*****
Our Future Probation Service training materials and online learning is academically demeaning. I have never been so embarrassed by the training they are pushing out, it is BBC bite size for probation. The sentence plans have no professionalism about them and I have had enough. It is Playschool Probation.Tomorrow my papers are going in, don’t need to be treated so abysmally as we are currently, registered probation officer status is a joke, remuneration package poor and there are less stressful options out there.
Our Future Probation Service training materials and online learning is academically demeaning. I have never been so embarrassed by the training they are pushing out, it is BBC bite size for probation. The sentence plans have no professionalism about them and I have had enough. It is Playschool Probation.Tomorrow my papers are going in, don’t need to be treated so abysmally as we are currently, registered probation officer status is a joke, remuneration package poor and there are less stressful options out there.
*****
I took a look at the OFPS training, came across the first question and demeaning doesn’t do it. I completely understand the anger and desire to leave. If you can -run for the hills. My motivation is so low I think I am going to have to get a sharp spade and dig down for a long time to find it. How on earth did I arrive at this soulless place after 30+years, I am embarrassed to be a Probation Officer. No energy or interest to work at all.
I took a look at the OFPS training, came across the first question and demeaning doesn’t do it. I completely understand the anger and desire to leave. If you can -run for the hills. My motivation is so low I think I am going to have to get a sharp spade and dig down for a long time to find it. How on earth did I arrive at this soulless place after 30+years, I am embarrassed to be a Probation Officer. No energy or interest to work at all.
******
Mandatory training! Mandatory this, mandatory that, the probation service are a purveyor of online training aimed at the lower end of the market. I heard the moans and groans in the office today as we were directed to take an hour out to start it! I was so embarrassed to be expected to complete this. The cartoon character with a blue shirt and Captain Custer beard, the dieversity pictures, the condoning attitude of the presenter. The directorate for training, the directorate for this, that and the other, there is only one directorate and that is the one for the buffoons sanctioning this training, just shows the lack of respect for operational staff, Bob the Probation Officer, can he fix it? can he boll**ks. RIP probation. I think I will be moving on now this organisation is a joke.
Mandatory training! Mandatory this, mandatory that, the probation service are a purveyor of online training aimed at the lower end of the market. I heard the moans and groans in the office today as we were directed to take an hour out to start it! I was so embarrassed to be expected to complete this. The cartoon character with a blue shirt and Captain Custer beard, the dieversity pictures, the condoning attitude of the presenter. The directorate for training, the directorate for this, that and the other, there is only one directorate and that is the one for the buffoons sanctioning this training, just shows the lack of respect for operational staff, Bob the Probation Officer, can he fix it? can he boll**ks. RIP probation. I think I will be moving on now this organisation is a joke.
*****
It is a bit much to call this new training……’training’ ….more like an insurance policy for the centre……they know it will be despised yet they will persist with it as it will be used against you in a future SFO……..as in ‘ did you complete your mandatory training’?
Quite frankly, it’s embarrassing.
ReplyDeleteI’m struggling to understand who HMPPS thinks its audience is. These are qualified professionals making complex decisions every day about risk, safeguarding, domestic abuse, sexual offending, mental health, substance misuse, child protection, recall and public protection.
And this is the intellectual level at which we’re apparently expected to learn about one of the biggest changes to probation practice in years?
It is the educational equivalent of being handed crayons and told to colour within the lines.
Which would almost be funny were HMPPS not simultaneously consulting on statutory professional regulation, professional standards, ethics, continuing professional development and potentially a protected professional title.
Apparently we’re sufficiently professional to be registered, regulated and held individually accountable for our competence and decision-making — but require mandatory training pitched at this level.
You really cannot have it both ways.
If you genuinely believe probation officers are professionals, train them like professionals.
Give us the evidence underpinning OFPS. Give us the research. Give us complex case studies where the answer isn’t bleeding obvious. Give us competing risks to debate. Show us how supervision packages interact with professional judgement when someone’s circumstances change. Show us what happens when the model says one thing and an experienced practitioner believes another.
Challenge us intellectually.
Don’t give us cartoons, simplistic scenarios and click-through exercises and then congratulate yourselves for investing in our professional development.
The irony is that HMPPS itself describes PQiP as developing critical analysis skills for interpreting complex information and making accurate and justifiable.
So where did all that intellectual expectation disappear to once we qualified?
And then there’s the uncomfortable point made above about mandatory training becoming an organisational insurance policy.
If something goes seriously wrong in twelve months’ time, will the important question be whether the practitioner had sufficient time, manageable workload, experienced supervision and professional autonomy to make a good decision?
Or will somebody open the training record and ask:
“Did you complete the mandatory OFPS learning?”
Tick.
Excellent. Organisational responsibility successfully transferred.
If HMPPS wants Registered Probation Officers, perhaps it could start by treating them like registered professionals.
Professionalism isn’t created by putting somebody’s name on a register while simultaneously treating them as though they need stabilisers to do the job.
Nothing not anything in a po role is either professional or intellectual.
DeleteIf you think there is list it.
Happy to list it.
DeleteAssessing risk of serious harm and likelihood of reoffending. Analysing patterns of offending behaviour. Formulating and continually revising risk-management plans. Writing pre-sentence reports and providing professional sentencing advice to courts. Preparing reports for the Parole Board. Assessing safeguarding and domestic-abuse information. Working with complex sexual and violent offending. Applying desistance theory, motivational interviewing and evidence-based rehabilitative approaches. Balancing protective factors against dynamic risk. Making decisions about enforcement and recall where getting it wrong in either direction can have profound consequences. Working across police, social care, mental health, substance misuse, housing and other agencies and making sense of incomplete and sometimes contradictory information.
And, perhaps most importantly, taking all of that information about an individual human being and exercising professional judgement where there very often isn’t a single objectively “correct” answer.
I’d call quite a lot of that both professional and intellectual.
In fact, HMPPS itself calls it professional judgement and describes the role as providing professional advice and assessment to courts, the Parole Board and other criminal justice agencies.
Which rather reinforces my criticism of the OFPS training.
If the job genuinely required nothing professional or intellectual, perhaps training pitched at this level would be entirely appropriate.
But it doesn’t. And that’s precisely the problem.
If anything, your comment illustrates something rather sad about what has happened to probation. If somebody working within it has reached the point where they genuinely believe there is “nothing” professional or intellectual left in being a Probation Officer, perhaps HMPPS should be asking itself how it managed to reduce a profession to the point where its own practitioners no longer recognise it as one.
Won't diminish that it's a good effort and general job spec lost. The only two that actually contribute to both professional requirement and some level of higher considerations assesment is this part of your reply.
Delete"Writing pre-sentence reports and providing professional sentencing advice to courts. Preparing reports for the Parole Board."
Whenever you put this to most officers they stutter around with no definite idea . You have the cornerstone of all that is solely po work
The worrying this is that this standard does not promote healthy debate or discussion as the training did in the ‘old days’….but actually assists the organisation insofar as failure to complete it will result in a competency strike and contribute to the SFO investigation……
ReplyDeleteThat’s exactly what bothers me about it.
DeleteGood professional training should make you think. It should create debate, disagreement and reflection. You should be able to put six experienced probation officers in a room with a difficult case and get six slightly different perspectives, because human behaviour and risk don’t conveniently come with a single correct answer to click on a screen.
That’s how I remember some of the best training. You learned as much from the discussion in the room as you did from whoever was delivering it.
What I’ve seen of this OFPS training feels like the complete opposite. It isn’t intellectually challenging; it’s instructional. Consume the information, click the answer, demonstrate understanding, complete the module.
And yes, that creates a very useful record: training completed.
Which is why the SFO point is so important.
After something catastrophic happens, a computer can establish in seconds whether I completed a mandatory module. What it can’t tell you is whether I had enough time to think, whether my workload was manageable, whether I had access to experienced supervision, whether competing demands prevented something being done, or whether the organisational model itself contributed to the decision.
Yet those are surely the questions that matter.
The whole thing feels increasingly arse-about-face. We’re apparently trying to create a more professional Probation Service while systematically removing some of the things that actually develop professionals: debate, reflective supervision, discretion, challenge and learning alongside experienced colleagues.
Mandatory completion is not professional development. Passing information downwards is not training. And clicking the correct box certainly isn’t evidence that somebody will exercise good judgement when confronted with a complicated human being at 4.30 on a Friday afternoon.
If this is the training designed to prepare us for one of the biggest changes to probation practice in years, I find that genuinely depressing.
Another issue is that many experienced POs have gone out and completed all sorts of academic qualifications at post graduate level and beyond. They remain on the front line in community and custody managing significantly complex cases. However were they consulted about OFPS, were experience and knowledge of operational staff even considered when developing this package, I don’t think so. A lot of the ‘research’ is academic only and a lot pushed out by the those in HMIP who have limited insight into probation let alone have sat in front of someone with a cut down to their wrist ligaments, wanting to throw themselves in front of a train because they are homeless and skint or even worse! I am sick to death of reading reports from HMIP slagging off POs and praising the leadership, there is no leadership just a bunch of inept buffoons jumping to the tune. Why do HMIP not push for further academic knowledge for POs as part of their development an MSc focusing on risk management and multi-agency working to give real CPD and not just the usual puerile CPD linked to SEEDs and tell me about a case you managed with MAPPA/CPPC/OCG/TACT/OPD/Violence/sexual offending. If you want a professional service you need to provide professional qualifications and allow people to develop and show evidence of that learning and then you might, just might get the right people in the right places to drive the service forward. Coming soon ‘Probation for Dummies’ the next chapter.
DeleteThe Broken Pipeline Project
ReplyDeleteOur risk management system to spot, stop and control very highly dangerous people is profoundly dysfunctional. Countless atrocities occur, both great and small. Lessons are not learned. Public trust declines further. This project will investigate the causes and consequences of such failures and offer a radical alternative to a status quo which does not adequately protect public safety. This landing page is the means by which risk management professionals - probation, prisons, policing, counter-extremism, youth justice, child safeguarding etc can safely get in touch to tell their stories and offer their solutions. Your perspective will make my eventual conclusions and recommendations better.
This landing page will be regularly updated as the year-long project unfolds.
Thanks so much for your help.
Ian Acheson
August 2026
https://thebrokenpipeline.carrd.co/
https://victimscommissioner.org.uk/news/prisons-capacity-crisis-now-risks-becoming-a-public-safety-issue-victims-commissioners-exclusive-with-the-mirror/
DeleteThe Broken Pipeline project could be very interesting, particularly if it genuinely listens to frontline practitioners rather than starting with another assumption that the answer is more process.
DeleteBecause I’m increasingly wondering whether part of the problem is that we keep responding to failures in risk management by adding more risk-management machinery.
Something goes wrong.
Review it.
Identify a missed opportunity.
Create an action plan.
Amend the guidance.
Add a mandatory training module.
Introduce another process.
Create another dashboard.
Require another recording entry.
Then something else goes catastrophically wrong and we repeat the exercise.
Meanwhile the people actually trying to manage risk have less time to spend with the individual, experienced practitioners leave, services become fragmented, responsibility is spread across multiple agencies and professional judgement becomes increasingly defensive.
Perhaps the pipeline isn’t broken because there aren’t enough processes.
Perhaps we’ve built so much pipeline that we’ve forgotten the importance of the people inside it.
I’d particularly like this project to look at hindsight in SFO investigations.
Not simply “what information existed?” but:
What information was reasonably available to the practitioner at that point in time?
What was their workload?
What competing demands existed?
What information had other agencies failed to provide?
What services were actually available?
What supervision and experienced consultation could they access?
And was the decision reasonable based on what was known then, rather than what everybody knows after somebody has been seriously harmed?
Because if every tragedy simply produces another instruction for the frontline, eventually we aren’t learning from failure at all.
We’re converting organisational failure into practitioner compliance.
And that might itself be part of the broken pipeline.
Some figures in this BBC release explaining when and how many prisoners will be released under the early release scheme.
ReplyDeleteIt's just a thought but I wonder if any consideration has been given to the regional spread of released prisoners, and how some probation regions may be more adversely impacted on then others just by the number of prisoners being released to any one particulr region?
It strike me that there might be far more people being released to return to the greater London area then say Norwich or Bristol.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4jnqvdny0o
'Getafix
That’s a really important point.
DeleteSurely this hasn’t just been modelled as a national number?
What matters operationally isn’t simply how many people are released across England and Wales, but where they are released to and what capacity exists in those particular probation regions, PDUs and local services to absorb them.
Ten thousand additional releases spread neatly and proportionately across the country is one thing. A disproportionate number returning to already overstretched urban areas or particular PDUs is quite another.
And it isn’t only probation staffing.
How many will need Approved Premises places? Temporary accommodation? Drug and alcohol treatment? Mental-health services? MAPPA management? Electronic monitoring? Housing support? Victim liaison? Police involvement?
We already know those resources aren’t distributed evenly and neither are accommodation outcomes.
So I’d be very interested to see the regional modelling behind this.
How many additional releases are projected for each probation region and PDU?
What is the current staffing position in each?
What additional workload is expected from those releases?
What is the available accommodation and commissioned-service capacity locally?
And what happens where projected demand exceeds it?
Because if the answer is that the national figures work overall, that’s not really an operational plan.
People aren’t released into a national spreadsheet. They’re released into actual communities and onto actual probation officers’ caseloads.
Having worked as a probation officer for over 25 years, the most significant change I've witnessed isn't just in caseload volume — it's in ownership. Case management used to mean exactly that: we held the case, from initial contact through to the end of licence or order, coordinating referrals and services but retaining responsibility for the plan and the outcome.
ReplyDeleteThat model has eroded. Several structural shifts help explain why,
Fragmentation of the system. Since the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms and the subsequent 2021 reunification of the National Probation Service, practitioners have had to work across a patchwork of prison, community, and third-party interfaces that were never fully reintegrated. A case now passes through multiple institutional hand-offs — prison offender management units, community rehabilitation partners, housing, substance misuse services — each with their own reporting lines and none with clear overall accountability for the case as a whole.
Audit and compliance culture. The rise of centralised risk-management frameworks (MAPPA, OASys, structured risk assessments) has embedded a compliance layer over practice. HM Inspectorate of Probation reports have repeatedly flagged that administrative and recording burdens are consuming time that should be spent on direct engagement with people on probation. The result is that "doing the job well" is increasingly measured by paperwork completion and timeliness rather than by engagement quality or risk reduction outcomes.
Digital case management systems. Tools like nDelius were intended to streamline processes, but in practice they've generated their own compliance metrics — character counts in case notes, mandatory field completion, appointment-loading deadlines — that function as a parallel workload independent of the actual casework. Bloody Dashboards!
Asymmetric accountability. Perhaps most tellingly, the escalation culture runs one direction. A probation officer who is late on a task/Kpi faces automatic escalation to their line manager, then upward through the hierarchy. But there is no equivalent mechanism for probation to hold external agencies — EMS,housing, drug and alcohol services, prisons, police, social services etc — to the same standard when they fail to respond. This structural imbalance means us Officers absorb delay and dysfunction from across the system without the authority to push back.
Staff attrition figures — the Probation Service has struggled for years with vacancy rates and retention, according to its own workforce data and repeated union reporting — are, I'd argue, a direct consequence of this shift. It's not that the job became harder in a clinical sense; it's that practitioners lost ownership of the thing that made the job meaningful, while absorbing all of the accountability for a system they don't control.
This really resonates, particularly the point about ownership.
DeletePerhaps that’s why I reacted so strongly to the OFPS training in the first place. Taken in isolation, patronising e-learning is merely irritating. Put it alongside everything else that has happened to probation and it starts to look symptomatic of something much bigger.
We increasingly don’t do things. We refer.
We increasingly don’t own the intervention. Somebody else delivers it.
We increasingly don’t determine the structure of supervision. A framework does.
We increasingly don’t decide what constitutes sufficient work. A package, process, dashboard or target tells us.
Yet somehow, when the whole fragmented arrangement fails, responsibility has an extraordinary ability to travel back through all those interfaces and land on the desk of one probation officer.
That’s the bit I find increasingly absurd.
If I’m going to carry professional accountability for complex risk, then treat me as a professional capable of exercising judgement about it.
Don’t simultaneously remove ownership, prescribe practice, outsource interventions, give me Playschool-level mandatory training and then expect PhD-level foresight when something goes catastrophically wrong.
And the point above about the knowledge already sitting within probation is important too.
We have practitioners with decades of operational experience, postgraduate qualifications and enormous accumulated knowledge of risk, rehabilitation and multi-agency working.
Were they meaningfully involved in designing OFPS? Were frontline practitioners presented with the evidence, invited to challenge the assumptions and allowed to shape the model? Were experienced POs asked what actually helps them manage complex cases?
Because professional development could look completely different.
Give experienced practitioners difficult anonymised cases. Put six POs in a room. Give them incomplete and conflicting information. Ask them what they would do. Let them disagree. Introduce new information halfway through. Challenge their decisions. Bring in research. Bring in an experienced SPO. Debate recall versus continued management. Examine what happened afterwards without pretending hindsight was foresight.
That is training for professional judgement.
Clicking through cartoons until the system records “complete” isn’t.
And perhaps we’ve arrived at the strangest contradiction of all:
Probation officers appear to have progressively less ownership of the work, while retaining potentially enormous personal accountability for its outcome.
If Registered Probation Officer status is going to mean anything, that imbalance needs addressing.
Otherwise we’re not professionalising probation.
We’re professionalising the blame.