A fork in the road: Probation unification in England and Wales two years on
In our paper – ‘A fork in the road: Probation unification in England and Wales two years on’ - we argue that, two years in, the process of the ‘unification’ (re-nationalisation) of probation services in England and Wales continues to be a painful process whose end state remains elusive. Having previously drawn on data from our case study region of the ESRC-funded Rehabilitating Probation (ES/W001101/1) project to articulate how practitioners experienced unification as ‘painful but necessary’, here, we use the imagery of a journey to argue that the speed and direction of travel have encountered a more perilous trajectory than expected as high workloads and staffing challenges have persisted. Second, we argue that enduring challenges in bedding in new working practices – and building the confidence of new and existing colleagues to deliver them – have acted as ‘hazards’ that have needed careful navigation. Third, we argue that staff experience a sense of individual and collective operational vulnerability, in the face of the relentless demands placed upon them.
Read together with ‘A necessary but painful journey’ we have, across two sweeps of research activity in one case study area, captured the considerable challenges that many working within probation services in England and Wales are having to contend with on a daily basis. That the current and former Chief Inspectors of Probation have acknowledged the inter-locking and entrenched complexities faced by probation practitioners, whilst validating for many of those taking part in the research, demonstrates how widely the issues facing the coherent delivery of rehabilitation services have become.
In this article, we have examined how it feels for staff two years into the Target Operating Model (TOM) unification programme timeline – designed by senior national probation leaders as a heuristic device to guide organisational and practice reform – that seeks to bolster a unified service. Whilst our problematising of where progress is on the roadmap of the TOM set out prior to unification could be seen as an inevitable outworking of a roadmap meeting reality, the fact that something so robustly planned out and paced as the TOM is experiencing delays and has been somewhat derailed by a sequence of early release schemes administered by two different governments shows how volatile and uncertain the sector has become. The announcement towards the end of this cycle of research activity of a ‘probation reset’ highlights how widely acknowledged the need to do something about unwaveringly high demands on the service requires drastic action.
What we find in our research data is that climates of uncertainty impact on the well-being and capacity of individuals to deliver good practice here. The consequences of staff shortages and an overwhelming sense of constant scrutiny, that has the scope to isolate individuals for blame, are layers of individual and collective operational vulnerability that managers and practitioners report here. Our longitudinal research is capturing how challenging it is to maintain faith in a direction of travel and to believe an end state is possible. What it also shows us is that whilst others make their judgements about what probation is and should be, there remains real merit in engaging with the lived experiences of probation professionals whose continued loyalty to remain and deliver service, and capacity to think critically about what can and does not work in helping probation fulfil its duties to Assess, Protect and Change need to be heard before – at the fork in the road – they and their institutional memoires leave.