Once a Noble Career

We are trying to fix the unfixable here. Probation is an impossible job and people who have been here years are looking through rose tinted glasses. It's always been a tainted career, most people don't even know we exist. And the biggest question, why are more people committing crime, why are more people up in court? Nobody wants to dig deep into corrupt governments, cost of living, decline in mental health provisions. Rather we wallow in a world of blame game, poor training, poor managers, never any questions on the individuals who cause this initial harm. Very naive and limited thinking.

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No, I think the naive and limited thinking is with you and those like you. The organisation itself uses the blame game, we see that with SFO and performance approaches. It is no secret that there is poor training, even the universities providing PQIP training cannot criticise the Ministry. The problem of inexperienced and poor managers is widely documented by HMIP. Probation historically was a noble career, not a tainted career. And the focus was actually not on stopping people committing crime, but stopping THE SAME people committing crime. Speak to anyone in probation that understands this differentiation and they’ll tell you the impact of cost of living, decline in mental health provisions, problems with access to social provision, and whatever else.

So there are no rose tinted glasses, and that term is used by managers to dismiss the opinions of those with experience and length of service. It’s an excuse to ignore the past and the embrace the current state of affairs without question.

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“Most of the staff like the above now.” 

Perhaps some do. But I think there’s a more uncomfortable question: how would you know you’ve lost professional autonomy if you’ve never experienced it? f your entire probation career has taken place within OASys, performance measures, prescribed processes, centrally designed practice models, mandatory e-learning and increasingly structured supervision, that isn’t managerialism intruding into probation practice. To you, that is probation practice. And I don’t mean that as criticism of newer staff. Quite the opposite. People cannot miss a professional culture they were never given the opportunity to inherit. That’s why the loss of experienced practitioners matters beyond simple staffing numbers. When they leave, we don’t merely lose somebody capable of carrying a caseload. We lose memory of how the job can be done differently.

Perhaps the greatest success of managerialism isn’t persuading practitioners to accept less autonomy. It’s eventually producing generations of practitioners who don’t recognise autonomy as something they’re supposed to possess. That also makes all the current talk about “professionalisation” rather interesting.

You can create registers, standards, CPD requirements and eventually statutory regulation. But a profession isn’t simply a workforce whose members are individually regulated. A profession also possesses a body of knowledge, an ethical identity and some meaningful authority over its own practice. Otherwise we’re in danger of creating something rather peculiar:

professionally accountable individuals working in a profession that no longer controls its profession.

And perhaps that’s why the argument about probation’s purpose matters more than nostalgia for “advise, assist and befriend”. If we can’t collectively articulate what good probation is, beyond completing the required processes, managing the allocated contacts, satisfying the assessment framework and demonstrating compliance, then somebody at the centre will continue defining it for us. They have plenty of modules available to explain it afterwards.

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Probation celebrated its centenary in 2007 and at that time from memory every service was a gold standard…….then Chris Grayling, the split, the CRC's managing medium risk cases that were high risk but which they were not allowed to increase to high, every CPO offered three years protected salary to push the split, the reunification, the abandonment of critical thinking, the Mickey Mouse training (sorry Disney), the new breed of duplicitous CPOs kowtowing to ministers…….from gold standard to the brink of collapse in a generation………makes you think what will come next……