Listen to the Front Line!

What did HMPPS and the MoJ formally learn from TR about large-scale transformation, modelling risk, implementation at pace and listening to practitioners? And where can we see those lessons reflected in the design and implementation of OFPS today? And perhaps that question now needs putting directly to ministers, including the Probation Minister who we've heard nothing from since her appointment.

What lessons from TR have you personally satisfied yourself have been learned before another fundamental redesign of probation is implemented? Because this isn’t some interesting historical comparison. TR had an enormous financial cost, but it also had a human one. Experienced staff left. Professional identity was damaged. Services were fragmented. Practitioners spent years working through successive restructures before reunification attempted to put the service back together again.

And now, barely having recovered from one transformation, probation is being transformed again. Once again staff are being told about efficiency, technology, new models and releasing capacity. Once again the centre appears remarkably confident about what can be achieved. And once again the people expected to make it work will undoubtedly be thanked for their “hard work”, their “commitment” and their “resilience” when the reality on the ground becomes difficult.

Frankly, those words are wearing very thin. Resilience should not mean repeatedly asking a workforce to absorb the consequences of organisational decisions and then congratulating them for surviving them. Nor should “listening to the frontline” mean thanking staff for raising concerns before proceeding regardless.

This is why ministerial silence on probation is becoming increasingly difficult to understand. Probation is apparently important enough to carry a substantial part of the government’s answer to prison overcrowding and sentencing reform, but where is the political voice explaining what is happening to the service expected to deliver it?

Where is the Probation Minister explaining OFPS to the workforce and the public? Where is the acknowledgement of what happened under TR? Where is the assurance - backed by evidence rather than another set of comforting phrases - that the same mistakes are not being repeated? Because if an organisation can experience a failure on the scale of TR and, little more than a decade later, find itself using eerily similar language while embarking upon another fundamental redesign of probation, asking “what did you learn?” is hardly unreasonable.

Romeo was absolutely right about one thing in 2014: there are no prizes for believing your own hype. The financial and human cost of getting probation reform wrong doesn’t disappear simply because Whitehall has moved on to the next transformation programme.

So perhaps the question for HMPPS, the MoJ and the minister responsible for probation is no longer where is the institutional memory? It’s: what evidence is there that you learned anything at all?

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"Nor should “listening to the frontline” mean thanking staff for raising concerns before proceeding regardless."

That perfectly describes the attitude & approach in 1999 when, as the sun was eclipsed by the moon, a group met in London to discuss the findings of the first OASys paper-based pilot. Staff from prisons & probation sat around a large table while civil servants asked for their feedback. A number of legitimate &/or worrying concerns were raised by the staff. Those comments were acknowledged &, for the most part, immediately dismissed. There was an agenda.

The 'centre' had a plan & they were merely going through the motions so they could say they had consulted & piloted the project before imposing it across the board. It was cumbersome, it was repetitive, it was judgemental. It was a crude stick used to beat the person being 'assessed' into shape such that they would fit into the round or square hole. And so began a series of carefully choreographed impostions - NPSv.1, NOMS, Trusts, TR, HMPPS, reunification, reset, OFPS.

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I couldn't agree more that, looking back, OASYS signalled the beginning of the end for probation. We spend our lives servicing a badly designed system. The unrelenting lists of standards, feedback, audits, QDOs, shows me it isn't staff who are "doing it wrong" but the system itself is fundamentally flawed. And yet management have spent years of wasted time on this ridiculous endeavour, ultimately blaming the staff for incompetence rather than admitting it was their own for enabling such poor use of our time and resources filling it out with an ever increasing list of requirements and quality audit tools.

What I don't know is whether ARNS will sort this out...has anyone used it or seen it that can give us some reassurance that there is light at the end of the assessment tunnel?

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I don't think OFPS was based on staff consultation. Are we really saying that staff have genuinely supported and asked for reduced contact with people on probation as the key to unlocking the 25% workload reduction? Certainly if someone had asked me, I would have pointed to the duplication and unnecessary time spent completing OASYS...how easily could 25% of my time be saved if that system was completely redesigned and the unrelenting impossible standards underpinning it wripped up.

Think about the targets, the data, the measurement, the monitoring, the duplication and unnecessary tasks we are forced to complete on a daily basis. All this has been left completely intact while probation supervision has been diluted, reducing contact and cancelling any contact at all through a push for early termination motivated not by success but convenience, with one to one work replaced with a preset list of "conversations". Is this really what staff have said when asked for ideas about reducing unnecessary workload?

And are we now going to be passively brow beaten once again to bring in yet another "model" we don't support, or am i wrong and staff are really supportive of a probation service that spends the vast majority of its time "assessing" in the most unimaginably laborious and ineffective way possible while implementing absolutely nothing at the end of it? Are staff not as angry as I am that out of all the things that could have been cut, contact was seen as the most unnecessary and dispensible element of our role?

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And once again probation/government have increased punitive control measures by applying them to all, whether they are needed, worthwhile or necessary. In my mind this (inadvertently) changes the culture of probation officers by both seeing all as more dangerous than they really are, and diluting any remaining critical analysis or professionalism that used to be needed to determine who needs these monitoring tools at all or for whom they are necessary and proportionate.