SFOs and the culture of blame in Probation
HM Inspector of Probation, last month published a Research & Analysis Bulletin looking at how the Probation Service can learn and improve practice following Serious Further Offences (SFOs).
I read this with interest: in my time I spent as a Probation Officer I had my fair share of sleepless nights worrying someone I supervised would do something terrible. I would hear news reports about a crime and run through, in my head, whether anyone on my caseload could have been in the location it happened in, and when I would get news, someone had been arrested my heart would beat faster and I would feel panicked as I waited to hear what for.
As my career developed so did my greatest fear– fairly or unfairly – that, should the worse happen, I would be ‘hung out to dry’, and left unsupported to take the sole blame. I feared I would be shamed for negligence and incompetence that led to the harm of another person – making me as bad, if not worse, than the person who actually committed the SFO. I became frightened that one day I would wake to my name and personal details appearing in the national press – and my professional reputation forever tainted, with no right to reply or opportunity to give an explanation.
Of course, SFO reviews are intended to promote learning. But as the HMIP Report shows, staff experience the reviews as failing to reflect the complex realities of frontline probation work, and actually being about allocating blame to individual practitioners, to divert attention from the organisational and systemic factors that contribute to SFOs.
I was fortunate, no one I supervised ever caused me to be the subject of an SFO Review. Not because I was especially skilled – but because I was lucky. I saw some truly amazing Officers subject to brutal SFO Reviews and, frankly some poor Officers never subject to one. Because that’s the nature of working with people – sometimes things happen that you cannot predict. Other times you might have strong suspicions – but nothing you can evidence, or you try to get resources to help someone – and they simply are not there – or not there in time.
Of course, there are times when Probation Officers practice is poor. But – for a long time now Probation staff have worked in a very poorly performing service. Consistently, the Inspectorate reports detail a service in failure. Staff are constantly holding more cases than they should be, they are covering cases for absent colleagues, they are having to act as proxy housing officers, chasing referrals in an increasingly disjointed system.
Despite being exposed to seeing and hearing some of the worst parts of human behaviour – both in terms of the crimes the people they supervise have committed and the, often, trauma filled background those same people come from, probation staff rarely receive any clinical supervision or genuine assistance to process this.
Probation staff are encouraged to ‘build their resilience’ but little is done, to help them do that. The systemic problems in the Service, are something staff are expected to deal with and rise above – and if you can’t – well you must be to blame.
Of course, the result of a staff body living with this kind of pressure and fear is a culture of defensive practice. Every decision is seen through the lens of ‘what if the worst happens?’ Even when nothing in the person’s history suggests the worse will happen. The recall rate – now at record levels, is, in my opinion, testament to this.
The irony is, people enter the Probation Service wanting to deliver relational, rehabilitative practice. Inspectorate reports demonstrate staff worried to admit any deficits in their practice, and staff worried to commit fully to relational practice, for fear of the consequences and, as such, a learning culture is simply not possible, and Probation fails to be the service of rehabilitation it could be. It’s hardly a surprise retention is such an issue in the service.
But blame doesn’t keep people safe. Learning, ultimately does. And until probation chooses learning as the central part of its culture, rather than fear, it will never be the rehabilitative service our communities deserve.
HM Inspector of Probation, last month published a Research & Analysis Bulletin looking at how the Probation Service can learn and improve practice following Serious Further Offences (SFOs).
I read this with interest: in my time I spent as a Probation Officer I had my fair share of sleepless nights worrying someone I supervised would do something terrible. I would hear news reports about a crime and run through, in my head, whether anyone on my caseload could have been in the location it happened in, and when I would get news, someone had been arrested my heart would beat faster and I would feel panicked as I waited to hear what for.
As my career developed so did my greatest fear– fairly or unfairly – that, should the worse happen, I would be ‘hung out to dry’, and left unsupported to take the sole blame. I feared I would be shamed for negligence and incompetence that led to the harm of another person – making me as bad, if not worse, than the person who actually committed the SFO. I became frightened that one day I would wake to my name and personal details appearing in the national press – and my professional reputation forever tainted, with no right to reply or opportunity to give an explanation.
Of course, SFO reviews are intended to promote learning. But as the HMIP Report shows, staff experience the reviews as failing to reflect the complex realities of frontline probation work, and actually being about allocating blame to individual practitioners, to divert attention from the organisational and systemic factors that contribute to SFOs.
I was fortunate, no one I supervised ever caused me to be the subject of an SFO Review. Not because I was especially skilled – but because I was lucky. I saw some truly amazing Officers subject to brutal SFO Reviews and, frankly some poor Officers never subject to one. Because that’s the nature of working with people – sometimes things happen that you cannot predict. Other times you might have strong suspicions – but nothing you can evidence, or you try to get resources to help someone – and they simply are not there – or not there in time.
Of course, there are times when Probation Officers practice is poor. But – for a long time now Probation staff have worked in a very poorly performing service. Consistently, the Inspectorate reports detail a service in failure. Staff are constantly holding more cases than they should be, they are covering cases for absent colleagues, they are having to act as proxy housing officers, chasing referrals in an increasingly disjointed system.
Despite being exposed to seeing and hearing some of the worst parts of human behaviour – both in terms of the crimes the people they supervise have committed and the, often, trauma filled background those same people come from, probation staff rarely receive any clinical supervision or genuine assistance to process this.
Probation staff are encouraged to ‘build their resilience’ but little is done, to help them do that. The systemic problems in the Service, are something staff are expected to deal with and rise above – and if you can’t – well you must be to blame.
Of course, the result of a staff body living with this kind of pressure and fear is a culture of defensive practice. Every decision is seen through the lens of ‘what if the worst happens?’ Even when nothing in the person’s history suggests the worse will happen. The recall rate – now at record levels, is, in my opinion, testament to this.
The irony is, people enter the Probation Service wanting to deliver relational, rehabilitative practice. Inspectorate reports demonstrate staff worried to admit any deficits in their practice, and staff worried to commit fully to relational practice, for fear of the consequences and, as such, a learning culture is simply not possible, and Probation fails to be the service of rehabilitation it could be. It’s hardly a surprise retention is such an issue in the service.
But blame doesn’t keep people safe. Learning, ultimately does. And until probation chooses learning as the central part of its culture, rather than fear, it will never be the rehabilitative service our communities deserve.
@kellygrehaninjusticeblog
After 20 years working for the Probation Service in London, and 3 years working for MPs with justice briefs in Parliament, I now work for a justice charity. So fed up of the false discourse about justice I have decided to start blogging about it.
Are the chickens coming home to roost?
ReplyDeleteThe Daily Mail online no less has a very critical article concerning the role of Antonia Romeo in the current prisons crisis.
If the comments section were a popularity contest, I’m afraid she would be found wanting.
Excellent piece, particularly the acknowledgement that sometimes the difference between becoming the subject of an SFO review and never experiencing one is not necessarily professional competence, but luck.
ReplyDeleteRisk assessment is not clairvoyance. Practitioners make judgements using the information, resources and time available to them at that moment. Yet after an SFO almost every action of the individual PP can be reconstructed: what was recorded, what wasn’t, whether an assessment was updated, whether information was acted upon and whether recall should have been considered.
The question is whether the organisation is examined with anything approaching the same forensic intensity.
And that question becomes even more important with everything now being introduced through OFPS.
HMPPS is attempting to release around 25% of practitioner capacity. A new tiering model will determine how supervision is targeted, with seven tiers and maximum rather than minimum contacts. Practitioners will have to review all of their cases as the new arrangements are implemented, including ensuring the relevant risk indicators are captured. At the same time there are changes to supervision packages, increasing reliance on actuarial tools, the removal of practitioner access to the WMT and the additional pressures coming from sentencing reform and electronic monitoring.
These aren’t simply administrative changes. They are organisational decisions about risk.
If HMPPS determines through OFPS that a particular category of case should receive less practitioner resource, and a PP manages that person within the supervision framework HMPPS has designed, what happens if that person subsequently commits an SFO?
Will the review ask whether the model itself allocated sufficient professional time to that case? Will it examine whether the tier was appropriate, whether the supervision package was sufficient, what workload the PP was carrying and what other work they had been instructed to deprioritise?
Or will we once again work backwards through the individual practitioner’s records looking for something they might have done differently?
There is a particularly uncomfortable contradiction here. HMPPS is redesigning probation specifically because it accepts there isn’t sufficient capacity to continue doing everything currently expected of practitioners. Yet practitioner access to the WMT is disappearing just as these changes arrive.
Potentially, therefore, the individual PP becomes more retrospectively measurable while the organisational constraints around their practice become less objectively measurable.
That is exactly how defensive practice is created.
And perhaps this is the real test of whether SFO reviews are genuinely about learning. If HMPPS wants practitioners to embrace a new model that deliberately targets finite professional resource according to assessed need and risk, then HMPPS must be prepared to own the consequences of that model too.
Accountability cannot stop at the practitioner when the parameters within which that practitioner was working were designed much further up the organisation.
Anon 08:23 I think we have tomorrow's Guest Blog piece - just need a title. Thanks.
DeleteHow about "When the System Sets the Risk, Who Carries the Blame?"
DeleteOFPS may or may not prove to be the right way of targeting finite probation resources. That isn’t really the point.
The point is accountability.
If HMPPS designs the tiering model, determines the supervision packages, decides which activities can be reduced or removed, changes how workload is measured and asks practitioners to implement those decisions, then HMPPS must own the risk inherent in those choices.
It cannot design a system around constrained capacity and then, after an SFO, behave as though the individual practitioner had unlimited time, unlimited resources and unlimited discretion.
If this really is to be a learning organisation, the question after an SFO cannot simply be “What should the PP have done differently?”
It must also be:
“What did the system allow them to do?”
Indeed! Thanks for suggested title.
DeleteGreat article and very relevant. However it's up to the individual not to be blackmailed by DFO talk. I've had the guilt trip 'if there is an SFO I hope you can sleep at night'. I'm comfortable with my practice, SFOs will happen. Part of the issue is we are hiring the conveyor belt straight out of uni type who have not developed the emotional intelligence to deal with this pressure and have zero life skills . You can't teach resilience, you have it or experience it through life experiences. Hiring 22 year olds to deal with manipulate and aggressive men just ain't going to cut it. But management know this, hence why the service is being automated and they are hiring these lemmings.
ReplyDeleteI actually agree with the life experience point, although I wouldn’t describe young recruits as lemmings.
DeleteA 22-year-old can be intelligent, compassionate, academically capable and potentially become an excellent PO. But qualification isn’t the same thing as life experience, and I think we’re sometimes frightened to say that.
We are asking very young practitioners, predominantly women, to work with a predominantly male caseload, often involving people considerably older than them who may have spent years navigating violence, addiction, abusive relationships, institutions and the criminal justice system. The same applies with many women under supervision, whose own life experiences and survival strategies can be extraordinarily complex.
That creates a significant experience imbalance. Recognising manipulation, disguised compliance, coercive dynamics, subtle changes in presentation or simply sensing that something doesn’t quite add up isn’t something that can necessarily be learned from a module or competency framework.
None of that means a 22-year-old cannot become an excellent PO. They absolutely can. But they need experienced practitioners around them from whom they can learn.
That’s why constantly announcing trainee recruitment while experienced POs continue to leave worries me. You aren’t simply replacing one employee with another. You’re losing accumulated professional and life experience that may have taken 10, 15 or 20 years to develop.
I also agree that practitioners have to be robust enough to accept that SFOs will happen. But I don’t agree that resilience is entirely innate. Good supervision, experience and supportive colleagues help develop it. What certainly isn’t resilience is frightening staff with “if there’s an SFO, I hope you can sleep at night”. That’s management by fear, not professional development.
We all know it's the PP that gets blamed for SFOs. No consideration given to staff absences within the PDU, number of grievance claims made within the PDU.
ReplyDelete@10:11, fully agree, starting your PO career as a 21 or 22 years old isn't wrong or dangerous, skills will be learnt, experience developed over time etc. The trouble is as stated the proportion of experienced staff by which I guess I mean those with at least 10 years under there belts has dramatically declined. I started roughly 25 years ago at the age of 30 but back then I was surrounded by PO and PSO in there 50's and 60"s who i could lean on for advice and support. They were happy pushing back at managers if need be and weren't frightened to speak up. In my office now I'm probably one of 4 officers in our mid 50's with the other 35 or so mostly in there 20's with 3 or 4 years done. It's dangerous and enables management to bully thrm endlessly. I'd also like to bring back the possibly unwritten rule that you couldn't look for promotion until you'd been in the job for 5 years, having Deps and Heads who only case managed for a years post qualification is quite frankly wrong and unprofessional
ReplyDeleteCompletely agree. I’m mid-50s with 25+ years in probation and this really resonates. What worries me isn’t the age of new recruits, it’s how few of us are now left around them.
DeleteI had exactly what you describe when I started – experienced colleagues to learn from, test my thinking against and turn to when something didn’t feel right. You can’t put a value on that accumulated knowledge, and you certainly can’t replace it simply by recruiting another cohort of trainees.
I also think your point about promotion is important. There seems to be far less value placed on actually mastering the job before moving upwards. Experience isn’t everything, but when managers are challenging professional judgement, allocating complex work and making decisions that ultimately affect public protection, surely substantial frontline experience ought to count for something.
Perhaps that’s another part of the retention crisis nobody talks about enough. Every time an experienced PP leaves, probation doesn’t just lose one member of staff and replace them with another. It loses years of knowledge, judgement, confidence and informal mentoring that the people coming behind them desperately need.
The move from systemic to individual blame has been a slow and steady one designed to protect reputational damage and more specifically damage to Senior Managers….the creation of SFO investigation team has created the “there must be something to find” mentality so that so called ‘learning points’ can be provided to show that we have our house in order. The personal stress generated by these investigations is ignored and sometimes seen as a tacit admission of guilt………imagine if the SFO investigators continued to find nothing but OK practice…..they don’t want that, they want a head, yours,mine,it doesn’t really matter,just so that workloads ,poor man management, the way in which everyone interprets the notion of risk differently, staff sickness, bullying of inexperienced staff, is not blamed…….
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ReplyDeleteFrom InsideTime:-Researchers from The Ministry of Justice have undertaken a full study of the Probation Reset scheme, launched in April 2024. Under Reset, probation officers were told to reduce the amount of time they spent with people on the final one-third of their probationary period and focus on those newly-released from prison.
Whilst the scheme was operating, it was criticised by Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee and by the Chief Inspector of Probation, Martin Jones, who said the service is under-resourced and understaffed so it was not delivering what was intended. This report looks at the way Probation Reset functions, exploring how it was implemented, perceptions of how it affected sentence management, and how staff across the criminal justice system coped with large-scale organisational change.
The research team interviewed 40 probation practitioners, 13 people on probation, seven Parole Board members, Judges, and eight police representatives. They found implementation was inconsistent across regions and often diverged from policy intent, largely because Reset was introduced too quickly and with unclear guidance. Over time, they say, understanding improved and processes became better established.
Despite the Reset policy suspending active supervision in the final third of an individual’s licence or order, the researchers say some practitioners reported continuing engagement in some cases. This ranged from informal check-ins to maintaining supervision which often-reflected concerns for those with neurodiverse issues, high needs or escalating risks.
Particular concerns were raised by some staff that Reset disproportionately affected women as they are more likely to be lower-risk but with higher levels of need. Several probation practitioners highlighted that planned mental health interventions often did not begin in time, leaving individuals with mental health problems lacking support once Reset started. Reset was found to be unsuitable in these cases.
Some judges questioned whether sentences were being delivered as intended, with some suggesting they adjusted sentence decisions accordingly. Parole Board members were similarly less likely to grant releases due to a reduced confidence in community oversight of people under Reset.
Participants described change management in probation as being rushed, poorly communicated, and lacking meaningful consultation. They said strong local leadership helped staff navigate change where national communication was unclear. The roll-out of multiple operational changes at once was said to have left staff little time to absorb any new guidance, with changes often applied in real time rather than being fully understood before implementation. Staff also expressed concern that reforms get introduced simultaneously without clear prioritisation and that the pace and volume of reforms have generated change fatigue and a reduction in job satisfaction for probation practitioners.
The researchers conclude that with any future large-scale organisational change in the probation service, there is a need for clear communication and meaningful consultation before final decisions are agreed. Implementation should avoid mixed messages and overlapping systems changes, while recognising regional differences. Guidance for changes to the management of people on probation management should be practical, accessible and role specific. Changes should align with the core values of the Probation Service to maintain morale and retention, and public confidence.
I remember having to attend an SFO for attempted murder. 4.5 hours being interviewed. Patronising and humiliating. A disgraceful process and undertaken by those that can't hack it as POs- a horrid pulling up of the ladder. That POs think they're a blame game to put POs in the frame and this is exactly the opposite from the HMPPS directorate, is why there is such a divide between the front line and those telling you what to do, but with a culture that's long been a disease: do as I say not as I do.
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