It’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.
Anon
"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.
ReplyDeleteAnd 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."
Helping support the work we have is one thing, but doing ourselves out of a job with Justice Transcribed (Justice denied?) It will soon go the way of the Home Office FNO obligation of going to an anonymous office, with a security guard from G4S, and punching in a code or a piece of cardboard or plastic to show that you've attended. The powers that be should or probably do look at this website, but the heads are in the sand and they'd rather come up with ideas that supposedly stave off being redeployed and give them the integrity that has been completely wiped out from probation as a job, as a profession and a purpose. It's all about prisons because the majority want more put there. But we don't have capacity, but the prisons and national guidelines favour them to the point of not being able to challenge it as community probation. This adversarial, inequitable dynamic is something that needs to be addressed. I'd rather not work in a prison where my office is a makeshift cell and i'm subject to the same rules around mobile phones and where I'm able to instruct, tell or ignore with surety any issues community probation may have. This dynamic is another reason why we're a dumping ground not a service that is valued for our experience and risk assessing- usually far more acute and insightful than the prison's. If you don't have money or don't want to spend it, then at least change the guidelines- that cost relatively little money.
ReplyDelete