Yesterday saw Andy Burnham make an historic speech. Beyond doubt he proved he cares and he has the wisdom and confidence not just to follow public opinion, but lead it for the public good. But he must apply the very same logic he so eloquently espoused at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool yesterday to the way society currently views crime and criminality. It never used to be a political football and has exactly the same roots in social inequality and poor life chances he so passionately cares about.
We simply cannot keep spending ever greater sums downstream on locking more people up with no hope of rehabilitation. He must have the bottle to recognise this and that money spent wisely upstream on investing in people and returning the probation service to the task they once so skillfully undertook would fit perfectly with his vision. Listen to them Andy:-
--oo000oo--
It’s the reduction in human contact that worries me most. It feels increasingly like a conveyor belt. Assess somebody, put them into the appropriate box, prescribe X number of appointments, move them through the stages, reduce contact, move them online and call it proportionate supervision.
Except these are people. People are complicated enough without adding trauma, abuse, addiction, poverty, neurodiversity, mental ill-health, damaged relationships, institutionalisation and all the other experiences so many of the people we supervise bring through the door with them. Two people who look remarkably similar on an assessment can need completely different things from us.
You cannot dictate that somebody needs X appointments because they fit into an A box or an F box and pretend that tells you how long it will take to build a relationship with them. One person might tell me everything in their first appointment. Somebody else might take six months before they trust me enough to tell me the thing I actually needed to know. That isn’t inefficiency. That is probation.
Give me a manageable caseload and I can actually know the people I supervise. If somebody who always attends suddenly doesn’t turn up, and I know they’ve been struggling recently, I can think that’s not like them. I can pick up the phone. I can speak to somebody who knows them. I can get in my car and do a home visit because my professional judgement tells me something might be wrong.
Under a conveyor-belt model, that same absence risks becoming something to process. Did not attend. Attempted contact. Warning. Rearrange. Next case.
Yet that person might have relapsed. Their mental health might have deteriorated. Their relationship might have broken down. They might have lost their accommodation or something else might be unravelling. Or there might be nothing seriously wrong at all. But I only know that their absence is unusual because I know what normal looks like for them.
That is what you cannot prescribe in a supervision package. It comes from knowing somebody well enough to recognise change and having enough space in your working day to do something about it. Give me an impossible caseload and I don’t suddenly lose those skills. I lose the time to use them.
And apparently the answer to that is everything except fewer cases. Justice Transcribe saves minutes. Online reporting removes appointments. Supervision packages reduce contact. Electronic monitoring provides surveillance. AI creates efficiencies. Dashboards measure performance. Another e-learning package tells us how to implement the latest version of probation.
I’m not against technology. Use it to get rid of pointless repetitive administration and give me more time with people and I’ll welcome it. But technology is a tool. A tag can tell you where somebody is; it cannot tell you why their life is falling apart. An online check-in can tell you somebody has ticked “fine”; it cannot necessarily tell you that they very obviously aren’t.
What makes me angry is that we seem to be designing probation backwards. Prisons are overcrowded, so more people must be managed in the community. Probation hasn’t enough capacity, so rather than genuinely addressing that, we redesign probation until the available workforce can absorb the numbers. Less contact. More automation. More remote supervision. More “efficiency”. Human contact itself becomes the resource to be rationed.
Of course not everybody needs intensive supervision and of course contact should be proportionate. But proportionate should mean responsive to the individual in front of me and capable of changing when their circumstances change. It should not mean fitting a human being into a centrally designed package because somebody has calculated how many practitioner hours the system can afford them.
We talk endlessly about individualised, trauma-informed, relational practice while simultaneously building a system which increasingly standardises how often practitioners are permitted to have the relationship. Those two things simply do not sit comfortably together.
And please don’t keep telling practitioners to exercise professional curiosity while systematically removing the time in which to exercise it. Professional curiosity is useless if I haven’t got the time to act on what makes me curious.
Stop asking how little probation we can give somebody and still call it supervision. Ask what this particular person needs to make it less likely that they come back through the system, then give practitioners enough time and professional freedom to respond.
Because if we keep stripping human contact out of probation to create capacity, eventually we may have a wonderfully efficient conveyor belt. I’m just not sure we’ll still have a Probation Service.
Except these are people. People are complicated enough without adding trauma, abuse, addiction, poverty, neurodiversity, mental ill-health, damaged relationships, institutionalisation and all the other experiences so many of the people we supervise bring through the door with them. Two people who look remarkably similar on an assessment can need completely different things from us.
You cannot dictate that somebody needs X appointments because they fit into an A box or an F box and pretend that tells you how long it will take to build a relationship with them. One person might tell me everything in their first appointment. Somebody else might take six months before they trust me enough to tell me the thing I actually needed to know. That isn’t inefficiency. That is probation.
Give me a manageable caseload and I can actually know the people I supervise. If somebody who always attends suddenly doesn’t turn up, and I know they’ve been struggling recently, I can think that’s not like them. I can pick up the phone. I can speak to somebody who knows them. I can get in my car and do a home visit because my professional judgement tells me something might be wrong.
Under a conveyor-belt model, that same absence risks becoming something to process. Did not attend. Attempted contact. Warning. Rearrange. Next case.
Yet that person might have relapsed. Their mental health might have deteriorated. Their relationship might have broken down. They might have lost their accommodation or something else might be unravelling. Or there might be nothing seriously wrong at all. But I only know that their absence is unusual because I know what normal looks like for them.
That is what you cannot prescribe in a supervision package. It comes from knowing somebody well enough to recognise change and having enough space in your working day to do something about it. Give me an impossible caseload and I don’t suddenly lose those skills. I lose the time to use them.
And apparently the answer to that is everything except fewer cases. Justice Transcribe saves minutes. Online reporting removes appointments. Supervision packages reduce contact. Electronic monitoring provides surveillance. AI creates efficiencies. Dashboards measure performance. Another e-learning package tells us how to implement the latest version of probation.
I’m not against technology. Use it to get rid of pointless repetitive administration and give me more time with people and I’ll welcome it. But technology is a tool. A tag can tell you where somebody is; it cannot tell you why their life is falling apart. An online check-in can tell you somebody has ticked “fine”; it cannot necessarily tell you that they very obviously aren’t.
What makes me angry is that we seem to be designing probation backwards. Prisons are overcrowded, so more people must be managed in the community. Probation hasn’t enough capacity, so rather than genuinely addressing that, we redesign probation until the available workforce can absorb the numbers. Less contact. More automation. More remote supervision. More “efficiency”. Human contact itself becomes the resource to be rationed.
Of course not everybody needs intensive supervision and of course contact should be proportionate. But proportionate should mean responsive to the individual in front of me and capable of changing when their circumstances change. It should not mean fitting a human being into a centrally designed package because somebody has calculated how many practitioner hours the system can afford them.
We talk endlessly about individualised, trauma-informed, relational practice while simultaneously building a system which increasingly standardises how often practitioners are permitted to have the relationship. Those two things simply do not sit comfortably together.
And please don’t keep telling practitioners to exercise professional curiosity while systematically removing the time in which to exercise it. Professional curiosity is useless if I haven’t got the time to act on what makes me curious.
Stop asking how little probation we can give somebody and still call it supervision. Ask what this particular person needs to make it less likely that they come back through the system, then give practitioners enough time and professional freedom to respond.
Because if we keep stripping human contact out of probation to create capacity, eventually we may have a wonderfully efficient conveyor belt. I’m just not sure we’ll still have a Probation Service.
Anon
*****
This sums up the situation eloquently, and I applaud their contribution however, probation staff have been raising their objections to the direction of travel both in person and via this blog for several years, and the powers that be simply disregard us.
Do ‘they,’ not know our views? Do they not know that they have a crisis of confidence? Do they believe that they have a glorious vision of the future or that they know life at the sharp end better that frontline workers, or are they following a blueprint with an end point that has never been disclosed.
Dialogue, evidence, statistics, data and history are simply overlooked or disregarded either because of arrogance or a directive from above and we are playing a game without the privilege of holding a full deck of cards.
At the end of the day, bonuses will be paid, gongs awarded, promotions granted and the back slapping will continue. ‘They,’ have nothing to lose, they’re not listening and they don’t care what you say or do. It’s called abuse and they can do it because they have the power.
Anon
*****
I agree with this, and I think that’s what makes me angrier than anything else. We need to stop pretending the problem is that nobody has explained it clearly enough. How many more times do practitioners have to say it? How many different ways do we have to describe what is happening before we accept that lack of information isn’t the problem?We’ve explained the workload. We’ve explained what relentless change does. We’ve explained why relationships matter. We’ve explained the danger of reducing human contact. We’ve explained what happens when professional judgement is squeezed between national processes, targets and performance demands. We’ve explained why people are exhausted, why experienced practitioners are leaving and why confidence in the direction of the service is disappearing.
And still we get another transformation. Another model. Another package. Another dashboard. Another e-learning module. Another “efficiency”. Another announcement telling us how much better probation is going to become.
So yes, I agree. At some point you have to consider the possibility that they already know what we think. And that is far more frightening than believing they simply haven’t listened properly.
Because if you know that the people delivering the service are deeply concerned about its direction and you carry on regardless, what exactly is “staff engagement” for? If practitioners are invited to meetings, surveys, consultations and events but the fundamental direction is immovable, stop calling it engagement. Tell us what has already been decided and spare everybody the pretence.
The power imbalance in that is what I find increasingly disturbing. The practitioner still carries the case. The practitioner still carries the risk. The practitioner will still have their decisions scrutinised when something goes catastrophically wrong. Yet how much genuine influence does that same practitioner have over the systems, workloads, contact models and processes within which those decisions have to be made?
And eventually people learn. They stop putting their hand up. They stop challenging in meetings. They stop answering honestly. They sit through the presentation, complete the training, tick the box and keep their head down. Not because they agree, but because they have concluded that speaking achieves nothing except potentially marking them out as “difficult”, “negative” or “resistant to change”.
For an organisation supposedly dependent upon professional curiosity and people being prepared to say something doesn’t feel right here, that should be absolutely terrifying.
I’m angry because I still care. I still believe probation can be better than this. But I’m increasingly tired of hearing that practitioners need to make their voices heard. Our voices have been heard. The question now is why so little appears to change when we use them. And perhaps that is the crisis of confidence we should really be talking about.
Anon
*****
Thursday 1 October 2026: one for the probation history books. Apart from the introduction, and eventual unwinding, of Transforming Rehabilitation, Thursday could be one of the most significant days the Probation Service has faced in recent times - again. The media attention around the Sentencing Act may have died down, but that does not change what is about to happen across prisons and probation. The new Progression Model comes into force with hundreds of prisoners estimated to be released on the first day, followed by implementation across 10 tranches between October 2026 and June 2027. These are modelled estimates rather than fixed numbers, so the scale of the challenge is clear. There is an enormous amount of work happening behind scenes and credit is due where it is due, but the level of guidance, communication, instructions and mandatory learning accompanying all this change does not make the situation better. We do not need to return to the past, but you’d think they’d have learnt from it.
No rational person thought they’d be reversing rehabilitating, revitalising or renewing probation into something better. It is possible, but not if the future of probation success is primarily framed around justice transcribe, AI, tagging and reducing the prison population, with little serious consideration of what probation actually is or what it could become.
Probation has become the mechanism for implementing whatever happens elsewhere in the justice system, but without its own identity, professional voice and purpose. I do not even think there is real sympathy for probation staff being pulled from pillar to post through yet another major programme of change, while continuing to deliver a demanding public service, while poorly paid..
It’s totally ignored that within there is a legitimate sense of anger at those who have been complicit in allowing probation to become increasingly defined by the demands placed upon it rather than by what it can contribute. This force fed approach is simply that Thursday is where the policy document ends and operational reality begins, take it or leave it because once again the change machine is upon us and this time the Progression Model risks becoming another missed opportunity to properly understand, develop probation, rehabilitation and justice.
In a word, another omnishambles.
In a word, another omnishambles.
Anon
I don’t think 1 October is the day probation falls over. In fact, I fully expect 1 October to be declared a success.
ReplyDeleteSenior managers will be able to point to months of preparation. The e-learning was completed. Guidance was issued. Briefings were delivered. Information was cascaded through regions, PDUs, teams and practitioners. Meetings were held, implementation plans produced and assurance provided. There will undoubtedly have been an enormous amount of work behind the scenes, and staff will do what probation staff always do: somehow make it work.
Then there will be a collective sigh of relief and, I suspect, quite a lot of congratulating ourselves on a successful implementation.
But completing the preparation is not the same as being prepared for the consequences.
The real test starts afterwards.
The courts will continue sentencing. Prisons will continue releasing. Existing caseloads will not disappear to make room for the new ones. The next tranche will follow, then another. People will relapse, lose accommodation, breach, be recalled, experience crises and suddenly require considerably more intervention than any workload assumption anticipated. Reviews will still become due, court work will continue, staff will go sick, vacancies will remain and all the ordinary unpredictable business of probation will carry on underneath it.
That is how services become overwhelmed. Not necessarily through some spectacular collapse on launch day, but through accumulation.
And this is where I think organisations can fool themselves. A cascade can tell you that information reached somebody. An e-learning completion rate can tell you that somebody clicked through the required training. An implementation dashboard can tell you that specified tasks happened by the specified date. None of those things tells you whether a practitioner has enough hours in their working week to absorb the additional work safely.
We have become extraordinarily good at demonstrating organisational preparedness through activity. I’m much less convinced that we understand the difference between staff knowing what they are supposed to do and staff actually having the capacity to do it.
So don’t judge this on 1 October. Come back in January. Come back in April. Look at caseloads, sickness, vacancies, enforcement, recalls, overdue work and, crucially, the amount of meaningful time practitioners actually have with people.
If those things deteriorate, please don’t tell us implementation was successful because 98% of staff completed the e-learning.
You cannot train people out of insufficient capacity. You cannot cascade your way out of an impossible workload.
And if probation buckles under the cumulative pressure months from now, nobody gets to call it unforeseen. Practitioners are telling you now.
It’s already buckled
DeleteAnon08:24 reword that. There has been an enormous amount of work behind the scenes, and probation frontline staff were required to do what probation managers forced them to do: to make it work. Managers have already declared it a success because the abysmal eLearning and barrage of administration tasks have a reached a 98% completion rate. Tired, demoralised Practitioners await the consequences. As a reward the lucky ones will get a £10 r&r voucher or a certificate calling them a hidden hero.
ReplyDeleteI understand why people say probation has already buckled, and perhaps in some places it has. But I think something slightly more insidious is happening. Practitioners are still preventing it from visibly buckling by absorbing the failure themselves.
ReplyDeleteWork through lunch. Stay after five. Log back on later. Get the assessment finished because otherwise it locks incomplete. Write up the contacts because the dashboard will show them outstanding. Get the review done because the deadline doesn’t move simply because your workload is impossible.
And therein lies the trap.
If people continually donate the additional hours necessary to make an impossible workload look possible, the organisation never sees the true capacity problem. Worse, those people inadvertently become the benchmark for everybody else. “Joe manages his caseload.” Yes, but does anybody ask how Joe manages it? Is Joe taking his lunch break? Finishing on time? Thinking about work all evening? Working on days off? What is actually being sacrificed to produce that apparently acceptable performance?
Then look at the practitioner who refuses, or simply cannot continue doing that. Deadlines slip. Contacts wait to be written. Assessments become overdue. Performance indicators deteriorate. The workload may quite openly show that they are over capacity, but the response is: “Everyone is in the same boat.”
As though everybody being overloaded somehow makes overloading everybody acceptable.
This is where I become genuinely worried about capability and disciplinary processes. If somebody demonstrably has more work than can reasonably be completed within their working hours, at what point does organisational incapacity get rewritten as individual underperformance?
Because the work cannot simply be reallocated if everybody else is full too. So what does the manager actually have available to “manage” the problem? Performance monitoring. Action plans. Increased scrutiny. Capability. And, in the wrong circumstances, conduct or disciplinary processes.
I don’t necessarily blame the individual SPO either. Pressure travels downwards beautifully. PDU Heads need assurance. SPOs need to demonstrate that performance is being managed. Practitioners need to demonstrate that the work is being completed. Everyone needs to evidence that they have done what was expected of them. The organisation has delivered the briefings, cascaded the guidance and completed the e-learning, so when capacity finally collides with expectation, where does accountability land?
Usually at the lowest point at which an individual name can be attached to something that wasn’t done.
And this is why the Napo workload dispute and talk of industrial action becomes much more interesting than simply whether people are prepared to lose a day’s pay. What would happen if the hidden capacity disappeared? If people took their contractual breaks, finished at their contractual finishing time and stopped routinely donating hours simply to prevent the work falling over?
I suspect we’d discover very quickly how much capacity probation actually has.
But asking an individual practitioner to do that is incredibly difficult when they know the unfinished work remains attached to their name, their cases and potentially their capability. That fear itself helps keep the system functioning.
That’s the vicious circle: staff work beyond their hours because they’re frightened of falling behind; that additional work disguises the true scale of the workload problem; management sees that the work is getting done; expectations remain unchanged; and the person who cannot keep doing it becomes the apparent problem.
“Everyone is in the same boat” doesn’t make the boat seaworthy. And threatening the people who stop bailing long enough to point out the hole certainly isn’t going to fix it.
I’ve been looking at how another profession deals with this and social work makes for an uncomfortable comparison, although perhaps not for the reason you might expect.
ReplyDeleteSocial workers certainly aren’t protected from impossible workloads. Far from it. They report excessive caseloads, unpaid additional hours, staff shortages and exactly the same tension between doing the work properly and simply getting through it. So this isn’t an argument that social work has somehow solved the problem and probation should copy it.
What interests me is that the principle is at least explicit.
The employer standards for social workers in England talk about safe workloads and case allocation. Workload is supposed to take account of complexity and individual capacity, not simply numbers. Employers are expected to take action when demand exceeds staffing capacity. The Department for Education’s own guidance goes further and distinguishes caseload from workload because the number of people somebody holds tells you very little about how much work those people actually generate.
And, when services become overwhelmed, unallocated social-work cases really can exist. That’s not something to celebrate, quite the opposite. Ofsted regards large numbers of them as evidence of potential systemic safeguarding failure.
But there’s something revealing in that.
An unallocated case makes a shortage of organisational capacity impossible to disguise. There is a person requiring a service and currently insufficient professional capacity to provide it. The deficit remains visible.
So what is probation’s equivalent?
What happens when 20 cases arrive and there genuinely isn’t sufficient practitioner capacity to supervise them properly? Do we ever allow the organisation to say: we currently do not have sufficient capacity to deliver this work to the required standard?
Or do we allocate them anyway?
Because allocation doesn’t create capacity. It merely changes where the deficit appears.
Once excessive demand has been distributed amongst practitioners it stops looking like an allocation problem. A few weeks later it appears somewhere completely different: overdue reviews, rushed assessments, delayed recording, missed enquiries, shortened appointments, reduced contact and deteriorating quality.
Suddenly we’re measuring practitioner performance rather than organisational capacity.
That’s why the direction of travel with WMT troubles me so much. At precisely the point when probation is expecting increasing demand, we’re moving away from a mechanism which attempted — however imperfectly — to make workload visible.
Everything else will remain wonderfully measurable. We will know whether the assessment was completed. Whether the contact was recorded. Whether the review was on time. Whether the practitioner has completed their mandatory learning. Whether their performance indicators are green or red.
Yet the question sitting underneath all of those measures becomes less tangible:
Was there actually enough professional time available to do all of this properly?
Social work hasn’t solved excessive workload. Its practitioners are struggling with it too. But perhaps both professions demonstrate why workload needs to become more visible, not less.
Because when demand exceeds professional capacity, somebody has to own that gap.
And simply allocating the work does not make the gap disappear.
There’s another uncomfortable issue sitting underneath all of this: how probation treats people when the consequences of excessive workload finally become visible.
ReplyDeleteWe talk about staff wellbeing, psychological safety and supportive management, but when somebody starts drowning the organisational machinery available to deal with them can be remarkably punitive. Missed targets become performance concerns. Performance concerns become action plans. Increased monitoring follows. And ultimately there is capability, conduct or disciplinary.
Of course there are occasions when those processes are entirely appropriate. But there is something profoundly wrong if they are used without first establishing whether the person could reasonably have completed the work expected of them within their contracted time and available resources.
Because what exactly are we assessing in those circumstances — the capability of the practitioner, or their capability to survive an excessive workload?
The distinction matters. Someone can be an experienced, perfectly capable practitioner and still reach the point where they cannot keep every plate spinning. In fact, the more conscientious they are, the longer they may conceal the problem before something finally drops.
And once formal performance management begins there is a horrible irony: the person already struggling for time acquires more meetings, more actions, more scrutiny, more things to evidence and more anxiety about making another mistake. None of that removes a single case.
This is where I think probation needs a safeguard. Before capability or disciplinary action is considered in relation to incomplete or delayed work, there should be a demonstrable examination of workload and capacity during the relevant period. Not “everyone was busy”. Not “other practitioners managed”. Not whether the individual should have prioritised differently. Was the totality of the work actually achievable within the hours for which that person was employed?
If it wasn’t, that needs to remain an organisational fact throughout whatever follows.
Otherwise we create a perverse system in which excessive workload is allowed to produce the failure and then the failure is used as evidence against the person carrying the workload.
And with WMT disappearing, I worry about how a practitioner will evidence that distinction in future. We are retaining increasingly sophisticated evidence of everything an individual failed to do, while removing one of the few objective pieces of evidence they could point to and say: this was what I was being asked to carry at the time.
That should concern every practitioner, whether they are currently struggling or not. Capability should determine whether somebody is capable of doing their job. It should never become the mechanism by which an organisation disciplines people for being unable to do more work than one person could reasonably do.
Meanwhile ….
ReplyDeleteHiddenHeroes Day 2026 – 30.09.26
Launched in 2020 by HRH The Princess Royal (Princess Anne), HiddenHeroesDay is a national day – held on the last Wednesday of September each year – paying tribute to the #HiddenHeroes working in UK prisons, IRCs, probation and youth justice services. HiddenHeroes Day 2026 is TODAY.
https://www.hiddenheroes.uk/hiddenheroesday/
Calling exhausted, overworked and underpaid professionals “hidden heroes” brings absolutely nothing. It’s no different from telling us to have hope.
DeleteIt doesn’t reduce caseloads. It doesn’t put more staff in place. It doesn’t cut the bureaucracy. It doesn’t improve pay. And it doesn’t ease the constant pressure on people carrying huge levels of responsibility.
There’s something pretty uncomfortable about celebrating our resilience while doing very little about the conditions that make us need that resilience in the first place.
We’re definitely “hidden” though, because there’s a real effort to make sure nobody speaks up. If we stopped doing the extra hours, stopped taking on more and more demands, and stopped bending over backwards to keep the service running while senior managers sit around planning how to get more for less, what would they call us then?
Heroes? Probably not.
the soon-to-be-noms lot "asked" practitioners to 'pilot' oasys for 6 months then gathered them together for a "feedback" session.
ReplyDeleteThey weren't interested in the feedback. They just needed the data so they could make oasys what *they* wanted.
That's the closest any of those fucking whitehall parasites have come to "asking the practitioner" about anything.
Any ex-practitioners - mostly those who hated the job, hated those sent to work with them & who merely wanted kudos & more ££s - who made it far enough up the greasy pole to be granted a temporary seat at "the centre" were so-far removed from reality & mostly glued to the lower intestines of the whitehall massiv, tongues dragging along the corridors of power.
I left over a decade ago, unable to stomach the Grand Shafting of November 2014. Sounds like I didn't miss out on much by way of a payout either, seeing as the greedy privateer shitheads pocketed most for themselves.
ReplyDeleteA few weeks ago I met an ex-colleague who, having qualified shortly before the Grand Shafting, had a different view of the golden future being dangled before her & remained fully optimistic. I say that with considerable love & respect because she was a bright & energetic young person (mid-twenties then) with a lot to give.
We met quite by chance in a Waitrose (not the real name of the shop) but I have to admit to being somehwat shocked by her appearance & almost didn't recognise her. It had been at least ten years since we last met. She looked tired, exhausted, drawn, haggard.
There were a few things in her trolley & she was staring at items on the shelf in front of her. I said 'hello' & gently touched her arm, which made her start. She looked at me confused, concerned, puzzled; then recognition dawned. She smiled, but her eyes welled up & tears ran freely down her face.
We found a quiet corner in the cafe & the tears kept running as she off-loaded for nearly an hour. I can't/won't elaborate for fear of giving too much away but she was simply desperate. The workload, the lack of support, the bullying, the abusive behaviours across all grades. And she was terrified of what this week will bring to her & her colleagues.
Its evident she tries to give those she supervises as much as she can but she's utterly spent. Burnt to a cinder. How she continues is beyond my understanding (setting aside the financial trap she finds her self in).
She has friends outwith the probation world, but they haven't a clue as they find what she tells them unbelievable; they think she embellishes it.
She now has my number & we speak weekly.
My message to handy burn'em & the bullies across the board - whether whitehall or in the regions - AND to the pseudo-chief of probation Jones (cos he's the only one who's dared to open his trap) is:
Do the decent thing:
Ask. The. Practitioner. You. Fucking. Brain-dead. Bellends.
Policy makers would do well to listen to practitioners, the inspectorate, academics, unions; basically anybody outside HMPPS. This feels like familiar territory, all but those with their hands on the reins are advising against the current path. Any day now, but sadly probably not after some catastrophy, someone with influence will say the current model is "irredeeemably flawed". No shit, Sherlock.
ReplyDeleteThey won't even listen to their own delegates at conference:
ReplyDelete"The British Labour Party blocked an emergency motion brought forth by party delegates at its conference calling for the cancellation of Palantir’s £330 million National Health Service (NHS) contract.
￭ The motion was submitted by the Socialist Health Association and several Labour constituency parties and called on the government to cancel the contract over Palantir’s links to the Israeli occupation, according to Middle East Eye.
￭ Palantir’s own 2024 annual filing confirms that it entered a strategic partnership with the Israeli War Ministry to supply technology to assist in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
￭ Meanwhile, NHS England awarded a consortium led by Palantir the Federated Data Platform contract in November 2023, with up to £330 million allocated to the platform over seven years.
￭ The motion was blocked by Labour’s Conference Arrangements Committee, which claimed it did not meet the criteria required for an emergency debate.
￭ The decision comes as Labour ministers have become more critical of the Israeli settlers' occupation in rhetoric, while continuing military collaboration and keeping Palantir embedded in Britain’s public health infrastructure."
A certain ms antonia romeo was key in introducing palantir to the relevant uk govt contacts; in her former role as the permanent secretary at the Department for International Trade she engaged with the data analytics firm to promote its expansion in the UK, meeting with Palantir's U.K. head, Louis Mosley, to discuss digital data frameworks and pitching the potential of NHSX (a joint government unit established in 2019 to drive the digital transformation of health and social care across the UK).
All of our health data (uk-wide) is now commercially available via palantir.
What number in the current climate would people say should be caseload maximum for a PO?
ReplyDeleteTechnically it depends on the complexity of the case, but around 34 should be equivalent to 100% IMO
DeleteTo do the job properly, then no more than 20 cases.
DeleteThe way the service treats its practitioners has been abusive for many years now and it remains so.
ReplyDeleteAn SPO.
Yes we know this. And many SPOs are complicit in the abuse too. We’ve seen it once again with the progression model. SPOs, Deputies, Heads, all running around barking “do this, do that, do it now”. All to please those above and a future chance of a promotion.
DeleteThe comment from an SPO saying the treatment of practitioners is abusive is actually quite significant, and I wouldn’t immediately dismiss that by saying all managers are complicit or simply chasing promotion.
DeleteSPOs are under enormous pressure too. They haven’t escaped the workload crisis by moving into management. They are expected to absorb endless change, understand and implement it, manage large teams, monitor performance, deal with sickness, adjustments, complaints and HR issues, provide oversight of risk and somehow still find time for meaningful supervision. The Progression Model has undoubtedly created another huge demand on them as well.
But there has to be a line somewhere between being under pressure and transmitting that pressure unquestioningly to the people below you.
Management cannot simply mean receiving demands from above and forwarding them downwards with a deadline attached. If that is all the role becomes, we don’t really have management at all; we have a very expensive organisational relay system.
An SPO should be the person who knows their team well enough to recognise when the demand has become unreasonable. The person who can say, “No, they cannot absorb another case.” “No, that deadline isn’t realistic.” “No, this isn’t an individual performance problem.” And sometimes, “I know this is what you want delivered, but my staff cannot safely deliver it in the way you are asking.”
That inevitably means managing upwards as well as downwards, and I suspect that has become increasingly difficult in a culture where everybody is themselves being measured on delivery.
But that is precisely when management matters most.
I don’t need a manager simply to tell me what the organisation wants from me. The organisation has emails, dashboards, guidance, Teams meetings and e-learning perfectly capable of doing that. I need a manager when what the organisation wants collides with what is actually possible.
And perhaps that is the uncomfortable challenge for managers at every level tomorrow and in the months that follow. When the pressure increases — and it will — are you going to absorb some of it, challenge some of it and defend your staff where necessary? Or are you simply going to pass every demand downwards until it eventually lands on the practitioner who has nowhere left to pass it?
Because “I was under pressure from above too” may explain why something happened. It doesn’t always excuse it.
The comment said “many” SPOs it didn’t say all. An SPO arriving to comment here that the service is abusive would have a lot more value if they shared what they’re doing not to be abusive. SPOs would be under a lot less pressure if 99% of them didn’t run after those above. The same 99% that will happily help the abuse flow downward. The same 99% that will repeat demands and emails about dashboards, guidance, Teams meetings and e-learning. And the 1% that will challenge some of it and defend staff, well they’re such a decreasing minority that nobody above needs to take notice of them anymore.
DeleteThis blog might get lots more traffic over the coming weeks; almost 19.3 million visits to date. Well done sir!
ReplyDeleteSo, in the event of so many casual visitors wanting to know more about probation & why its in the pickle it is, I'd like journalists or interested parties to get their heads around &/or teeth into the managed decline of the probation service & the one name that pops up every time there's a key moment in the genesis of that managed decline.
Offender Management Act 2007, which opened the door to outsourcing/privatising probation services.
* "In 2006, X became principal private secretary to the Lord Chancellor – initially Charles Falconer, then from 2007 Jack Straw."
UK Ministry of Justice introduces the Revised Probation National Standards, 2011.
* "In 2011, after 18 months at the Cabinet Office, X moved back to the Ministry of Justice, taking on the role of Director General, Transformation."
In 2013, the most significant legislative and structural overhaul of probation occurred in England and Wales under the UK Ministry of Justice's Transforming Rehabilitation strategy.
* "in 2013 X became Director General, Criminal Justice"
The Probation Modernisation Fund (often referred to as the Mutuals Support Programme or specific probation spin-out funding) was an initiative driven by the Cabinet Office under Francis Maude during the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in the early 2010s... The total amount of taxpayer cash deployed from this specific Modernisation Fund was allegedly £80 million, though critics and parliamentary evidence noted that exact, itemized figures were never fully disclosed by the government...
... Specifically, the *public funds* were utilized as a mechanism to cover pre-planned workforce restructuring costs, redundancy packages (which was supposed to offer up to 67.5 weeks of enhanced voluntary redundancy), and pre-planned job losses as staff transitioned to private-sector bidders, but much of it disappeared into the pockets of the multinationals, as confirmed here in Hansard:
"15 June 2015 - Andrew Selous, Written Answer: Under the enhanced voluntary redundancy scheme opened in advance of the transition of the Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) to new providers, probation staff were able to apply for voluntary redundancy on the basis that they would leave the service by 31 March 2016. The total cost of these redundancies was £16.4m."
Here's the tell that selous dangles before your very eyes:
"All remaining Modernisation Fund monies were awarded to CRCs. Redundancy funding was allocated pro-rata to CRCs based on their size and estimated future staffing requirements."
* Following the 2010 United Kingdom general election X transferred to the Cabinet Office as the Executive Director in the new Efficiency and Reform Group under Francis Maude."
X marks the spot.
Every. Single. Time.
Happy Thursday everyone, don’t forget to pick up your free Greggs sausage roll from Perkbox.
ReplyDeleteThey cannot act on what they hear/learn from practitioners as it conflicts with the word from the top which is, at all costs make sure that the prison releases work, irregardless as to the cost to individuals or the service, HMP have to be protected………..
ReplyDelete