Rehabilitating
Probation

17th March 2025

Institute for Government Event

The Rehabilitating Probation Research Project partnered with the Institute for Government to explore 'What Lessons can government learn from the insourcing of probation services?'. The expert panel assembled to discuss the insights to be generated from the creation - and impact - of the Probation Service in 2021 comprised of Harry Annison from the team; Martin Jones CBE, the Chief Inspector of Probation; Helen Berresford, Director of External Engagement at Nacro; and Sam Freedman, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government. You can watch a recording of the session here. 

The panel discussion explored a series of themes to help understand how processes of outsourcing and then, more recently, insourcing has impacted on the character of the organisation of probation services and the capacity of the service to meet the demands being placed upon it. The importance of organisational stability in building practitioner confidence and in enhancing the ability of probation staff to sustain meaningful relationships with those they manage was a constant thread that ran through the session, and the capacity to draw on research from the project to add more context helped enrich the commentary. Important too was the need to place the work of the probation service within the context of a connected network of partners working within a shared organisational field to address the underpinning issues that those most frequently (re)entering the criminal justice system present with. The panel explored the important role that strengthening local level leadership of probation services – through seeking to eradicate excessive bureaucracy; facilitating the (co)commissioning of services; and greater immersion in more narrowly constructed partnership arrangements – would help probation services deliver more impactful interventions and develop an even greater level of understanding of offending behaviour.

The panel were unanimous, in ways that are consistent with the findings generated through the Rehabilitating Probation Project in our interviews with policy-makers, leaders, and practitioners in probation, in recognising just how traumatic the recent period for the service has been and of how significantly the challenges of recruiting and retaining staff continue to be in efforts to stabilise the service. All too could see how the need to push for national-level change programmes should avoid casting all operational practices as necessarily good or bad, and that time needs to be taken to explore practice working, listen to practitioners and partners, and draw out lessons from efforts to innovate service delivery. There are, as the panel identified, important lessons about how to manage processes of insourcing that other sectors can learn from probation and a decade of structural reform within the sector. But, as the discussion captured, there are as many lessons to draw from the deep and legacy impacts of the partial outsourcing of probation services under the Transforming Rehabilitation Reform programme in 2014 for those within and beyond probation services.

10th February 2025

National Inspection Consultation Contribution

The Rehabilitating Probation team have informed the HM Probation Inspectorate’s consultation on a national inspection of probation. This national inspection will take place in early 2025. By contrast to the inspections of individual probation delivery units (PDUs), this inspection will examine the national arrangements for probation. We are pleased to see that the finalised national probation inspection standards appear to have incorporated many of our suggestions, especially as regards Part 1: Leadership and Governance. We look forward to continuing to engage with HM Probation Inspectorate, and other stakeholders, going forwards.

Our response, which is available in full here, advised that a national inspection would serve as a beneficial complement to existing inspection arrangements and would come at a timely moment for probation.

Our response included suggestions for specific refinements that would suitably recognise the empowerment of leaders of the local units and regional areas for probation, expecting the national ‘centre’ to enable and support, as much as (where necessary) providing a greater level of direction.

More broadly, and based directly on our research with probation practitioners, we advised that it was likely that staff would respond positively to the Inspectorate’s stated intention to broaden its focus onto important aspects of the systematic problems and the national centre’s role in ameliorating or exacerbating them.

We advised that a national level inspection would likely help to surface the complexity of delivering impactful probation practice. This would validate the observations shared by practitioners about the need to place day-to-day realities of service delivery within its broader systematic context.

We concluded our response by observing that after so many years of focus on structural change in probation, and more recently responding to urgent crises like prison overcrowding, there remains the need to be fostered an ongoing, pluralistic debate about the current and desired future nature of probation practice: what does good probation work look like? And how can this best be achieved?

21 October 2024

Fixing Public Services - Insights from Probation

Members of the Rehabilitating Probation project team have been engaged in ongoing dialogue with the Institute for Government (IfG), regarding their interest in public services generally, specific challenges facing criminal justice, and the lessons on insourcing that our study of probation unification can provide.

The Institute for Government recently published the report 'Fixing public services: Priorities for the new Labour government' which includes discussion of the challenges facing probation, within the broader public sector challenges that need to be tackled.

It is the IfG’s report, but we were pleased to be able to inform their thinking, drawing on our research with a wide range of practitioners and stakeholders in the probation space. Research from the project was also cited specifically when helping the report reflect on how repeated restructures and changes in practice have compromised the clairty of purpose and identity of the probation service.

19th February 2024

Probation Leaders Event

Matthew and Harry from the Rehabilitating Probation project team were invited to address an HMPPS Probation Leaders Event in Manchester to share emerging findings from the on-going research study. To an audience of 280 Probation and Prison Leaders from across England and Wales, Matthew and Harry were given an hour on the first morning of the agenda to reflect on the experiences and consequences of profound organisational reform for Senior Policy Leads, Probation Managers, and frontline Probation practitioners alike.

The presentation in Manchester, in February 2024, was able to explore the challenging climate for an understaffed service in delivering effective practice, the knock-on impact for levels of individual and collective operational vulnerability, and in terms of practitioner professional roles and identities. In working through a series of themes that have characterised conditions for probation leaders and staff in the period since unification the presentation could draw on the insights from the papers already published in the Probation Journal, The British Journal of Criminology and Criminology and Criminal Justice to date, as well as exploring some new material currently being written up.

Echoing the positive feedback received on the day, a survey completed by 120 attendees identified that;

• 90.83% anticipate they will draw on the research in developing their policy and practice,
• 96.64% felt the research helps probation managers make sense of changing cultural values within the service,
• 95.84% saw value in the study in stimulating debate about the future challenges of delivering good probation practice.

The following free-text comments were representative of a series of reflections offered that captured the ability of the presentation to resonate with attendee’s own experiences of unification; ‘Very interesting research which is needed and should be shared with staff to help develop overall understanding of the changing culture’ and ‘Brilliant presentation today, has made me reflect as to how far we have come in my region and area of responsibility thank you’.

The Rehabilitating Probation Project has, from its inception, sought to help stimulate dialogue and reflection within and at all levels of the probation service to help support on-going efforts to reduce harm and promote public safety. Being able to share the voices, experiences, and perspectives the project team are gathering and making sense of in forums like the Senior Leaders Event (and this has followed other knowledge exchange activities with staff and senior leaders alike) helps the project deliver on this ambition. The raw and candid experiences the project is capturing across the five work packages highlight the challenges being faced by those working in the probation service and those who engage with the service as partners and through supervision. As a research team it is rewarding to be given a platform to be able to share these insights to audiences of leaders and practitioners to help stimulate debate about delivering effective probation and rehabilitative practice.

4th October 2022

Project Update

As the project enters its tenth month, we are nearing the end of our first sweep of research activity across a series of our work streams. We have spent time to reflect upon and consolidate the learning that has been generated through our interview-based research activity since we started fieldwork in March and we are now embarking on a series of dissemination events. We have interviewed 60 probation practitioners in our first sweep of activity in our local-level case study area - engaging staff at all levels of the organisation. In order to ensure we are representative of the region, we have interviewed staff from offices operating in urban and rural locations. We have also interviewed probation staff who have remained in the same offices or who have been relocated to newly established teams to fully capture the wide range of practitioner experiences. At regional and national levels, we have interviewed all Regional Directors of Probation in a first sweep of interview activity and have engaged 20 national policymakers who hold, or have recently held, roles within the Ministry of Justice, HMPPS, spanning both policy and operational roles.

In the first phase of research activity our focus has been on the implementation and experience of the unification of probation services since June 2021 and in  the months that have followed. We will, shortly, run a series of practitioner engagement events to reach out and report back into our case study area to share the key emergent themes from our fieldwork. These events will provide valuable opportunities for staff to listen to the voices of their peers, share their own perspectives, facilitate engagement between the research team and practitioners. Our fieldwork activity and the insights we will capture through the engagement events will help us frame research briefing reports enabling us to communicate timely insights into the delivery of reform and of the challenges experienced by staff. 

Ahead of these events we will also present thematic insights from our local level case study and the data generated though our interviews with Regional Directors at an in-person workshop for Regional Directors of Probation in Nottingham in October. The presentations of our research and discussions that follow will allow us to explore how consistent, contrasting and/or contradictory the experiences of our case study region are with other areas and to reflect critically on the challenges for Regional Probation leaders involved in organisational reform.

These dissemination events are an important opportunity to feedback to research participants, which is a commitment we made as part of the project.  Following these events we will be starting to publish some initial research findings in due course…watch this space…

Matthew Millings 

1st July 2022

Can Probation be Rehabilitated?

Scheduled in June 2022, the 24th annual Bill McWilliams lecture coincided with the first anniversary of probation unification, so as the invited lecturer I took the opportunity to offer some reflections on the present by posing the provocative question: ‘Can probation be rehabilitated?’ The lecture took as its starting point the now uncontested view that the probation, broadly conceived, has sustained damage as a consequence of the 2014 Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, but whilst much has been said and written about the quantitative aspects of that damage (e.g. the economic costs and failure to deliver ‘results’), little attention has been paid to the less tangible effects of the splitting of the service, which was experienced by many as organisational trauma. The lecture was structured by a consideration of three different ways of understanding rehabilitation: firstly, as a return to some former (more desirable) state; secondly, as a process of improvement or ‘building back better’; and, thirdly, as a state that is only achieved when important others recognise and acknowledge that positive change has been accomplished. The lecture thus took a concept that is in may ways the ‘bread and butter’ of probation work, and deployed it as a critical lens through which to think about the possible futures for the unified service.

Gwen Robinson

You can listen to the Bill McWilliams Memorial Lecture delivered by Professor Gwen Robinson here: https://www.ccgsj.crim.cam.ac.uk/mcwilliams/lectures

21st June 2022

Our latest meeting of the project team took place in Liverpool in late June. The team is progressing well on the first set of interviews being conducted across the different ‘levels’ of the project, which includes exploring the experiences of probation practitioners, regional leaders (“Regional Probation Directors” or RPDs), national policy makers and other stakeholders. (We will also be exploring the experiences of those subject to probation supervision, in due course). It is always an exciting and generative experience when we gather: an opportunity to consider and debate the lessons that might already be emerging, only six months into our three-year project. Our respondents’ insights interplay with one another, in our reflections on them; as do the differing theoretical and conceptual perspectives that we each bring to the project. It is also an opportunity to move forwards our ideas for engagement with publics, with stakeholders and through scholarship; and to think of new ones! Watch this space…