I want you to hear this honestly. Reading pieces like this brings up a sadness and an anger that has become far too familiar. Many of us joined probation when it still had a soul. When the work was hard but meaningful. When relationships mattered. When professional judgement was respected. When the service still recognised itself.
What we are living through now feels like standing inside the ruins of something that once meant a great deal. The culture has shifted so far from what probation used to be that some days it barely resembles the service we committed our careers to. You talk about public protection, about risk, about operational needs, but you never seem to acknowledge the depth of what has been lost along the way.
We are watching probation become more hollow, more defensive, more enforcement-led, more afraid. And the burden of that shift always falls on the front line. We are the ones absorbing the fallout from collapsing services, rising crises, unrealistic expectations and decisions made far above us that bear no resemblance to the reality we work in. Each time the system fails, it is practitioners who are left to carry the consequences.
What makes it harder is the feeling that leadership either cannot see this or has chosen not to. You respond to tragedy with equipment. You respond to pressure with instructions. You respond to risk by telling us to be more resilient. But you do not respond to the truth. The service is unsafe because the structure around us has been stripped back to the point where staff themselves are the last line of protection.
That is not resilience. It is exhaustion disguised as professionalism.
I am angry because probation did not need to become this. And I am sad because the ethos that once defined us is slipping away in full view. The people who still believe in it are doing everything they can to keep it alive, but goodwill is not an infinite resource, and it should never have been the foundation the entire service rested on.
If leadership genuinely wants probation to recover, then listen to the people doing the work. We are telling you what is wrong every single day. Listen to the sadness in our voices when we say this is not the probation we joined. Listen to the anger when we say we are being asked to carry risks we cannot manage safely. Listen to the quiet honesty when we tell you that the service is losing its purpose, and that we feel we are losing ours with it.
Probation deserves more than equipment and slogans. The public deserves a service rooted in purpose, skill and support. And the staff holding this together deserve leadership that finally accepts what we already know. Something fundamental has to change.
And so let me say this plainly. Probation is not being held together by strategy, policy or leadership. It is being held together by exhausted practitioners who still care enough to keep turning up. We are the safety net, the scaffolding and the shock absorbers of a system that has forgotten its own purpose. If leadership continues to look away, if nothing meaningful changes, it will not be staff who have failed. It will be those who were trusted to protect this service and instead presided over its slow, avoidable decline. We deserve better. The people we supervise deserve better. And the truth is no longer quiet.
Anon
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