Since when did probation become an annex of Right Move and Purple Bricks? I haven't got time or energy to write out form after form after form to cover myself in terms of contingencies because there are too many releases and not enough bed spaces and only certain tiers of offender get priority for those spaces. Where is the planning for all this? Where is the contingency? Where are the temporary APs to deal with the increase? Where is the extra funding? Where is the accountability? It's a complete farce. I don't blame the AP or CAS-3 system- they must be beleaguered, but why put them in that position?
Probation in the community is a miserable dumping ground for the ill-thought out policies that favour prisons that are in no great shakes themselves. We are sullied with this lack of professional respect and are a clearing house for failure of will, leadership, joined-up thinking and a lack of planning. Yes, the prisons need to reduce capacity. But if you don't just warehouse them in the first place and make sure their needs are identified and addressed rather than wait until they are in the community, we are less likely to have recalls.
Having an offender off the books of prisons for a few weeks only to be placed back in there is just musical cells and distorts figures.There needs to be proper investment in community probation and for those officers to be given their dignity and professional acumen back and, if necessary, be able to voice concerns before release. It seems the most efficient thing prisons do, is have the POM's name removed on Delius about 5 seconds after they've left the prison gates: Not our problem, matey. Yours now. Ta! Ta! Although... the tapping of that Part A is often not a long way off.
Anon
Ah yes. The modern probation role: part housing officer, part admin clerk, part crisis sponge.
ReplyDeleteCAS-3 referrals, AP applications, Duty to Refer, CRS forms. Page after page of paperwork chasing bedspaces that don’t exist, documenting shortages everyone already knows about, while the actual job, working with people, managing risk, building relationships, the thing most of us came into probation to do, gets pushed to the margins because there simply isn’t time.
When prisons or APs hit capacity, nothing is fixed. The pressure is just dumped into community teams and rebranded as “resettlement”.
More bureaucracy. More liability. More blame. Less professional judgement.
And after absorbing all of that, the reward is a derisory 4%, below inflation, sold to us as generous.
If this is what being “valued” looks like, it’s no wonder people are walking away
HMPPS Probation Service – Now Recruiting
ReplyDeleteBecome a Probation Officer
Extraordinary people doing extraordinary admin.
Looking for a career where you can make a real difference?
Fantastic.
You won’t have time to.
The Role
Join a modern, target-driven organisation where your primary responsibilities will include:
• Completing housing referrals longer than most Russian novels
• Explaining to five agencies why nothing is your responsibility but somehow still yours
• Managing prison releases planned approximately six minutes in advance
• Assessing “risk” using different IT systems that don’t talk to each other
• Recording everything multiple times in slightly different formats
• Feeding the systems first and seeing people if time allows
• Delivering rehabilitation primarily through keyboards, drop-down menus and duplicate case notes
• Absorbing the consequences of every upstream policy failure while being told this is “innovation”
Actual face-to-face work with people will be available occasionally, subject to admin demand.
What We’re Looking For
We welcome applicants who:
• Care deeply about people (this will be gently trained out of you)
• Can tolerate high workload and low trust
• Are comfortable having professional judgement replaced by templates
• Accept that experience is optional but compliance is essential
• View burnout as a personal development opportunity
• Plan to leave within 2–3 years for a better paid job elsewhere
Long-serving staff also welcome, while stocks last.
Pay & Rewards
Enjoy:
• A decade of pay “progression” worth roughly 7–10% against an 80%+ rise in living costs
• Settlements consistently lower than comparable public sector roles
• Occasional £20 vouchers as recognition for managing life-threatening risk
• A generous 4% offer described repeatedly as “beyond remit”
Retention not guaranteed.
Career Development
• Watch newly qualified colleagues leave for police, prisons or literally anything else
• Take on their caseload
• Repeat
Our Vision
To transform probation into a streamlined, efficient throughput service where:
Process replaces judgement
Churn replaces experience
Surveillance replaces support
And “capacity” replaces care
Apply now
Because if you wanted to actually work with people, you probably should have been a nurse, teacher or social worker.
Probation Service. Keeping the spreadsheets safe since 2010.
100% this is true
Delete99% true, even the Spreadsheets they use to keep track of crap and to admonish us with are as accurate at drunk darts player wearing boxing gloves
DeleteBrilliantly written summation and so accurate and funny- in its own tragic way. Another 'innovation', Justice Transcribed by A.I. Instead of actually improving the role itself and the mind-numbing task setting (not a piece of work, as it's so often referred to) we have a system that transcribes your interviees. Except, it's prone to making mistakes and doesn't actually increase engagement and rapport with offenders, especially as officers bring in their laptops which actually acts as a barrier to building trust, etc. Note pads should be for writing down pertinent things such as contacts or dates,, but, in essence, the best conversations you'll have with your offender are where it's just you two, with no physical barriers and you remember the fundamentals of what was discussed.
DeleteTrigger warning for POMs - You do know you can also refer to CRS, or do a DTR.
ReplyDeleteHaha have you ever asked a POM for prison information post-release? …… ‘computer says no’. Bunch of biffs the lot of them. There is a reason why POM and VLO roles can be done by people with no degrees or PQiP qualifications. Why are they paid the same and sometimes paid more than COMs?
DeleteVLOs you are also allowed to go on Delius, you don’t need to email COMs for updates. I love the passive aggressive ones after they know there has been an update but we as COMs have not emailed them. Just imagine them sat at home with face mask on, jammy bottoms and ugg boots on.
Your ignorance is astounding
DeleteThoughts of every COM when a POM recommends release in an OH, where nothing has changed since recall…..
DeleteVlo pay is the same as pom com. It is a different set of tasks duties responsibilities but as it was rated in the job scheme with similar scores from the job checklist criteria the grading made the threshold. Get over your self pom com admin job today ain't worth shit you all know it .
DeletePrisons have resettlement teams and the internet, so they can do resettlement work, but often send an email out via the sob story the repeat offender has told them- without really knowing them- and then telling the community probation officer what they already know and it's often they weren't helped in the community. More like you buggered off on release and become disengaged and unlawfully at Large. It's a marvellous art of shifting the responsibility. If the offender is in custody, they should remain the responsibility of the prison, not the community probation officer. This gip of overreaching primacy is another thing that needs to be recalibrated so the prisons don't just send remixed missives, which are really there to say we've told you. We've covered our back. You don't deal with it, then it's on you, sonny boy. Do prisons have to sit in SFO kangaroo courts? Or does the concrete and closed conditions exempt them from being accountable?
DeleteSpeak up then. It’s your responsibility
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I’m tempted to send the Chief Probation Officer and Justice Minister a 4pm meeting invite with 12 hours’ notice, just like they do to us, no agenda, and just talk at them about what doesn’t work: pay, conditions, workloads, security, estates, IT that crashes when you breathe on it, risk being pushed down the chain, and that constant low-level chaos that’s now just background noise. That’s the model now, isn’t it? Last-minute decisions, no engagement, then surprise when staff aren’t buzzing about the “change journey”.
DeleteAll these changes to help prisons, nothing for probation. For my sins, I haven’t attended a single briefing on this. I skimmed the email and that was already pushing it. Didn’t bother with the all-staff calls either, not for this, not for the pay “deal”. I’ve sat through enough of those to know how it goes: buzzwords, slides about “opportunity” and “transformation”, a nod to “wellbeing”, then straight back to business as usual. It’s framed like inclusion, but it’s just being talked at. Consultation happens to us, not with us.
The labels “COM” and “POM” really grate. Probation officers work in probation offices. Prison-based probation officers work in OMUs. Different settings, pressures and risks, flattened into tidy acronyms so it looks neat on an organogram, even if it makes no sense on the ground. Managerial feng shui.
Also, weren’t we supposed to stop using “offender”? The “O” in COM and POM is literally that. Years of language guidance, then the same framing baked into job titles. Now we’ve got COM, POM, PP, RO, PO, PSO – alphabet spaghetti for frontline staff, while people higher up get grand titles. Some of us have shoes that’ve done more miles in probation offices than certain so-called leaders did before being promoted by their mates. The worst bit is watching people who lived through previous restructures usher in the same corporate nonsense like it’s progress.
Operationally, the recall FTR56 guidance is clear: the probation officer holds responsibility for everything. Even when prison POMs are meant to refer into pre-release services, probation still does the DTR, CRS, referrals, accountability, scrutiny, the “what went wrong” bits. In practice the prison role is to notify probation of release and move on. Fine, call it that, but don’t dress it up as equal partnership when everyone knows where the risk lands.
Now we’re told to change out-of-office messages so prisons can redirect release notifications to individual probation officers even when they’re not there. No “I was on leave” get-out – either you pick it up or make sure someone else does so it’s waiting at 9am on your return. Under-resourced systems solve their design problems by blurring boundaries and making it the practitioner’s problem. When it goes wrong, it won’t be the process blamed, it’ll be the individual whose auto-reply didn’t catch something.
Zoom out and this is probation in 2026: firefighting, absorbing decisions made elsewhere. Understaffed, overworked, buildings less safe, IT that fights you, endless “new models” with extra expectations and no resource. Professional judgement talked up in strategy, squeezed out by process and performance language that looks good on dashboards and is useless at 4:45pm on a Friday when you’re holding the risk.
Now the sentencing review’s baked into law. On paper it’s sensible. In reality it means probation inheriting more problems it didn’t create: more people supervised, more complexity, more scrutiny when things go wrong, and no matching uplift in staff, infrastructure or protection. We’re always the solution, never given the tools to make it safe or sustainable.
I’m shocked, but not surprised, at how probation is expected to lap this up. “Exciting changes”. Another “new era”. Another “opportunity”. Staff quietly gaslit into feeling responsible for another shambles done to them, not with them, then blamed when the cracks show.
And all of this… for 4% and maybe a £20 R&R voucher while £700m gets spent elsewhere.
We do speak up, but the response is often, the moon is made of cheese, so as you were.
Delete4pm? She will be with the POMs and VLOs at that time after a hard day of sending shitty emails to hardworking coms
ReplyDeleteSimply wishing you all a kind/good day and that all Probation staff are very much in my thoughts and prayers. Be Kind to each other today and take care @IanGould5
ReplyDeleteIan - your well-meaning & heartfelt wishes, thoughts & prayers are kind &, I'm sure, are very well received by many.
DeleteThe difficulty is that, as so many - far too many to count - have said on here: "Nothing Changes".
It feels like we're caught in some kind of eddy in a torrential river of toxicity with no escape. A scenario where those who created the eddy have fucked off and those now in a position of privilege & responsibility *could* simply throw in a lifeline but ... they're transfixed, fascinated, morbidly aroused by the grotesque spectacle unfolding before their very eyes... so they do the least possible while pretending they're doing all they can.
See also: epstein files, Gaza, DRC & several other African countries, Syria, Yemen, China, Ukraine, putin, etc.
80% of the POMs I've worked with have been helpful. 20% just send the "so and so is going to be homeless on release what are you going to do about it" email
ReplyDelete