Back for More?

Academic articles are invariably extremely long and not at all conducive to the blog format, especially if accessed via a mobile, however they are often important and the following published last year, particularly so in my view. I've taken the liberty of removing the copious references and the chapter on methodology in order to make it more manageable and hope the author forgives me in furtherance of trying to bring it to a wider audience. 

So, in an attempt to maintain the current discourse regarding probation's plight, although a long read, I think it pretty much puts things into context and is particularly relevant for its testimonies from front line staff as the Napo AGM in Newcastle approaches this week. And on that note, I am going to be in that great city on Thursday 15th at The Mile Castle Wetherspoons on Grainger Road near the railway station from 6pm in order to meet any colleague old or new, up for a chat. 

“We’ll always go back for more”? Probation, precariousness, and professional identity

Abstract

Over the last few decades, the environment in which the Probation Service in England and Wales operates has become both more punitive and managerial, dominated by the logic of risk. A challenge to the tenets on which probation’s professional project was founded, such as its (social work) knowledge base and autonomy to work with individuals under supervision, has accompanied this changed landscape. Indeed, probation’s relative powerlessness to mobilise against governmental impositions has resulted in four top-down organisational restructurings since the turn of the millennium. This paper, therefore, considers the impact of such change on professional identity in probation. Against the backdrop of the most recent organisational reform – the “unification” of services, in June 2021 which brought to an end a failed seven-year experiment in part-privatisation – it explores how punitive, managerial, and marketising reforms have contributed to a crisis of identity that has been decades in the making. The paper argues that, while an appeal to an ideology of service centred on helping clients remains significant among staff, the nature and extent of the challenges probation faces has rendered professional identity more precarious.

Introduction

Change, it seems, has been the only constant for the Probation Service in England and Wales in recent decades. Probation is a legal profession rather than the legal profession, but the two have historically had strong links – notably, through co-location in the courts. Like criminal justice defence lawyering, probation professionals have typically acted as an “ally” for those processed through the criminal justice system. In recent years, however, probation – again, like criminal justice lawyering – has experienced considerable challenges. As an “invisible” profession – one that exists in the shadow of the prison, working with involuntary, (mostly) low status clients – probation has proved especially vulnerable to interference from successive governments. Part of a broader neoliberal effort to align public service delivery with private sector techniques, the foundations on which the service’s “professional project” was built have been disturbed by the forces of managerialism and marketisation. From the 1980s onwards, practitioner autonomy has been partially surrendered to performance targets and audit; social work training requirements for practice have been abolished; and the service’s foundational mission, summarised in the words “advise, assist, befriend”, has been abandoned within official documents.

This challenge to probation’s knowledge, methods, and values extends to the service’s governance structure. There have been four top-down restructurings of probation since the turn of the millennium. In 2001, the New Labour Government concentrated 55 “constitutionally separate” Probation Areas within 42 Probation Boards, overseen by a new National Probation Service (NPS). These were further reduced to 35 Probation Trusts in 2007, as the search for greater efficiency and effectiveness saw the “ogre of contestability” rear its head in the form of attempts to outsource core practices to private (and voluntary) providers. This (part-)privatising ambition was not realised until 2014, when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government’s Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms split services between the publicly-owned NPS and 21 privately-managed Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). However, TR was a “policy disaster” and probation was subsequently “unified” (in essence, re-nationalised): on 26 June 2021, seven NPS Divisions and 21 CRCs were realigned into 12 Probation Regions and housed within the Civil Service.

These changes to probation governance and practice can be seen in expectations for professional identity (re)formation. There is no accepted definition of “professional identity”, but Obling’s review of the literature identifies three ways in which it is understood. The first sees identity as constructed through a process of professional socialisation. This refers to the acquisition of knowledge, skills, qualifications, and values as crucial to shaping how to differentiate between professionals and non-professionals. Second, professional identity is not fixed or immutable. Hence, work role transitions concern internal transformations of professional identity, which can be prompted by new training programmes, workplace structures, or career development. Third, identities in context relates to how “environmental change” brought about by socio-economic and political changes can exert significant influence over professional identity formation. Taken together, Obling argues, a recognition of how macro- and meso-level forces interact and are enmeshed can produce more comprehensive understandings of how professional identity is (re)constructed.

Thus, with a particular emphasis on the unification of services, this paper analyses professional identity in probation. It maps the strands of the literature identified by Obling onto the service, tracing how the “extra-organizational forces” which influence probation governance and practice have contributed to a succession of organisational restructurings, with detrimental implications for professional identity. The paper contends that the nature and extent of the challenges probation faces have reshaped the service into which professionals are socialised. While an ideology of service predicated on helping clients remains a significant source of meaning for staff, recent reforms have contributed to a crisis of identity that has been decades in the making. The result is an increasingly “precarious” professionalism. As such, the paper’s contributions are twofold. First, it provides an ongoing commentary on the impact of the unification of probation services, from the perspectives of staff. Second, following adopting an approach which bridges macro-, meso-, and micro-level changes can enhance understandings of professional identity in probation and comparable (low status) professions.

The paper begins with an overview of the power (and precarity) of professions. Thereafter, following a brief outline of the study’s methodology, understandings of professional identity give structure to the data analysis. Identities in context explores how the service’s relative powerlessness renders it an easy target for political intervention. Work role transitions reports on staff experiences of recent organisational reform – namely, TR and the unification of services. Finally, professional socialisation scrutinises the service into which new staff enter, arguing that professional identity in probation is increasingly precarious.

Professions, power, and precariousness

The legitimacy of professions depends, in part, upon the extent to which they can demonstrate “commitment to the public good”. Professions able to successfully present themselves as in service to broader societal benefit can acquire social, economic, and political power, and thereby guard against external interventions from the state or market competition. This claim as to public interest underpinned functionalist views of the reasons that professions should be considered different from other occupations. Would-be professions sought to acquire ideal-typical “professional” traits that marked them as distinct, such as a mastery of abstract knowledge, learned through prolonged education and training; capture of a particular activity, or activities, within the division of labour; and the ability to exercise considerable autonomy over how everyday tasks are undertaken. Ultimately, though, the most important trait was a client-centred ideology of service which not only communicated a profession’s altruistic social function, but also kept the potentially self-serving interests of members in check.

While later, neo-Weberian views of the professions took issue with the altruism that pervades functionalist understandings, there was nonetheless consensus on how occupations that are able to successfully lay claim to professional status cultivate a space between the state and the market. Scholars writing from this perspective asserted that professions utilise the jurisdiction granted by the state to manipulate the market to realise higher social and economic gains relative to laypeople. Hence, the claim central to neo-Weberian interpretations is that professional power is leveraged for self-interest: professions compete with others adjacent to their jurisdiction to preserve, maintain, and ultimately capitalise on their legitimacy, often at the expense of their clients. The more social, economic, and political resources a profession can command, the better it can resist extraneous interference.

And yet, not all professions benefit from such power and privilege. The extent to which a group can profit from claims to professional status depends upon its relationships with its “audiences”, such as the state, clients, and the public. Here, Johnson’s distinction between “collegiate” and “mediative” control over work can be used to show how professions can flourish under different modes of organisation. A collegiate model refers to how members of some professions are able to organise themselves. The medical profession in the US has typically provided an archetype of “collegiate” organisation: the state grants licence to practise; members are then able to restrict entry into the profession, while providing a service to fee-paying clients. By contrast, mediative professions thrived under Keynesian political economy. This model emphasises state intervention in the professional-client relationship: services are funded by the state; and clients, who are often involuntary, cannot typically withdraw their purchasing power. These professions, like social work and nursing, are often located in the public sector, staffed predominantly by women, and underpinned by an ethic of care; they are generally “multichance”, for a certain degree of “failure” must be tolerated. This means that trust, both public and political, in a profession’s knowledge and methods is more difficult to establish than, say, in the case of surgeons, whose credibility is directly linked to their ability to prevent (somatic) failure. This dependency upon the state renders mediative professions’ legitimacy more precarious, and thus less able to resist external interventions.

The Probation Service in England and Wales, Tidmarsh argues, is one such mediative, “multichance” profession. From its origins in the Church of England Temperance Society, it established exclusive jurisdiction over the supervision of offenders in the community in the first half of the twentieth century. As such, probation underwent a process of professionalisation: practitioners were trained in social work knowledge and entrusted by the state to work autonomously in diagnosing individuals’ problems and proposing solutions. Staff, in other words, were socialised into a service defined by a “medical” casework model and underpinned by the words “advise, assist, befriend”, which constituted probation’s (rehabilitative) ideology of service. While probation has always been plagued by accusations that it is “soft on crime” relative to institutions like the prison, its knowledge, methods, and values were largely shielded from public scrutiny for most of the twentieth century. What was viewed as being in the best interests of people on probation – namely, rehabilitation – was also considered to be in the best interests of taxpayers. This state-sanctioned confidence in the service enabled it to grow in the postwar period: between 1951 and 1981, the number of full-time, qualified officers increased from 1,000 to 5,500 while its caseload tripled from 55,000 to 157,000.

However, against the backdrop of sustained increases in the crime rate, which quadrupled between 1955 and 1974, probation’s social and economic utility began to be questioned. This challenge can be seen as part of a wider shift in the 1970s, in which neo-Weberian criticisms of professional power became overlaid with critiques of the paternalistic role of the Keynesian state. Mediative professions were criticised on the grounds that their methods were ineffective. for example, alleged that for professions like probation, a failure to reduce the size of the criminal justice system in the postwar period served as a justification for their continued expansion. Thus, the legitimacy of the postwar penal welfare compromise, of which probation was a fundamental part, was challenged by the New Left and a politically ascendant New Right. For the former, penal welfarism was coercive and hierarchical, unreceptive to the needs of particular individuals and communities. For the latter, the costs of administering criminal justice services premised on rehabilitation and perceived to be ineffective during a decade defined by fiscal crises was detrimental to the taxpayer. Despite their ideological differences, at the heart of both perspectives was a distrust of the state and professionals, and the contention that “their power must be checked”. This highlights probation’s precariousness as a profession – a point that is developed below with regard to the decades-long challenge to the service’s knowledge, methods, values, and governance structure.

Identities in context: probation and extra-organisational change

With regard to the legitimacy of professions, Moorhead asks, “[d]oes there come a point at which professions can no longer satisfy their audiences that they meet their needs?” This question is relevant to the Probation Service following the collapse of the Keynesian postwar state. The election to government of Margeret Thatcher’s Conservative Party, in 1979, marked the key turning point. Her political project was predicated on neoliberal ideology, or the belief that individual freedoms are directly linked to free and unregulated markets. Amidst a wave of privatisations in the 1980s, public services which were not transferred to the market were instead subjected to the principles of New Public Management – specifically, a prioritisation of economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in service delivery. Thus, where a profession’s worth historically rested upon its ability to demonstrate superior competence and ethicality, for professionals working in the public sector, the neoliberal reorganisation of the state accentuated economic criteria of legitimacy.

Political economic shifts have also prompted questions of the audience(s) to whom probation must demonstrate its legitimacy, with significant implications for its professional project. Here, “the public” are typically expressed as taxpayers and as potential victims. Both are captured in Robinson et al.’s analysis of the penal “adaptations” which have informed probation policy and practice since the 1980s. For example, a managerial adaptation witnessed the pursuit of greater accountability via new rules and regulatory frameworks. Part of a wider neoliberal agenda which sought to curb professional autonomy, targets were introduced in probation in 1988, with performance monitored via an expanded culture of audit. This was followed, in 1995, by the severance of probation from social work training requirements for practice, a “repudiation [that] was much more about connotation and political tone than substance”.

Managerial practices have been accompanied by a punitive “adaptation” which promised “tough on crime” approaches, particularly after the 1990s. This can be seen in the language used around probation policy. For example, the words “advise, assist, befriend” were removed from official probation documents from 1992 onwards. Espousing greater punitiveness was key to the election of the (New) Labour Party to Government in 199, and Canton notes how a 1998 House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee “deplored” the use of terms like “client” and “probationer”. Indeed, in 2008, Jack Straw, then Secretary of State in the newly established Ministry of Justice, bragged that “Probation officers now routinely talk of the criminals they are dealing with as “offenders”, which is what they are, and not the euphemistic nonsense of “clients”, when the client is the victim and the tax-paying public”. His comments highlight the confluence of punitive and managerial adaptations in how, and to whom, the state expects probation to demonstrate its legitimacy. They also illustrate the contempt with which the service is sometimes discussed in political discourses, rendering it an easy target for intervention. Probation is largely “invisible” it enters the public eye not for its successes, but for its failures – namely, serious further offences. The presentation of these tragic, often fatal incidents, and thus of the service, is accentuated by the so-called “undeserving” and nature of its clientele:

In the health service, you get doctors who do the wrong thing, but you don’t get the health minister playing the blame game. In health, in the police, they feel less blamed. I think that’s because we do the work nobody else does. We work with the so-called undeserving, somebody who has done wrong, and therefore we’re under a higher level of scrutiny. (RPD4)

The increased “scrutiny” under which probation operates has coincided with two significant demographic changes in probation. First, the abolition of social work training requirements prompted a significant increase in lesser qualified PSOs, who constituted the majority of frontline practitioners by 2012. Second, having historically been dominated by men, probation has experienced “feminisation”. A “gender switchover” – the moment at which women outnumbered men – occurred in 2006, and women now comprise 76.4% of probation staff has recently linked these demographic changes to “cultural dynamics of feminisation” in which an influx of women into a profession is typically accompanied by worsening pay and working conditions. This is not to present a causal link between women and a diminished professional project, but rather, to emphasise their overrepresentation in professions like social work and nursing. That these professions, like probation are predicated on care for non-fee-paying clients means their virtues are disconsonant with market-like mechanisms through which the success of neoliberal public services is demonstrated.

The consequences of macro-level, “extra-organizational forces” can be further seen in changing professional identity in probation. Mawby and Worrall’s typology of occupational narratives identified three ideal-typical profiles of probation staff. Lifers, they argue, were social work trained and most likely to view their job as a vocation. Second careerists entered into the service after a considerable period of employment in another, often unrelated occupation; some were social work trained, but others joined after its abolition as a requirement for practice. Finally, offender managers joined after the election of the New Labour Government in 1997. There was little resonance amongst this group with social work culture; they were, instead, “security-conscious” and generally comfortable with the technologies and practices of risk assessment compared to lifers and second careerists. Indeed, the logic of risk now dominates practice; it is both “a language through which probation could frame its work with offenders and a knowledge base on which staff could draw to evidence decision-making”. And yet, despite these differences, Mawby and Worrall conclude that these groups are united by a shared value set based on commitment to the client and a desire to engender change amongst the less fortunate. This claim is supported by research on the “durability” of a client-centred ideology of service. Studies of probation training, for example, have emphasised that while staff express frustrations with the managerial nature of probation work, there is consensus of why people enter the service – namely, because of a desire to work in a people-oriented profession. This highlights the importance of an ideology of service to professional identity in probation, particularly as a buffer against efforts to reshape its organisational culture.

As such, it is possible to identify several major environmental changes that have impacted probation’s professional project since the 1980s. Public ignorance about probation, largely unfavourable media representation, and the political capital made from its “undeserving” client base has rendered, and continues to render, the service vulnerable to state interference. This powerlessness has manifested in the turbulence that has marked the recent history of probation:

I think a big challenge is the complexity of our working environment – which I think, genuinely, we overcomplicate sometimes. Trying to navigate those pressures – the financial, the political, the operational – is difficult. (RPD1) 

Where, previously, ideal-typical professional tenets like social work training, practitioner autonomy, and an ideology of service were crucial to legitimacy and identity in probation, the service is now predicated on a regimen of risk management and managerial regulation. Indeed, countering this shift towards managerialism was at the heart of the Coalition Government’s implementation of TR. Part of the wider adoption of austerity measures which followed a reconfiguration of the 2007/08 financial crisis as one of government overspending, these reforms accelerated the decades-long challenge to professional subjectivities in probation. The impact of TR and the subsequent unification of services on staff is explored in more depth below.

Identities in transition? Probation and organisational reform

The financial, political, and operational challenges described by RPD1, above, have driven and been exacerbated by work role transitions. The most destabilising of these restructurings was Transforming Rehabilitation (TR), which split services between a publicly-owned NPS and 21 privately-owned CRCs, in 2014. The reforms were initiated, in part, to “unlock … professionalism” (MoJ) in probation. Part of a wider critique of public sector efficiency, the Coalition Government argued that state-run services were excessively bureaucratic, dominated by a regime of targets and audit that stifled effective performance. The innovations only market provision could generate, by contrast, would empower probation professionals with the discretion to reduce reoffending and the costs of criminal justice.

A comprehensive autopsy of the failures of TR is beyond the scope of this paper, but suffice to say that interlinked cultural and structural issues became insurmountable. On culture, studies of the transition to the private sector provide found overwhelming opposition to TR as staff identified resolutely with a public sector ethos. This suggests that attempts to promote entrepreneurial “narratives of self” through organisational reform were successfully resisted, a point further evidenced in this current study. Such cultural resistance to TR was exacerbated by structural failings in how the contracts were set up (NAO). Contrary to how the Coalition Government presented the market as a means to activate professionalism, the reforms merely entrenched the importance of meeting performance targets. As PO2 put it:

The main thing is, the CRCs had to hit targets to get paid. […] There was a massive difference, a separation, between quality assessments and performance; the two didn’t meet.

This focus on metrics was further heightened by lower than anticipated caseloads. Fewer individuals allocated to the CRCs by the courts resulted in a combined £1.4bn shortfall against the initial £3.7bn promised to private providers (HMI Probation). Many CRCs responded with redundancy programmes, which not only increased individual caseloads for those who remained but also intensified target-driven, “box-ticking” practice (HMI Probation). Accordingly, HMI Probation’s conclusion that TR contributed to “deplorable diminution of the probation profession” was echoed by PSO11, whose summary of the impact of the reforms can be taken as evidence of an increasingly precarious professional identity:

Prior to the privatisation, we were very proud of the fact that we were a public sector organisation that delivered a very specific and significant, very specialist service. I think the roots of where the Probation Service came from were still visible and were still quite obvious to any member of staff and especially new staff coming in. […] I’m afraid that my opinion is that it’s all been eroded because of what happened through the privatisation.

One of the most consistent findings within probation research in recent decades is the persistence of a client-centred ideology of service. Staff, as argued above, have successfully mobilised such values as a way to “grasp the nettle”, to make sense of practice with reference to the profession rather the organisation. The period of TR was no exception: despite considerable opposition to the reforms, most staff could be described as guardians of probation identity. This view was summarised by PO3:

If we didn’t have the passion for the job, it would be easy for us to walk out and double our salaries in the private sector. We’ll always go back for more; it’s the way we’re built. The one thing we have in common is that we believe in the work. (my emphasis)

What could be interpreted in positive terms, as an ideology of service that willingly places the care of individuals above all else could equally represent the normalisation of overworking in probation. This raises questions about the impact of yet another work role transition on professional identity (re)construction.

Since the “unification” of services in June 2021, PO3’s contention that staff will “always go back for more” has been undermined by the confluence of challenges which continue to besiege the service. Staff feel “overworked, understaffed, [and] underpaid” (PSO2) – claims that are borne out in the national data. For example, while caseloads vary by Probation Region, a survey of 1,534 probation staff conducted by HMI Probation found that 51% thought their workloads were “not so manageable”. The challenge presented by high caseloads is compounded by staffing levels. The extent of frontline practitioner vacancies did not become known until unification – in large part because commercial confidentiality laws meant CRCs were not required to disclose data on staffing – but the evidence points to a “retention crisis.” As of June 2024, 2,357 people left the service in the previous 12 months, an increase of 10.6% on the previous year. M2 reflected upon the impact of staffing shortages, which she attributed to the continuance of managerial adaptions:

We’ve struggled with staffing levels that I’ve never experienced in any job. Everything was cut to the bone and trying to manage the cases appropriately and still maintain the community links and find the work … it’s been really tough. People have got to have the time and the headspace to supervise the teams, do the community liaison, and actually motivate people to attend. It’s all been about meeting deadlines, meeting time limits, and just chasing targets that are completely unrealistic.

This contention that staffing “was cut to the bone” could apply to numerous public services during a period defined by the politics of austerity; however, there is evidence that budgetary pressures have been felt more acutely in probation than in comparable professions. For example, many of the professionals to whom informants compared themselves – such as police officers and NHS staff – have seen pay increases of approximately 15% since 2010  – but pay in probation has largely been stagnant, with just a 1% increase in real terms over the same period:

People realise that they can get more stacking shelves for less stress. I think, even now, you know, people haven’t had a pay rise again; the unions are trying to argue again, but they never seem to be able to argue what we’re worth. If they manage to argue a 3% pay rise, everyone will be like, “great, what does that mean in real terms?” The cost of living is soaring – food, electricity, petrol – so, actually, we’re taking a pay cut: it’s horrendous. (PSO7)

The comparison to “stacking shelves” resonates with similar research. It should not be read as an attempt to belittle retail work, but rather, as a way to emphasise that the pay is “not commensurate with the weight of responsibilities upon the shoulders of probation staff”. This points, then, to a sense of demise among probation staff in this study, of identity in crisis. As M6 summarised:

It’s sad because I don’t see the profession that we had before, I think it’s been decimated. I don’t want to be depressing, but I really do. I think it’s been decimated. It needs to be redone, rebuilt.

Accordingly, recent work role transitions in the form of top-down, organisational restructurings have surfaced longstanding concerns, around caseloads and the pervasiveness of managerialism. The findings presented in this section point to a heightened sense of precarity regarding how staff understand their work. This raises questions about the culture of the service into which new staff enter, which are explored in the next section through the lens of professional socialisation.

Identity and socialisation: the “enculturation” of probation staff

Professional socialisation entails the acquisition of the knowledge, qualifications, values, and practices which differentiate professionals from non-professionals. It typically occurs through training and exposure to the established working cultures and practices of other professionals, thereby contributing to a collective sense of identity. In a probation context, Robinson refers to this process as “enculturation” – that is, how “new members acquire the norms, values, behaviours and other tools of [a] particular culture”. However, these facets of identity formation have been challenged by successive governments and codified within numerous organisational restructurings. Despite claims to the contrary, recent reforms have served only to bring longstanding problems to the surface, particularly with regard to caseloads and poor retention rates. This raises questions about the nature of the service into which staff are socialised and, by extension, how they construct their professional identity. Hence, this final section explores the enculturation of probation staff, including the roles played by Practice Tutor Assessors (PTAs) and Senior Probation Officers (SPOs) – two groups that are important to the socialisation of frontline practitioners.

As acknowledged above, one of the most consistently observed findings within probation research is the persistence of a value base which foregrounds the importance of non-judgemental approach to those who have offended and a belief in the capacity of individuals to change. Staff, in M2’s terms, share an “underlying moral compass”

If you talk to people in probation, they all have – no matter how they present as characters and personalities – this underlying moral compass of not only wanting to see that justice is done and people are dealt with appropriately but also to make a difference and get those difference and get those people off the paths they’re currently on. […] I do think that people who work in probation have this desire to care, to change the way the wheel is turning for some people.

Her allusion to care-based practice means probation can be located alongside comparable (low status) professions, such as nursing and social work. Accordingly, this current study supports a substantial body of research on why people work in probation. It suggests that an ideology of service underpinned by a desire to work with people to motivate change is the most significant factor in professional identity formation, one that cuts across experience and job role:

… to work with offenders to help them improve their lives in effect, in some shape or form. I think that for me is the main common denominator. So, thinking of my colleagues, those who have left, those new ones who have joined, a big one is they want to improve people’s lives. (PSO4)

… it’s about social justice, the path we walk, where we find ourselves – just being able to have a temperament to work with people. They’ve been judged, so there’s no point in judging them; I just want to help them. (RPD4)

PSO4’s reference to new entrants into the service is particularly important given the challenges of retention identified in the previous section, and the subsequent need to recruit staff. According to the latest HMPPS Workforce Statistics Bulletin, of the 1,047 frontline practitioners that joined the service in the year-end June 2024, the overwhelming majority (95%) entered at PSO grade. Just over half (n = 543) of these new staff are enrolled on the Professional Qualification in Probation (PQiP), completion of which is prerequisite for qualifying as a PO. The PQiP is comprised of an academic component located in a university and on-the-job learning, which includes managing a (reduced) caseload. Newer staff who had recently completed (PO5) or were enrolled on (PSO2) or the PQiP at the time of interview were generally positive about their experience, but also commented on its intensity:

At some points, it became overwhelming, especially at the end when you have deadlines and you’re expected to deal with higher risk cases. But it did give me a theoretical underpinning to the work that I needed to do. For me, it was a good experience overall – I just recognise that there were some really intense periods. (PO5)

It’s intense, is one word to describe it. It’s just a lot. It is manageable and my SPOs are happy to be flexible with deadlines; but with deadlines for work and deadlines for uni, it’s, urgh, a lot. (PSO2)

PSO2’s emphasis on “deadlines” highlights the dual pressures under which trainee POs operate, as individuals who manage a caseload alongside undertaking education and training. It suggests how both an ability to demonstrate the acquisition of knowledge via university assessment and to meet performance targets, part the neoliberal demand for accountability which has reconfigured practice in recent decades, are crucial to professional socialisation into probation. The latter, in particular, reflects a “narrative of efficiency” by which identity among public sector professionals has been reshaped. This further underscores the shift towards working with “things” over “people”, manifest in greater administrative responsibilities. As PTA2 put it:

The biggest difficulty about the job – and they’re all graduates, right? None of these kids are stupid and they’ve gone through a ton of hoops to get into the service – is they arrive into the service and go, “what, I’m not seeing anyone?” […] I think that individuality of care has been lost to the administration side of things. That’s why I think people have completely left the service, because of the amount of time people spend staring at their screens. (my emphasis)

PTA2’s role entails inducting new staff, observing them as they begin to undertake interviews with clients, and assessing their practice skills. He is, in other words, responsible for socialising new recruits into the culture and practices of the service. Tensions between with the time spent with people relative to time spent behind computers have long defined new starters’ experiences, but PTA2’s above comment suggests that unification has exacerbated the conflict between probation’s ideology of service and managerial administration, contributing to problems of retention. This culture, he argued, is dominated by the logic of risk, which prioritises proficient “typists” over “people-people”:

I really want more time to be spent between probation officer and client, face-to-face, in the room, and not feeling under any pressure to have to get out of the room to go and write about them. I think, when we get to that point, we’ll have people coming into this job who are not administrators, they’re not great typists – they’re people-people.

As such, PTA2 sees his role as training practitioners in the hope that they will have the time to realise a client-centred ideology of service:

We’re training people for the future possible, in the hope that they will go back to seeing clients properly, for an hour at a time, weekly.

The present reality, though, is of a service that is overwhelmed, not just at practitioner level but also at the level of management. Like PTAs, SPOs are crucial to the process of enculturation. The role was integral to the professionalisation of probation in the postwar period: established via the Probation Rules of 1949, SPOs provided a measure of oversight over practitioners whilst ensuring that complex cases were managed by an individual with the appropriate skills and experience. For PTA3 (a former SPO), however, the role has changed markedly in recent decades:

… the SPO role has changed dramatically from when I first qualified, when it was about case supervision. Now, it’s about performance management. I think that’s what senior probation officers should be doing: they should be working with people on their cases. The HR function, the performance function, should be done by a different role or grade.

This response speaks to both quantitative and qualitative shifts. SPOs should be both the “manager and developer of frontline probation practitioners”. Present workloads, however, mean they are unable to give sufficient support to their staff. Qualitatively, the tasks that fall within SPOs’ remit have expanded, as understaffing has meant that “their focus is too often on non-operational tasks” (HMI Probation). Quantitatively, then, this increase in the volume of work has reduced the time SPOs are able to spend with their staff. Both shifts were emphasised by SM1:

If we had more staff, [SPOs] could do more. We also have quality development officers; but the problem is, because we’re so understaffed, they’re used elsewhere to plug operational staff. So, it comes down to the SPOs, many of whom have got large teams. They haven’t got the capacity to do what they’d like to do.

One of the consequences of these staffing pressures is that practitioners are able to move into management roles more quickly than has previously been possible in probation. Here, there are parallels between the post-unification Probation Service and Healy’s research on children’s social workers in Australia. She argued that “low status and poor working conditions” which stemmed in large part from a societal ambivalence towards caring profession, contribute to high staff turnover and an inexperienced workforce. This inexperience was felt higher up the managerial hierarchy, for newly qualified social workers were quickly promoted into decision-making roles and, once there, discovered that workload pressures impinge upon their ability to develop the structures “to support a largely novice casework workforce”. Such concerns were articulated by PSO12, who reflected on what she saw as a “new breed” of SPOs who had risen through the ranks too quickly:

I think people are moving up really, really quickly. A woman who was a PSO five years ago in [this region], she’s now an SPO. That’s quite a new thing. […] Here, there are two SPOs. One of them was highly thought of by colleagues because she got on with people. She’d come up through the ranks and had been a senior for a long time. Whereas the other one was more like the newer breed; she didn’t have a lot of time for staff, closed door all of the time, works from home. If you did have supervision, it’d be via Teams. The management isn’t as visible now as what it used to be. They don’t seem to be as hands on and have enough knowledge of all the processes and policies that are being churned out. (my emphasis)

PSO12 works in a rural office with just two SPOs. Her comparison cannot be extrapolated to the service at large nor, even, to practitioners in this study – most of whom were supportive towards SPOs and acknowledged the pressures they face – but others reported similar experiences. As PO4, who joined the service in 2020, summarised:

It’s difficult to allocate the time to spend to maybe reflect on practice, even in supervision. The time is limited. You can always tell when the SPO is clock-watching or thinking about those 50 emails that are in their inbox. […] You’re left to your own devices quite a lot, to be honest. Often, you can feel like you’re on your own on a little boat sailing. It can be unsettling, at times, when there’s lots going on – people going into crisis, all sorts of risks to manage. […] A lot of the time, I think a lot of people try to bottle it up and deal with it themselves.This response highlights how pressures upon SPOs in some regions can manifest in an absence of support. It suggests that, since unification, new staff in some regions are being socialised into an increasing atomised, “unsettling” probation culture – one that points to an increasingly precarious sense of professionalism and professional identity.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that probation staff in England and Wales are being socialised into a culture beset by multiple and interlinked challenges. It adds to a significant body of research on the persistence of a client-centred ideology of service which guides why individuals enter into probation, one that has proved relatively resistant to numerous (and damaging) restructurings. However, the ability to realise these values is being impaired by the confluence of staffing shortages, high workloads, and a regime of performance management, manifest in an increasingly “precarious” professional identity. The value of the paper, therefore, lies in its focus on professional identity (re)construction – specifically, how macro-level environmental shifts filter into meso-level work role transitions which, in turn, impact micro-level processes of how probation staff understand their work.

No profession has been exempted from the forces of neoliberalism; but the changes to the Probation Service described in this paper demonstrate how it has proved especially vulnerable to extraneous intervention, not least because of the low-status, involuntary nature of its clientele. The politicisation of these concerns from the late-1970s onwards accelerated demands for probation to display its punitive credentials. This extra-organisational change prompted the rise of managerialism: as caseloads increased, so did pressures on the service and its staff to manage the risks posed by clients – reconstituted as “offenders” – in more efficient and effective ways. Accordingly, while an ideology of service has not disappeared altogether, it has been tempered by the work role transitions extant within several organisational restructurings and changes to probation’s knowledge and methods.

The most damaging of the recent organisational reforms to probation was the TR, which brought many of the service’s underlying problems to the surface. Here, the emphasis placed by staff on care-based practice provides the clearest articulation of the best of probation work, and thus the findings typically associated with AI research. For the most part, though, staff were pessimistic about the service’s contemporary iteration. Ongoing staffing shortages are felt by practitioners, not only in terms of workloads but also in their socialisation. For new staff, two groups are key to this “enculturation”: PTAs and SPOs. The former prioritise educating staff in the knowledge and practices of risk management; the latter, many of whom were relatively inexperienced practitioners before progressing into the SPO role, are preoccupied with a culture of performance management.

The findings presented in this article have several implications for the future of probation. First, organisational reform has not alleviated the challenges experienced throughout the period of TR; indeed, since unification, problems of high caseloads and low morale have worsened. This suggests that further attempts at restructuring should be approached with caution. Second, the client-centred ideology of service espoused by staff in this study is testament to its durability, but it is not a sustainable base from which to rebuild the service. The pressures under which practitioners operate, manifest in a “retention crisis” hint at an atomised probation culture and an increasingly precarious professional identity. More, then, is needed from Government, both in terms of financial resources and political backing, if the trends towards precarity described in this paper are to be reversed. Third, investment in the service since unification has understandably been put to the recruitment of trainee POs, but other groups should also be prioritised. This article has highlighted the dual roles of SPOs, who are responsible for both performance management and case working elements of staff supervision; however, the former dominates over the latter. Rebalancing this asymmetry, or perhaps even splitting the quantitative and qualitative tasks between distinct SPO roles, could not only provide better role clarity but also help new practitioners to feel more confident in their practice.

Matt Tidmarsh

University of Leeds

Associate Professor in Criminal Justice

Areas of expertise: Probation; community sanctions and measures; sociology of the professions; organisational culture; offender rehabilitation; alternatives to custody