERIMENT: DAMAGED PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY POST ‘TRANSFORMING REHABILITATION’

Sam Cooper: Probation Officer

Abstract 

Following the Government’s Transforming Rehabilitation process of privatising half of the Probation Service, research found that profession identity and resilience had been damaged in the aftermath. Five years later, just after the Government announcement that Probation is to be re-unified, this paper explores the impact of the last five years on 7 members of staff working in one of the CRC companies that originally reported the lowest resilience and the most difficult working experiences. Narrative inquiry was used to allow staff to tell their own stories, and then followed up by semi-structured interviews to fill in any gaps in data. Key themes which emerged were loss of professional discretion, resistance to financial driven decision making and diminished self-efficacy as a result of inconsistent management oversight. Recommendations are made at the end of the paper to assist new managers to ease the transition and support staff resilience.

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Phillips (2010) considers the institutional values that probation staff have to work to, and taking into account the past experiences and drivers for staff joining the profession, he argues that such values cannot be imposed on staff from management down, but are internal. Mawby and Worrall (2009) echo this after interviewing probation staff who went through the creation of NOMS. Staff were very concerned about higher management being prison staff who, they perceived, had no idea what the values and working ethos of probation were, instead seeing the prison ethos as inherently punitive. Even when faced with more stringent values of control and punishment implemented by NOMS, probation professionals resisted this because they saw their professional role as more supportive than punishing (Mawby and Worrall, 2009; Clare, 2015). For some, then, the internal values and ethical drivers underpin their sense of professional identity as they seek out altruistic and service-based vocations. 

Professional identity as measured by performance and ability 

For other writers, the performance required to complete a professional role, and the level of competence and skill to do this effectively are vital to the sense of professional identity (Riddle, 2016). For instance, in software engineering students who developed self-efficacy through developing problem-solving skills had a stronger sense of professional identity and increased confidence (Dunlap, 2005).

In the early 1980s writers were researching the professional identity of probation staff and asked if there was a body of specialist knowledge specific to the role which would constitute this in the way that other professions such as teachers, lawyers or doctors had (Thomas, 1983; Lawrence, 1984). They were more concerned with a limited body of academic writing which guided and supported practice and development, rather than a perception of performance or confidence comprising part of professional identity (Lawrence, 1984).

Between 1970 and 1990 the key qualification for probation officers was the certificate of qualification in social work (CQSW) (Mawby and Worrall, 2009) and that those who qualified saw themselves as specialists in working with vulnerable people. This qualification was followed by the Diploma in Social Work (DipSW), before 1997 the introduction of the Diploma in Probation Studies finally cut ties with social services and professionals who were new to the service were no longer being trained in a social work driven ethos (Mawby and Worrall, 2009). Suddenly probation officers were having to successfully pass difficult qualifications that no longer mirrored the altruistic, social or religious motivations of the 60s and 70s (Mawby and Worrall, 2009). Older social workers still saw the offender as a victim of their circumstances and needed help and support, whereas the newer staff saw them as potentially dangerous individuals whose risk needed to be managed and controlled (Mawby and Worrall, 2009).

Mawby and Worrall (2009) not only looked at the change in academic qualifications and the drive to ensure they were academically robust, but also observed the fact that probation staff were keen to work across a range of areas to gain different knowledge from courts, to hostels to prisons in order to specialise. Staff actively sought to build on their formal qualifications with work-based skills and specialist experience to increase their competence and professional reputation (Clare, 2015).

Clare (2015) also argues that probation staff use their training and experience in order to juggle the realities of a need for social justice and punishment with the ethical treatment of the offender which adds legitimacy to their practice, which has often come under question following the TR process of privatization. Clare (2015) further suggests that this legitimacy and ethically driven practice should be used to shape the way the CRCs deliver their business because it reduces business risk when staff are highly trained and highly experienced in their role. However, it is unclear whether officers share the same business concerns, as research suggests they are more motivated by ethical practice than business profits (Phillips, 2010; Clare, 2015). Yet it is in the interest of a business to ensure relevant and reliable training meets the needs of its staff as this ensures capability and confidence (DeMonte, 2013; Thompson et al., 2017). 

With probation staff it appears that their construction of professional identity is in fact a combination of their education, training and perceived high standards of delivery of work, but also underlying ethical and moral motivations to provide a service which make their role a vocation rather than simply a job (Phillips, 2010; Clare, 2015). Understanding these drivers can help to predict that staff who have been moved from a role they consider to be akin to social service, to an employee of a large business concerned with profit may no longer feel their ethical and moral motivators are aligned to the new company’s and this could erode their sense of identity and trust.

Identity post-privatization 

As stated earlier, probation has undergone various changes to both organisational shape and ideological paradigms (Phillips, 2010), however, some writers claim that this split and the cultural effects of going from an effectively civil service role to one of business and profit driven employee, has been the biggest paradigm shift (Clare, 2015). Historically staff have fought to hold on to their professional values and identities in the face of policy change because first and foremost, they were probation officers (Phillips, 2010; Clare, 2015). However, after TR even that was removed as fully qualified probation officers are now called senior responsible officers (SRO) and partially qualified probation service officers are now called responsible officers (RO). 

Kirton and Guillaume (2015), conducted research into the impact of privatization on Probation staff and found there was a general fear that profit would come before staff and that their future was no longer secure, and they would not have the long-term career opportunities that NPS staff had. This was a stark difference from the lifelong services of staff in the past who had joined Probation looking for a vocation (Phillips, 2010). Kirton and Guillaume’s (2015) study regarding the effects of TR on NAPO members found that conditions had deteriorated and the lack of a professional voice in the process had been demoralising to staff whose educated opinion had previously been respected (Phillips, 2010). 

Robinson, Burke and Millings (2016) studied staff identity during the transition period from probation trusts to CRC and identified a number of themes which emerged in the discourse of the staff interviewed from separation and loss and status anxiety. Some staff believed the new CRCs were ‘socially invisible’ without a clear identity, and they were worried that they would be seen as ‘second class probation’ (Robinson, Burke and Millings, 2016, p.173). 

Deering and Feilzer (2017) followed Robinson, Burke and Millings’ (2016) study by considering the 3 elements of legitimacy; external legitimacy of officers work as interpreted by external agencies, internal legitimacy of practice as interpreted by offenders under supervision and self-legitimacy as internalised by staff themselves. They found that self-legitimacy and a belief that they are acting appropriately affected how professionals behaved and exercised their authority and this then increased the co-operation of offenders on supervision. However, they argue that the transition into private practice has impacted on this level of self-legitimacy but add the caveat that this had been a progressive occurrence prior to TR (Deering and Feilzer 2017). 

They conducted questionnaires followed by open questions to explore the qualitative explanations for the quantitative results from the questionnaires by asking subjects why they joined probation, had it met their expectation, what type of person they think staff should be and what their role should include and whether their values have come under challenge following the move to the private sector. 

They found that the gap in shared values and interpretation of quality had diverged between established probation officers and new managers and new staff, leading to mistrust and a fracturing of group identity, which is necessary for the maintaining of self-legitimacy. They also found that self-legitimacy was based on the belief that justice was  state-sanctioned and as such should be state administered and not something which should be done by private providers and this membership of a private company did not sit comfortably with subjects (Burnett and McNeill, 2005; Deering and Feilzer, 2017). 

Hall (2015) supported the Probation Institutes bid to become a regulatory body, where staff would register and be subject to mandatory continuous professional development. Deering and Feilzer (2017) posit that probation staff’s sense of self-legitimacy may have been severely damaged during the transition and suggest such internal narratives may be rebuilt by the Probation Institute gaining regulatory body status to add legitimacy to staff identity. They suggest this could potentially rebuild the sense of joint identity as a member of one body, irrespective of who the officer’s employer is. This was a large-scale study conducted over a period of time which is outside the scope of this current research, however, the research was conducted directly after TR. This current research will be following on from these initial findings, three years later and in light of the new knowledge that the two Probation providers are to be re-unified. 

Consequences of damage to professional identity 

Even before TR began, Phillips (2010) recognised that qualified probation officers’ professional identity had declined as more and more probation service officers have taken over work without possessing the full probation officer qualification. Mawby and Worrall (2011) similarly found dissatisfaction, with newer staff felling they had been misled by the job role as the emphasis was more on compliance and enforcement than building strong relationships. Overall, there was unrest within the staff group irrespective of grade. 

Fitzgibbon (2009) also argues that there has been a wide-scale deskilling of probation staff as professional discretion has been replaced by tick boxes, where staff record attendance and compliance and no longer had the opportunity to work with the whole picture. This led to damaging high profile further offences and high levels of scrutiny which have led to increased stress and anxiety (Fitzgibbon, 2009). Fitzgibbon (2009) goes on to state that the rate of continuous change in practice has had a detrimental impact on staff, with experienced officers suffering lowered resilience and leaving the service. 

Kirton (2015) conducted a large scale survey and found that following TR, the staffing levels in CRCs reduced on average across the UK by 1.84%, but in Derbyshire, Leicester and Nottinghamshire this was 4.76%. They also found that 40% of respondents surveyed in the CRCs would take voluntary redundancy and leave if they had the opportunity and 29.2% of staff were actively seeking other employment outside probation. The main experiences cited during this study were a sense of de-skilling, loss of career opportunities, and excessive workloads with the CRCs owned by Sodexo suffering higher than average inability to cope at 48% and fearing job loss at 74%. 

This strengthens the argument that employers, particularly Sodexo employers, need to mitigate more staff losses and attempt to retain their experienced and qualified staff members. The next wave of change was set to start in spring of 2020 when the two sides of probation return back to one service (Barton, 2019). In reality, this has turned out to be June 2021 when staff will again through a change of organisational identity, as they become civil servants.

Sam Cooper, Probation Officer