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.
Delete"all those personal entwined relationships all to [sic] many staff were getting into from all the non focused interaction."
DeleteTo see if this is total bollox, let's disassemble it. What might 'non personal interaction' mean?
1. a term coined by sociologist Erving Goffman in 'Behavior in Public Places' (1963), referring to the social engagement that occurs when individuals are co-present in a shared space but are not directly involved in a common, shared activity or conversation.
2. the dominant form of interaction in public places, characterized by mutual awareness of others without direct engagement.
Oh.
Oh dear another ego bruising here we go. While I won't reach for the harrallambos or the psy giddens texts I'll use the new study map of easy. Google . Just tap in how many probation officers are dismissed for completely inappropriate relations with offenders. You appear to Fein ignorance of the realities of the behaviours many of your so called authority clear colleagues administer. The right smooth talking offender and authority falls over . Let's have a mature discussion not your pathetic attempt to defend the indefensible. Doing that is why you need further monitoring and direction to deliver the model not your choice it's inconsistent practice.
DeleteUK Context: A qualitative study analyzed 25 cases of sexual misconduct involving prison/probation staff, with 21 of the 25 staff members identified as female.
DeleteIncidence Rates: In the UK, sexual misconduct allegations against prison/probation staff have led to rising disciplinary action; in 2021-22, 31 officers were disciplined for sexual misconduct.
@13:** - you are right to suggest this issue is escalating & an area of concern within the justice system, but the lack of distinction between staff employed by hmpps makes it difficult to identify probation staff numbers. I've managed to find two probation-specific cases using search engines; the rest seem to be prison officers.
DeleteSeveral articles exist addressing the wider concern in the justice system, the case being predominantly female staff in male prisons:
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/staff-sexual-misconduct-uk-correctional-services-time-ask-more-questions
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/prison-staff-inappropriate-misconduct-sexual-abuse/
"92 prison staffers being sacked or sanctioned – such as with written warnings – between 2017 and 2023. The annual number of staff disciplinaries rose from 11 in 2017/18 to 17 in 2022/23" (not sure where your "31 in 2021/22" figures came from).
And from 2015-2019 the number was 32 according to a FOI request.
And look! No bruises!
A simple indicator of senior management peripheral issues is the autonomy of staff in certain circumstances who often have become vulnerable or go rogue. It happens. The initial response indicated a desire for more control or AI possibly as stated adding tech. This approach will script every delivery model going. The idea of different relationships whatever form they take in working with people has to confirm to the target neo culture. The extreme end of breaking professional lines was illustrating the controls would reduce the risk. While you may only find some examples the nature of this subject is always hushed up. What's reported is just the tip the rest is and remains a secret. I can recall many cases hidden until retirements or dismissal via pensions and all sorts of deals done. This rabbit of discussion is just an example of lost control of staff involved in managing people. Your really boring picking up on a simple reference to understand the employers actually want scripted delivery in time and AI will do it. With or without bruising your ego wants some sort of point scoring and frankly no one cares at this time we all have to wait and see how far they drive out your sort of irritating challenge to nothing.
Delete"With or without bruising your ego wants some sort of point scoring and frankly no one cares... "
DeleteSorry, I'm now completely lost ... where am I? Which rabbithole did I fall down?
Erm, okay, you win. I'm covered in bruises & off to bathe in arnica and no-one cares. That's fine by me. Goodnight : )
I 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.
How they spend *your* money; the money they won't give you because they've already given it to somebody else. For example:
Delete"UK Home Office confirms, Israeli based firm Corsight AI has been subcontracted by UK company Digital Barriers, to provide the Ai facial recognition software. (source: Al Jazeera)
This Ai facial recognition has been endorsed by Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood on Monday announcing a nation wide increase in facial recognition, which will be used by British Police as a means of surveillance. This same Ai continues to be used in Gaza by Israel to track and abduct Palestinians."
Between facial recognition, AI transcription, tagging & more prisons, where's the scope for probation?
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.
ReplyDeleteHaha!! So true. If you can put up with all that rubbish then it definitely is an Extraordinary job for Extraordinary people.
ReplyDeleteAt Starting salaries in probation £26,475, while even prison-officer pay starts from £33,746, it certainly will be a job with purpose. Purpose to leave!!
On that other old chestnut of deceit, “Making a real difference where it matters most” - yes your work-life will become very different to what it is now. WORSE!
https://prisonandprobationjobs.gov.uk/probation-service-roles/overview-of-the-probation-officer-role/how-to-apply/
The careers page makes me smile a bit grimly. It says you can progress “once you’ve gained experience”, specialise, then move into senior roles.
DeleteThat’s how it should work.
That isn’t how it works now.
We’re seeing newly qualified officers stepping into SPO posts within a year or two. That’s not a criticism of them at all. Anyone would take the pay and the opportunity. But let’s be honest about what that means.
Two years post-qualification isn’t “experienced” in probation terms. It’s still learning the job.
You’re still:
• handling your first genuinely high-risk MAPPA cases
• dealing with your first recall that keeps you awake at night
• navigating your first serious further offence review
• learning how to challenge prisons, courts and managers safely
• developing the judgement that comes from seeing patterns over time, not just following OASys prompts
Real professional confidence doesn’t come from a training programme or an interview. It comes from years of practice, mistakes, supervision, and lived experience.
The SPOs I remember from years ago had 10, 15, 20 years behind them. They could push back. They trusted your judgement. They’d have difficult professional conversations and defend their staff when something felt unsafe. They weren’t hiding behind process or grade because they didn’t need to. Their authority came from experience.
Now too often we promote people before they’ve had the chance to build that depth, then wonder why management becomes procedural, target-driven and risk-averse. If you haven’t had the time to develop confidence in your own judgement, you fall back on templates, policy and “because I said so.”
That isn’t leadership. It’s survival.
Which makes me think this isn’t really about “career progression” at all. It’s about churn.
We lose experienced staff because pay and conditions are poor. Vacancies appear. People get fast-tracked to plug gaps. Then we call it development.
It’s not development. It’s vacancy management dressed up as opportunity.
If experience were genuinely valued, the service would fight to retain it. Instead we seem to be quietly redesigning the job so that experience isn’t necessary. More process. More systems. More AI. Less judgement. Because judgement is harder to standardise and harder to replace when someone leaves.
That tells you everything about the direction of travel.
The NAPO website rightly states, ‘Workloads across the Probation Service are excessive and have been for years. The Probation Service has never been properly staffed and it’s not clear if it ever will be. Vacancy rates and high levels of sickness – mainly due to mental ill health, in large part caused by poor working conditions – push the demands on staff still further. Probation staff complete, by our estimations, hundreds of thousands of hours of unpaid overtime each year, which this employer has shown a willingness to repeatedly exploit. Moreover, the new Sentencing Act will bring huge increases in work to the Probation Service over the coming months.
ReplyDeleteMinisters and senior leaders in HMPPS can issue all the statements and kind words they want to tell us how much they appreciate us, but it means nothing if they then refuse to pay us a decent wage. Their empty platitudes don’t pay our bills!’
Yet they fail to issue instructions to members similar to that from the POA some weeks ago about working to the terms of your contract of employment, stopping unpaid overtime, taking legal action for injury caused to members, enforcing rather than negotiating away role boundaries, seeking new money for new work etc. etc.
ultimately, it is down to the workforce to stand up to exploitative employers, but a bit of guidance, tactics and leadership goes a long way.
This is exactly the contradiction that frustrates people.
DeleteThe unions are absolutely right about the diagnosis. Excessive workloads. Chronic understaffing. Burnout. Hundreds of thousands of hours of unpaid overtime propping the system up. New legislation piling on even more work.
But then what?
We get statements. Strongly worded blog posts. “Deep concern.” “Serious issues.” And then back to business as usual.
At some point the conversation has to move from describing the problem to changing behaviour.
Because the uncomfortable truth is this: the service only functions because staff keep saving it for free.
Every unpaid hour, every late report, every skipped lunch, every bit of “I’ll just get this done” is effectively subsidising the employer.
If everyone worked strictly to contract tomorrow, the system would grind to a halt within weeks. Not because staff are lazy, but because the workload has been built on the assumption of unpaid labour.
The POA understand that. They use boundaries as leverage.
Probation keeps negotiating goodwill.
Guidance like “work to rule”, “no unpaid overtime”, “stick to role boundaries” shouldn’t be radical. It should be basic self-protection. Without that, we’re just volunteering to be exploited.
Napo under the current has never won an argument or posed one really. The employers don't negotiate with Ian Lawrence because he is superfluous he fulfils a consultative step in legalities but has not the intelligence for a tactical leadership resistance . He is so in the wrong job yet we let him damage us. We ask for it. Low skill low results .
DeleteJim at 07:54 you’re spot on. Nobody seems to be addressing the issue of laptops. All the noise is about health & safety and security, while at the same time we’re told to “engage people on probation” and “make a difference.”
ReplyDeleteYet probation officers are being encouraged to carry laptops into every meeting to run AI transcription pilots. Workers should be pushing back on this, not fawning over shiny tech experiments. A laptop in that context can be a weapon and it’s definitely a barrier to genuine human connection. Only a matter of time before someone throws it through the window.
I can understand why staff might default to carrying a laptop or phone around the building and sitting with PoPs (is that even the term now?) tapping away instead of making eye contact or holding a phone under someone’s mouth to record every word they say.
But let’s be honest, that’s not engagement. That’s surveillance dressed up as innovation and everyone is buying into it.
Completely agree.
DeleteYou can’t talk about “engagement” and “relationships” while physically putting a screen between you and the person.
It’s absurd when you think about it.
We’re told:
Build trust
Read body language
Pick up risk cues
Have meaningful conversations
…while typing into a laptop and watching an AI transcript. It turns a human interaction into an interview under observation.
Anyone who’s worked in probation long enough knows the real information rarely comes out when someone feels recorded or monitored. It comes when the laptop is closed, the notes are away, and you’re just talking.
Instead we’re being nudged toward surveillance dressed up as efficiency.
And the safety point is real too. We’re carrying expensive bits of kit into volatile situations and pretending that’s neutral. It isn’t.
This isn’t innovation. It’s another example of tech being used to manage staff performance and data capture, not improve practice.
If they genuinely wanted better engagement, they’d reduce caseloads and give us time. Not gadgets.
This is so true with the laptop becoming something of an electronic comfort blanket !
DeleteI wouldn't say staff are encouraged to take laptops into supervision. The phone seems to be the way A.I or Justice Transcribed records it, but a laptop can be, potentially, used as a weapon and it creates a physical barrier between you and the offender. Which, in turn, engenders mistrust and increases suspicion. Also, we're not looking for properties on Zoopla, so why do we need to refer to the computer. Either write it down on note paper or put it to memory then head back to your desk to write it down or given it a few hours to digest and reflect.
DeleteIt will be body worn cameras next to make sure you keep to the script that is on its way. The laptop is just the start, just wait until they launch the AI PO, who will take you through the induction process, collate a sentence plan ascribed to the type of offence and length of sentence. It will interact with the AI in housing, children and adult services, drug and alcohol services and initiate the enforcement AI that will be judge and jury, watch Demolition Man for a view into the future. They have spent years shortening and dumbing down the training to deliver PO 2026. Gone is the investigative approach, building a relationship and understanding the person in front of you. They don’t want you to utilise professional judgement, look for disguised compliance interact with the police or be alerted about further offending. They want you to listen to bend to the new modeI not to question just do. 1984 is with us and Animal Farm in the office politics. HMIP want to make you feel bad singling out operational staff every single time and let’s face it most inspectors are there just to take the next step up the greasy pole. Just get the job done, don’t do overtime, no union membership, professional discussions only in supervision and let the management clean up the mess.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds dystopian until you realise it’s already happening.
DeleteTraining shortened.
Judgement reduced to templates.
Conversations reduced to scripts.
Professional discretion treated as “risk”.
Everything logged, tracked and standardised.
That isn’t modernisation. It’s de-skilling.
You only design a job like this if you don’t want experience to matter.
Because experienced practitioners question decisions. They challenge unsafe releases. They push back on nonsense. They don’t just tick the box and move on.
That’s inconvenient for a system built on compliance and throughput.
So the role gets stripped back until anyone can do it with a checklist and a dashboard. Less skill. Less autonomy. Less resistance.
Cheaper. Easier to replace. Easier to control.
Call it AI, call it “digital transformation”, call it innovation -it’s the same thing underneath: turning a profession into a processing function.
Probation used to be about judgement, relationships and understanding risk in the real world.
Now it’s becoming data entry with liability.
And when something serious goes wrong, it won’t be the “model” blamed. It’ll still be the practitioner sat in front of the screen.
That’s the part that should make people angry.
New probation for a new generation the old stuff doesn't work simply put it's over. AI will do it all shortly.
DeleteI never have and never will take my laptop into appointments!
ReplyDeleteSurely going for SPO position straight after qualifying says more about you as a person I.e lack of self reflection and awareness than it does the service. Why would you want that position when you have not earned any respect from your peers.
ReplyDeleteAnon 12:33 and 13:32. They do not want experienced SPOs who push back, trust practitioner judgement, have difficult professional conversations, or defend staff. Experience brings authority and respect, and that is exactly what they do not want.
ReplyDeleteSo people get promoted before they have built real confidence in their own judgement. The result is procedural, target driven, risk averse management. We see this now in SPOs, Deputies and Heads with very little frontline experience, falling back on templates, policy and “because I said so” because that is all they know.
They get away with it by hiding behind screens, forwarding instructions of those above them, taking credit for others’ work, handing out £20 vouchers, and calling people “extraordinary” instead of actually backing them.
Filling the ranks with inexperienced managers and practitioners keeps the workforce easier to control. If people ever collectively challenged it, the whole thing would fall apart fast.
Absolutely! It’s not really about individual character, it’s structural.
DeleteIn a healthy service, people wait because experience matters and credibility matters.
Now people move quickly because the system rewards compliance and interview technique, not judgement or depth of practice.
You used to become an SPO because others trusted you.
Now you become one because you can pass a behaviour based interview and repeat the right buzzwords.
That’s not leadership development.
That’s box ticking.
And everyone on the ground feels the difference.
This is exactly it.
DeleteExperience creates confidence.
Confidence creates challenge.
Challenge creates friction.
So the model quietly shifts to people who haven’t yet built the authority to say no.
It’s not accidental. It’s managerial design.
A workforce full of seasoned practitioners asks awkward questions.
A workforce made up of churn, trainees and fast tracked managers just follows process.
One is harder to control.
Guess which one they prefer.
Absolutely. Fucking. Spot. On.
DeleteWhy did they abandon psr writing to computer-compiled shyte? Because they hated writing them &/or struggled to write them; thus they felt eclipsed by others' evident skills.
Why did they pull court teams? Because they hated courtroom settings where their utter lack of knowledge was exposed & (as it was explained to me by a particularly dim fast-tracked spo) "we don't want individuals hogging the limelight or cosying up to solicitors in courts. Its a team game."
"A workforce made up of churn, trainees and fast tracked managers just follows process."
There’s a pattern here that people pretend not to see.
DeleteAnything that relies on skill, judgement or professional craft quietly disappears.
Detailed PSRs replaced with auto-filled templates.
Court work pulled back from people who actually knew what they were doing.
Individual expertise reframed as “not team focused”.
It’s not about improvement. It’s about levelling.
If nobody develops deep knowledge, nobody stands out.
If nobody stands out, nobody challenges.
If nobody challenges, management life is easier.
But the cost is obvious. Reports get weaker. Advice gets safer. Justice gets poorer.
It’s standardisation masquerading as fairness.
"It’s not about improvement. It’s about levelling."
DeleteNot, as some tory wags ironically described it, 'levelling up'. No. This is a far more serious endeavour. It is, in its purest form, Levelling. Its more than 'dumbing down'. It is Flattening. Demolishing. Clearing. Preparing Ground Zero for the grand design yet to come...
In all this innovation what has been done to protect officers following the two stabbings in 2025, both in offices?
ReplyDeleteNothing- they don't or won't spend the money on our safety or believe the existing safety guidelines are sufficient. Your health and safety are paramount... so long as we can afford it. Meanwhile, you'll get tedious missives from business managers about signing in and out correctly or some such. It's only an issue when they deem it to be.
DeleteTwo stabbings in offices and the response is guidance notes and a few "pilots” somewhere.
DeleteMeanwhile laptops, tagging contracts, AI transcription and restructures materialise almost instantly when leadership wants them.
So clearly things can move quickly. Just not when it’s staff safety.
It tells you everything about priorities.
If it protects the organisation, it’s urgent. If it protects staff, it’s optional.
We can apparently roll out AI to transcribe conversations and spend millions on surveillance tech, but we can’t guarantee that the people doing the job go home safe at the end of the day.
That isn’t a resource issue. It’s a values issue and the message couldn’t be clearer.
I'm quite curious about what is ment by "meaningful engagement " in today's probation model?
ReplyDeleteWhat does "meaningful engagement" actually constitute? More importantly, who is it meaningful for?
Is it about the person on probation? Or does it represent an opertunity for the probation service to collect, check and cross reference data to keep their digital records updated?
When does engagement become meaningful for the person on supervision?
'Getafix
“Meaningful engagement” is one of those phrases that sounds great in a strategy document and means almost nothing in practice.
DeleteIf you’re carrying 60 cases, rushing through appointments with a laptop open, updating three systems and chasing compliance targets, it isn’t meaningful for anyone.
It’s meaningful for the spreadsheet.
Real engagement takes time, trust and continuity.
All the things the current model has stripped away.
So what we have now isn’t engagement.
It’s data capture with a conversation happening in the background.
“Meaningful engagement” isn’t complicated or mystical. It’s not an app, a script or an AI transcript.
DeleteIt’s time.
It’s sitting across from someone without a screen between you and actually listening.
It’s knowing their history because you’ve supervised them for months, not just skimmed a case note five minutes before the appointment.
It’s noticing when something feels off before it shows up on a risk tool.
It’s being able to challenge them honestly because there’s enough trust for them not to shut down or walk out.
It’s the conversations that don’t fit neatly into drop-down boxes. The bits that never make it onto a dashboard but are exactly where change happens.
It’s also professional judgement. Making decisions based on experience and instinct as well as policy. Having the space to think, not just process.
When I started, engagement meant relationships. Now it too often means logging a contact, updating different systems and proving you spoke to someone for 30 minutes.
That’s not engagement. That’s admin with a pulse.
Real engagement takes continuity, time and trust. Three things the current model systematically squeezes out.
So when management talk about “meaningful engagement”, most of us just hear another slogan for “do more with less”.
Because you can’t build trust at speed, and you certainly can’t automate it.
This is so true...sadly the organisation has prioritised other things over this. Over the past ten or so years the organisation has focused on how to complete OASYS, audits of these, data collation, policy dictats, written case records, audits of these records, how things are recorded and measured....meanwhile nothing is really said about how to actually do the job...how to use relationships to good effect and the research which supports this or the skills and professionalism it requires to do it well.
DeleteAnd what makes me really sick is when finally addressing workloads what was the first thing that was cut? Relationships. RESET and impact pretty much disposed of the relationship, flippantly seeing this as the expendable element. Nothing else was changed...the ridiculous amount of time spent feeding the OASYS machine being the obvious one....huge amounts of money ploughed into data systems like MPOP and the recall portal.
Why was there not a mutiny when they literally cut what matters, left bureaucracy untouched and we all waved this in without blinking an eye.
Probation is vile keep any one away from it to avoid further marginalisation why don’t you join the police ?
ReplyDeleteI get the frustration, but that’s not really fair.
DeleteProbation isn’t vile. The people doing the work certainly aren’t.
The problem is the system we’re forced to operate inside. Most of us joined to help people stabilise their lives, reduce harm and keep communities safer. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the constant stripping away of time, autonomy and resources that made that possible.
Telling people to “just join the police” misses the point. Probation should be something worth staying in. Right now it’s being managed into something barely recognisable.
That’s the tragedy.
Not so sure when sitting across the desk at a manager will the lovely sscl staff of brainless branding and their bristling desire to implement rigidly a piss poor policy to detrimental impact to a hard worker who has been overworked and falls behind in illness. You can see they don't give a fuck the nazi control in all of them then comes out and they love control bullying by process that's your collegiate group of today .
DeleteNo judgement. No humanity. No professional conversation. Just “computer says no”.
DeleteAnd that culture now runs through the whole service. Risk pushed down. Responsibility pushed down. Blame pushed down. While the people doing the actual work are treated like problems to manage rather than professionals to support.
For a job that depends on relationships and trust, it’s a pretty bleak place to have ended up. Pay is just the final proof of it, because you always fund what you actually value.
@anon 19:38 I recognise the frustration behind this, because some of those experiences are very real, but I don’t think it’s helpful to paint every manager the same way. Not all of them operate like that, and some are just as trapped by the machinery as everyone else.
ReplyDeleteA lot of what people are describing isn’t personal malice, it’s weak leadership mixed with bureaucracy. SSCL processes, HR scripts and civil service policy become shields. Instead of using discretion or judgement, some managers just hide behind “that’s the process”. It’s safer for them, but it lands as cold and punitive for staff.
The difference usually comes down to confidence and experience. The stronger SPOs and managers I’ve known were prepared to push back, build a case, and defend their staff. They didn’t just forward instructions. They used judgement. The problem now is we’ve hollowed out that experience, so too many people default to compliance because they don’t feel able to challenge upwards.
That’s not an excuse, but it explains a lot.
And when you combine that culture with the way staff are paid, it tells you exactly how much professional judgement is actually valued.
Its not personal malice, but its taking thousands of peoples liberty away every year.
DeleteThat's much more then just a bad experience.