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”
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
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”
Career Development
- Watch newly qualified colleagues leave for police, prisons or literally anything else
- Take on their caseload
- Repeat
To transform probation into a streamlined, efficient throughput service where:
- Process replaces judgement
- Churn replaces experience
- Surveillance replaces support
- And “capacity” replaces care
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
Anon
"Brilliantly 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 interviews. 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."
ReplyDeleteIt says everything about the direction of travel that the “solution” to overload isn’t fewer tasks or safer caseloads, it’s software to help us type faster.
DeleteNo one joined probation to become a live captioning service.
The best work I’ve ever done with someone happened in a quiet room with no screen between us, no ticking clock, no template to feed. Just a conversation. That’s where trust sits. That's where relationships are built. That’s where risk is actually understood.
Now we’re told to bring a laptop, run transcription, upload notes, check the AI summary, correct the AI summary, then paste it into two other systems.
We haven’t reduced admin.
We’ve just digitised it.
It’s innovation theatre again.
Fix nothing. Add tech. Call it progress.
That may be a good thing in the long run it sounds to me like it will prevent all those personal entwined relationships all to many staff were getting into from all the non focused interaction.
DeleteIf that was sarcasm then fair enough but if not, we’ve got a real problem. Building rapport isn’t “non-focused interaction”, it’s the job. You don’t manage risk or change behaviour through a laptop and a transcript. If we reduce probation to screens and scripts, we lose the one thing that actually makes it work: professional relationships.
DeleteNothing against professionalism your colleagues are damaged by the sheer amount of personal relationships that have developed by the very unprofessional conduct we have read all the stories about. It is this stuff that has led to the scripting glass panels and word conduct scripted directed approaches sorry to say.
DeleteI see other Departments seems to either be viewed more favourably or have better Unions, the below is an extract from the Telegraph this morning...
ReplyDelete'Employees at the administrative office [AO] and executive office [EO] grades – which make up about 67 per cent of the Home Office workforce – are set to receive the largest pay increases.
Staff in these roles can expect salary increases of 7.74 per cent in 2025/26, 7.29 per cent in 2026/26, followed by a further 4.66 per cent uplift in 2027/28.'
Funny how the Home Office can suddenly find 7 to 8 % a year for two thirds of its staff, yet probation is told 4 % is “beyond remit” and we’re expected to clap for it.
DeleteSo clearly the money exists. It just isn’t for us.
We came off a three year deal that worked out at roughly 3.2 % a year. While living costs rose by well over 20 % in the same period. Before that it was years of freezes and token 1% rises. That isn’t a pay strategy. That’s managed erosion.
Every time we’re fed the same script. Tight budgets. Difficult choices. Hard settlements. Then another department announces proper increases and the mask slips. This was never about affordability. It’s about priority.
When they value a workforce, they pay to keep it. When they don’t, they talk about vocation and “extraordinary people”.
Probation gets the praise and the pressure. Everyone else gets the pay.
After a decade of falling behind, 4 percent isn’t generous. It’s just the latest reminder of where we sit on the pecking order. And it’s not subtle anymore. It’s blatant.
Honestly, it’s funny because it’s accurate, and that’s the uncomfortable bit. I laughed reading the “job advert”, but it’s the kind of laugh you do when something hits too close to home. Every line is satire and yet none of it feels exaggerated. The admin overload, the constant firefighting, the endless systems, the churn of staff, the pay that never keeps up, the actual human work squeezed into whatever time is left. That isn’t parody, it’s a fairly standard week.
ReplyDeleteThe tragic humour works because it exposes what we’ve normalised. If you described this job honestly to an outsider, they’d think you were joking.
It’s a brilliant piece of writing, but also a pretty bleak indictment that so many of us read it and thought, “yes, that’s exactly it.”
Last April, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority set the basic annual salary of MPs at £93,904, up from £91,346. MPs also receive expenses to cover the costs of running an office, employing staff, renting a second home and travelling between Parliament and their constituency.
ReplyDelete‘The salary of the Chief Secretary at NAPO for 2024 is not explicitly stated in the available sources. However, the General Secretary was reported to be paid £103,921 in respect of salary and £16,292 in respect of pension for the year ending December 31, 2024.’ Not getting much value from our subscriptions and MP’s are we? They are all nice and comfortable and what about this, A Labour MP who decried the lack of affordable homes in her constituency is living in a council flat, The Telegraph can reveal.
DeleteAspana Begum, who earns a salary of £94,000 as the MP for Poplar and Limehouse, in east London, has spoken out about the “housing crisis across London” and rising rates of homelessness.
But The Telegraph can reveal that she continues to live in a council flat, despite admitting almost five years ago that she “probably” did not need it any more.
The entire role is exploitative. it relies on goodwill and vocational motivation, which usually means bluffing and blustering on pay rises. Generally, U.K society, as with most countries, wants more people locked up, so we're seen as a soft touch from members of the public that want frontier justice brought back- asylum seekers hounded ouf of their hotels without due process, for example.The top brass of probation think that as it's vocational, any money owed is secondary. It cost £50,000 a year to incarcerate someone; £4,750 for community probation. At least another £20,000 should be used, pro-rata, etc, to give us a pay rise that we're not begging for like an undignified crumb off the table and to invest in community agencies such as employment, etc. Staff seem to leave all the time and instead of improving the culture, especially the 'do as i say not as i do'' attitude of supposed local leadership teams, who certainly don't like being challenged on poor decisions' and the endless form-filling, they vapidly concentrate on how many PQIPs have been created and how many new PSOs there are. It's a distraction but no one is falling for it because the day-to-day experience is becoming intolerable. There are your tangibles for ten. Stop strategising to cover up failures and fix the issues at hand and stop negotiating about pay. Pay now, pay fair, pay what's right and stop treating community probation like an annexation of a terrible prison system.It's utterly not working. Otherwise what you're doing is continuing to erode the profession until it becomes utterly irrelevant and offenders punch in a hole in a windowless, staff less building and that's what supervision ends up looking like. Aided by A.I. Way to do yourself out of a job.
ReplyDelete