Welcome to Probation Perspectives, insights into
Community Justice, the podcast where we dive into the world of
probation, rehabilitation and community justice.
Each episode we explored the themes, challenges and skills
that underpin effective probation practise.
Whether you're just starting out on the P Quip programme, have
years of experience in the field, or are simply curious
about the criminal justice system, this podcast is your
space for practical insight, expert perspectives, and
meaningful conversations. In today's episode, we're joined
by Professor Matthew Millings, who shares his insights from his
recent project rehabilitating probation, and Doctor Matt
Tidmarsh, representing the Probation Institute.
Together, we explore the evolving identity of probation,
the importance of professional values, and what it means to
rehabilitate the service itself. There's a sense that is so
important to preserve that probation craft.
This is a job that is boundless, that you have to keep learning,
and that learning is a key and necessary and crucial part of
this job. We talk about the challenges
facing the profession, the role of research and the impact of
change within the probation service.
Constant feeling that you're you're firefighting, you're
you're dealing with the organisational change aspect
rather than the day-to-day elements of your practise and
where your focus perhaps should be.
It's a rich and reflective conversation that invites us to
consider how probation can be reimagined not just as a
service, but as a profession with purpose and identity.
Let's get into our conversation with Matthew and Matt.
Welcome to today's episode. We've got 2 brilliant guests
with us and we've got Professor Matthew Millings and Dr Matt
Tidmarsh. Please could you begin by
introducing yourselves and tell us briefly about your research
and publications relating to probation practise.
Thanks, Mike. Yeah.
So my name is Matthew Millings. I'm a professor of criminal
justice at Liverpool John Wills University.
I'm here today primarily to talk about my experience of being a
project lead for the the SRC funded rehabilitating probation
project, subtitled Rebuilding Culture, Identity and Legitimacy
in a Reformed Public Service. And that was a project that ran
from January 2022 through till March of 2025, looking at the
experiences and consequences of the unification of probation
services that began in in 2019. And this builds on an earlier,
another ESRC funded project 10 years ago, where we'd looked at
the devolving of probation services under the Transform and
Rehabilitation reform programme. So we've been able to track that
movement of people outside and beyond probation and now some of
those people who've now returned as part of the renationalized
service. I was the project lead of a six
person strong research team that had a Professor Gwen Robinson
from the University of Sheffield, Professor Lolberg
from John Walls University, Professor Nicola Carr, now
Trinity College Dublin, Professor Harry Aniston at the
University of Southampton and then we had Ellie Surridge who
was our research assistant. Thank you very much.
And Matt, could you tell us a bit about your research areas in
relation to probation? Hi, thanks, Meg.
My name is Doctor Matt Tidmarsh and I'm an Associate Professor
of Criminal Justice at the University of Leeds.
I'm wearing another couple of hats today as well.
I'm also the chair of the Research panel at the Probation
Institute, which is a professional association that
advocates on behalf of probation staff in England and Wales, and
I am also a member of the Professional Register Panel.
Then HMPPS. There's a couple of projects
that are relevant. Firstly, I did my PhD on the
subject of professionalism in probation, published as a book
in 2021. I've recently completed a data
sweep with Doctor Matt Kraknell at the at Brunel University and
we looked at the experiences of training and newly qualified
staff enrolled on the P quip in addition to a couple of other
staff groups like a practise tutor, assessors and criminal
justice learning academics. And finally, I'd I've also
fairly recently completed what is basically a scaled down
version of rehabilitating probation.
So that looked at professional identity, culture and practise
in the aftermath of the transforming rehabilitation
reforms and that project's been written up and is coming out as
a book. Excellent.
Wow. So even from your brief
introductions there, this just highlights that both of you are
key people for P Quips to know about, to read your
publications. And just to recognise that those
joining the P Quip programme, some of them will have worked as
PS OS for many years, but some of them, a lot of these topics
will be new to them. So learning about unification,
about the history and development of the probation
service to understand the service that they're in now, but
I don't know if you could speak to why that is useful for those
joining the the P Quip programme.
Yeah, absolutely. I think in a project like ours
that's looked at the the implementation, experiences and
consequences of profound organisational change in a
service like probation, where we've looked at the policy
makers who are the architects of that change.
The senior managers at a national level who are
responsible for delivering it. The staff on the ground who
ultimately make sense of and live through organisational
change and the changing structures within which they
have to work. And then looking outwards and
listening to the views of those partners that probation works
with and those people on probation who are managed and
supervised by the service before, during and after
structural change just gives a, a full sort of 360 picture of
what happens and what are the fallouts when when significant
change happens in an organisation like probation.
And I, and I guess for, for P quip learners, I think there's
something really powerful about how in those moments of personal
and professional stress and tension that people experience
when they're going through organisational change, how you
look into your values, you look into what shapes and contributes
to your sense of resilience on a professional and personal level.
And you really start to 0 in and focus on what are those messages
that people hang on to, to give themselves sort of hope as they
go through processes, which can often incur and generate
feelings of uncertainty and feeling rather destabilised.
And I do think, you know, when we now look back on the sort of
voices and the messages that we've processed from our
research, you know, we interviewed 340 people from all
of those different audiences that I've just talked about
there. But actually there's a lot of
consistency about what those people from their various
backgrounds describe and characterise as good probation
practise. A real focus on relational work,
a real focus on working with local partners and trying to
devolve powers to local level Managers of probation
professionals and a use probation professionals in a
purposely elastic sense to cover the range of roles there is
within the service. A probation professionals
exercise in, you know, professional curiosity and
critical reflective practise and engaging with their peers.
These are all part of what is important and necessary to not
just sort of survive, but to try and thrive through periods of
organisational change. And I think there is something
interesting and reassuring when you start to dissect all of
those different perspectives and views that actually running
running through them. There is this consistently, this
incredible recognition around the intuitively good work that
probation does and I also think it's quite cathartic for people
who work within the probation service to recognise that people
within and beyond the service recognise the systemic
challenges that beset the sector.
It is widely understood and recognised now about the number
of vacancies in the services and the challenges that creates, the
increased workload challenges that that creates.
When we started this project in 2022, I just don't think that
language was socialised as is now.
I just don't think it was as understood.
This was a period where there was still a great deal of sort
of optimism, there was still a great deal of faith that the
speed, the pace, the momentum of the target operating model,
which was the sort of road map to help us through to the
completion of unification could be followed, would give us
those. That sense of direction, that
sense of hope, and for reasons often well beyond the control of
the probation service and its policy make the impacts of post
COVID working conditions, the impacts of the prison crisis,
these all contributed to making it a really difficult time to
work in the sector. So I think there's something
cathartic for people to work in the sector to hear that there is
a recognition and there's an understanding of those
challenges. Few messages there, but I'd say
in terms of a headline that P quit learners, I hope could take
from the entirety of a project like this is try to listen to
those different messages, see how people connect with renew
their values, their sense of organisational belonging.
However, strain that can feel at times, but then also take notice
of some of those other voices that are recognising this is
this is challenging. Probation services is often
faced challenges in the past, but this feels particularly
acute. But keeping faith in the you
know, the integrity of the work and its authenticity.
Some really great points and you've covered a lot there and
I'm just intrigued by Matt's thoughts.
You're very much identifying the experiences of P quip learners,
but also their professional identity and who they are as as
individuals working within probation.
Matthew started off as an answer by talking about profound
organisational change in probation.
And in a way I think that puts it mildly and sort of the
destruction, I think in other words, that's been enacted on
the service in recent years. And I think that's what Matthew
and his colleagues work does so well is to show really how
profound that change has been. And I think just to relate that
to my own work, and particularly in my latest book, is really to
show that there's a continuity in a sense to this change as
well. Clearly all of the problems that
recent research, recent government inspections have
documented don't come from unification.
I'd go even further than that. And to say that they don't come
from the period of transforming rehabilitation either.
And I think what my work tries to do is really trace those back
further to show how the rise of things like performance targets,
the rise of risk, all contributes to this continuity
of change that shapes the current realities of probation
practise. And then I guess from there it's
about, well, So what I mean, what's the relevance of all of
this other than that I find this vaguely interesting from a
recent historical perspective. And I think that's where the P
quip comes in. Obviously, it's crucially
important in terms of recruiting staff at the moment.
And for me, I think by tracing those more recent historical
elements, you can begin to identify the things that are
relatively constant throughout. And for me, I guess one of the
essential things about the P quip is about instilling within
people of confidence to do their work.
And I think if people can recognise those traditions, that
becomes easier to plot your own working journey through
probation. So just to pull out a few, I
think that probation is of course no longer explicitly
grounded in social work. There's been lots of interesting
research in recent years about how probation is still at its
heart, social work in terms of the way people approach their
work with their clients. And I think it's really the
emphasis for me on values, but being able to recognise that
there's a really clear sense of those values if you go back
throughout the services history and trying to sort of enable
people to to better draw on those values and to enact those
values in their own practise. And I think those values go to
the heart of what is integrity in practise and what is
authenticity in practise in probation.
Yeah. Thank you, Matt.
Matthew, are you able to tell us a bit more about what motivated
the rehabilitation probation project in the 1st place and
what did you set out to discover or find through the research?
Yes, this project, the Rehabilitating Probation
projects as its origins in our first SRC funded project 10
years ago, where myself, Gwen Robinson and Lowell Burke
identified a probation trust and worked with chief executive of
that probation trust to set up the research project.
That for 18 months allowed us to follow the journey that people
made as they became a community rehabilitation company.
And as probation staff at all levels of that organisation went
through that spiritual journey of being a public sector
employee. And as they entered into the
private sector and as they went on a very uncertain journey with
no clear ending at that time, no clear sense of who was going to
be the owner and, and how their working conditions and the
structure of the organisation might look or might even be
titled. We did a series of tracker
interviews, those new to the service, those who'd been in the
service for a much longer period of time.
And it was just very powerful to be a very close eyewitness to
these moments of personal professional change that people
were processing. And we'd always intended to go
back and do research with those people again and to see how with
this maturation of the CRC they were working in with this
evolved model and how it was playing out, how their sense of
identity, how their value base had shifted and changed, how
they were embracing the emphasis on rehabilitation in their
working. And it was around the time that
we were starting to design that research that we started to see
the discussions around the unification, which then pricked
our interests to design A much bigger research project, working
some of those other voices that we didn't capture on the last
project. So we did interview the
policymakers. We wanted the senior civil
servants who were responsible for the unification programme
and have been responsible for overseeing it.
We wanted to speak to representatives from all the 12
regions and we interviewed all the regional directors.
And we also then wanted to extend outwards because this was
the unification programme that was very much portrayed to the
world as as a necessity. This was a probation service
that was operating in a legitimacy deficit.
And there was a need to strengthen probation.
It was a need to build confidence.
You know, we can look at the language that was used to
narrate unification. So we wanted to look beyond
probation and we wanted to speak to those criminal justice
partners at a national and strategic level, but also write
the way down to that day-to-day operational level, build a
picture of what working with probation is like for those
people. Of course, people who have been
supervised by probation as well during and beyond that time.
So it seemed like a very unique process of unification, a
nationalisation of a service and it just gave us that opportunity
to go back and to re interview those people we 1st engaged 10
years ago. And that very much is we wanted
to capture and explore how could how did this service seek to
rebuild its culture, its identity, and its legitimate
legitimacy, judged internally, but also judged by those outside
of them? Yeah.
Thank you, Matthew. I think it's really interesting
and great that you managed to capture it because having worked
in the probation service myself and being part of the CRC when
TR happened, I was aware that actually what would other
agencies think? Did they think that you chose to
go in the private company? But there wasn't really any
choice and it all happened really quickly, didn't it?
But even now I think when I talk to people that don't know about
probation, don't work and it's quite a hidden service, isn't
it? So people don't often understand
that it did get partly privatised and has been brought
back together. So I think it's really great
that you're doing research to pilot some of that.
And also I probably should help New P Quits understand the
history and the impact of that when they come into the service
and they're learning and maybe speaking with more experienced
colleagues. So really interesting, thank
you, Matt. Your work also explores how
probation practise is shaped by wider governance structures.
How do you see these forces influencing the everyday
realities of probation work? Yeah, that's a really good
question. How does governance influence
everyday practise? I guess I'd start that question
by reflecting a little bit on how I got into this field, if
that's OK. Around 2015, I was currently
doing my master's and I decided that I wanted to do a PhD and I
was really, really interested in privatisation.
At the time. I wanted to study prison
privatisation in particular, but then I discovered to my shock
that prison privatisation wasn't on the agenda at the time of
2015, but something called the probation service was.
And I confess I'd never, I'd never heard of the probation
service before, before this. And so I did some.
Yeah. Well, yeah, it goes back to what
Kerry was saying, doesn't it? So.
And it just seemed to me to be quite a bad idea, if I'm honest.
Again, to put it euphemistically, it seemed to me
as if this would have real human impact on not only the people
that work in the service, but people on probation.
And sadly, I think that transpired to be the case.
I think that if you look at that governance structure that was
impressed or implanted in the service around privatisation, we
saw all of the sort of stereotypical things that you
would expect to happen did happen.
Things like deteriorating working conditions, staff cuts,
a declining sense of performance.
Perhaps not the rampant profits from probation that you see in
other privatised industries there, but but certainly you
really see the impact I think of that governance structure, those
attempts to really make markets, for lack of a better term, in
probation that we're never there to make and having a real impact
on people. Unification, as you said, an
attempt by an organisation, a really unique attempt actually
by an organisation to rebuild its legitimacy, its culture, to
communicate that to the outside world, that we are a capable
organisation that is able to protect the public and to
rehabilitate individuals. Obviously they've used the
mechanism of renationalization, unification to do that, and I
think perhaps inevitably you've got this almost pendulum swing,
if you like. I think it has become a very
bureaucratic service. And I think that's something
that's come through really clearly in my research.
The frustration, I think with the amount of bureaucracy that's
in the civil service that I was surprised to find that people
really reflected back quite positively on the period of
TRCRCS as places where you could be creatives, where you could be
dynamic, where you could be innovative.
It's always sort of me to an extent, I think, because a lot
of the evidence from that period sort of suggests the opposite.
Just sorry, out of interest, Matt, the individuals that you
interviewed about the CRCS who were positive about innovation,
because that was one of the, I suppose the key things, wasn't
it, that there should be more ability to be creative and
innovative when most of them are still in the service because
obviously a lot of stuff left. I only interview people who are
currently working in probation at the time, so yes, they were
people who were in large part frustrated with how unification
gone so far. And this was quite soon after
unification as well. I should say it was the
interviews were done in May and June of 2022.
So it was only a year in. And I think that the time scale
for unification, but I think it was nine months was always very
ambitious. So I can understand how that
would have been quite process heavy at that time.
But they really reflected really quite positively on it in a lot
of cases. I saw that more so with
managers. I think.
I don't know whether that's because they have more contact
with attempting to change or make minor tweaks to policy and
practise than perhaps practitioners do, but yeah, a
lot of the managers were quite frustrated with their wings
being clipped, shall we say. So I would, if I could just add
to that conversation around this, what really I think will
stand as the missed opportunity to extract the organisational
learning and institutional memories, people who worked in
the CRCS, because we did another piece of research which focused
on some of the through the gate provision in one of the prisons
local to us here and. In Liverpool, and that was three
or four years after TR had happened and actually things had
got into a little bit of a rhythm.
And I think, you know, people were were understanding their
roles, they were understanding the boundaries of what they
could and couldn't do. They were forging new and
innovative and creative partnerships with local
organisations. There was a momentum and there
was a deliberate attempt by the CRC and that in that case to
really embrace rehabilitation. We are not the probation service
anymore and we're we are not a second class probation service
either. We are a community
rehabilitation company and we've got to try and, you know, make
the most of what we can do here. Now those, those are messages of
hope that did not translate for everyone, but for some they did
and they were a source of motivation and they were a
source of encouraging them to be innovative.
There was a group of CRC's that had a variety of ways of
innovating and doing business differently and a variety of
networks and partnerships they were enmeshed within.
And I think there's been opportunities missed to learn
from those. I think there was a dangerous
sort of polemic framing of everything was bad about TR and
it needed to stop and we needed to then to restart again.
It was clearly a model and a funding model that in hindsight
looked pretty flawed from the start.
But absolutely by its end, we were in a situation where the
public was being put at risk as a result of systematic flaws in
how the system works and something needed to be changed.
But it didn't mean that everything that the CRC did
should be forgotten about in the move towards unification.
And I guess that goes back to the question you're asking about
this governance and people in positions of influence.
A key part of a lot of what's happening here is about the
semantics, isn't it? About what unification is?
And the way in which people have understood this as a takeover or
as a merger or as an acquisition, rather than as the
ambition was that this would be a bringing together of the
strengths of different ways of doing probation and then shaping
a new way of doing and delivering rehabilitation and
protecting the public. Didn't feel like that for a lot
of people who had come from CRCS.
And that in large part is as a result of that trauma of the
experience of transforming rehabilitation.
Not just on those people who had the experience of moving over
into into the CRCS, but I think just that the speed and reach
that change could be made within your organisation just sent
shudders through the organisation.
And there was one of the last interviews we did was with one
of the area executive directors who talked about it wasn't until
they went out and they spoke to people in the probation offices
and they saw the physiological reaction when TR was mentioned
that it started to make sense of just how impactful and how deep
those legacies are of that process of change from from 10
years ago. And a lot of that is down to
just the speed, the reach, how it shapes everything from the
offices that you shared with colleagues who you'd work with.
So the commissioning arrangements, it touched every
aspect of the business. And it took a long time for a
lot of people to recover from that.
Yeah, I think that firstly, I think Matthew's absolutely right
about, I think one of the things lost in often lost in the the
narrative about TR is the tremendous diversity among the
CRCS in terms of performance. I mean, some are more much
better than others and some tried to do things in much more
different ways than others as well.
But frequently we sort of lump everything together as it's
either public and good or private and bad.
So you do get some of that diversity and a lot of that
nuance lost. The second thing was on the
semantics. I mean, I completely agree with
the point about how it's, it wasn't, it was never supposed to
be an acquisition. It was supposed to be more of
two organisations or many organisations coming together.
But I think that in a way it's understandable that it would be
seen as an acquisition because of decisions taken around TR.
For example, the decision to remove probation from the
organisation titled. I mean, they weren't, they
weren't patient. They were, they were community
rehabilitation companies. To me that it was prioritising
branding and marketing over the actual nuts and bolts of what
people do and the job titles. I mean, the, the, the CRC that I
did my research in was one of the ones where probation was
abandoned from all the job titles.
So people were going into meetings with external
organisations, not as probation officers and probation service
officers, but case managers and senior case managers.
And immediately they were fighting against that.
I think Matthew put it as legitimacy deficit earlier,
which was quite a good way to do it.
So it shouldn't be seen as an acquisition.
But again, I think if you look a bit further back, I can
understand why it has seemed like that to to lots of people
because of mistakes, I think mistakes anyway that were made a
few years ago. Some really important points
there from both of you. What stands out to me as well is
when Matthew was talking about the organisational trauma of the
organisation as a whole and the people that are working there,
and when we're thinking about Pequips joining a service,
having an understanding of what's come before and
understanding how that might impact the people and that
they're working alongside and why mention of TR might make
them feel in certain ways. Certainly not to create fear or
concern in any of our peak quips, but why it's so important
that they do develop that understanding of what's come
before in the service that they're now a part of.
Thank you for those points there.
One of the key areas of the Rehabilitating Probation
project, which you've highlighted really is about
unification and probation services and how it's impacted
culture, identity and legitimacy in a reformed public service.
But we're thinking about and you use the term rehabilitating
probation. What do you mean by that term in
this context? Could you explain that in a bit
more detail please? So when we were thinking of the
title of the projects and what we were seeking to achieve by
picking up on some of the themes that we've already talked about
so far was that sense of this is an organisation that we were
being told is operating a legitimacy deficit that is in
need of change and is in need of being saved to a, to a certain
degree. If you look at the language that
was used to narrate why we were going to see this level of
organisational change in probation, we wanted to see to
what extent policy makers who were, who were, who were making
the policy was setting the tone, who was set in the narrative,
what was the vision that they were trying to create?
What is the angle? Where is that?
Where is the point that they're trying to take the service to
and where does that come from? How are they seeking to fuse
together this sort of mixed economy of rehabilitation
services? We had as a result of
Transforming Rehabilitation, we wanted to see how the
organisation was going to build or renew its sense of
organisational culture, organisational belonging.
You know, you're fusing together the National Probation Service,
which is now changing the boundaries of the regions that
it belonged to. You're bringing together a
series of community rehabilitation companies owned
by a different set of providers. You've got a mix of different
organisational identities in this space, So how do you fuse
those different professional identities and cultures
together? And a key part of our research
was how can the Probation Service Act behave?
Presents itself in ways that to outside audiences suggests that
it is changing and that there is worthy of greater levels of
confidence, greater levels of trust, greater levels of
professional respect within the the criminal justice landscapes
that the service was operating within.
So what are the what are the triggers or compromise external
people's perceptions of trust and legitimacy in the service.
I hope that gives you some sense of of the different of ways
within which we wanted to explore how those responsible
for and those working within the service were seeking to build or
rebuild trust, identity and legitimacy in the service.
If you're using the term rehabilitation, which is used a
lot when talking about people on probation, whether it's done
something with them or to them, but you're applying it to the
organisation. And that's quite interesting
because it's a concept that gets discussed frequently in our P
quip sessions. So I'm intrigued from both of
you what definitions of rehabilitation you'd draw on?
We have quite a simple one of rehabilitation, I think, and
it's borrowed from Matthew's colleague on the project, Gwen
Robinson. She wrote a book, I think the
book was called Offender of Rehabilitation in 2000.
And rehabilitation in that is simply defined as change for the
better. And I think that's quite a good
way of getting across exactly what it is we mean when we talk
about rehabilitation, but in a way that's simple and really
easy to comprehend, I think. And Matthew very much spoke
about that just then from sort of an organisational
perspective. I mean, change that was
necessary and then attempting also to incorporate that change
for the better element. But it also works, of course, on
that individual level of people on probation.
Thoughts from you, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, I've, I've, I've
worked with Gwen for a long, long time and that there will
never be a point in my personal professional career where I
would ever challenge anything that Gwen says.
So firstly, that's the very first thing I'll do is reiterate
my agreement with Matt on the the ultimate definition of
rehabilitation. But absolutely tied to that, I
think it is that individual level.
It's about trying to help an individual understand the
impacts that are upon them that are making aspects of their life
particularly challenging, maybe even problematic and chaotic at
times. And trying to identify forms of
support and resources that might help get to a point where you
can make better decisions and have more options.
But it's it's changed for the better.
Excellent. Thank you from both of you.
So we've covered it a little bit, Matthew, but what have been
some of the key insights or findings from the project so
far? I'll pull out four key learning
points or observations that I think would be a value to equip
learner audience that we're trying to speak to.
The first thing is that the the sort of impacts and legacies of
organisational change are just so significant and have been so
significant for the probation service and change has just been
such a demanding and draining experience for people at all
levels of the organisation. And we did a workshop with
regional probational region and one of those directors said they
felt with confidence they could say that for the 80% of the last
decade, they have been focused on dealing with implementing or
responding to the consequences of organisational change and not
in focusing on those issues that would build practitioner
confidence that would help sort of improve relationships with
partners. And there was no disagreement
within that route. And we then can draw parallels
for some of the interviews that we did with probation delivery
unit leads. Four years on from unification,
we're still estimating that they probably had spent 70% of that
time in dealing with the fallout of organisational change and the
impacts that it's had on their Staffs.
Those sort of legacy of organisational change, the
disproportionate focus on organisational change and that
sense that instability is almost like embedded into the
professional identity of many of those who've worked in the
service. I think is something that just,
you know, has to be, has to be acknowledged.
And that that culture of emotional strain on people, I
think is just something that that you can't escape when you
do research in this field. I think a second key theme that
that is really pertinent for our P quip learners is what we have
consistently found in this project.
And the last is a real sort of humility from probation
practitioners, all levels of the organisation and all stages of
their career to keep learning and to keep engaging in
reflective practise. And so some of those people we
interviewed in the most recent projects who've who've got
careers in probation 2530 years plus, still recognise that they
need to keep learning. They need to keep understanding
the complexity of the people who are sitting in front of them,
who they have to manage in the probation service.
And that some of the behaviours that those people are engaging
in, some of the backgrounds and some of the contexts that
they're coming from are new, are different and they need new
skills. There's a sense that is so
important to preserve that probation craft.
This is a job that is boundless, that you have to keep learning
and that learning is a key and necessary and crucial part of
this job. And obviously for P quip
learners, that nowhere in that in a probation career journey is
learning as explicit as it is, as it is on AP Quip programme.
And the importance of really engaging with those messages and
focus on values and ethics as well as the more practical sort
of skills development. And when workloads become too
high and when working conditions become quite tough and stifling
to work, work within, there's a sad inevitability about the
compromises in reflective practise.
There's, there's, there's a post COVID landscape that we're
working within that mitigates against people coming into the
office sharing ideas. But these are a crucial part of
what good probation practise involves.
And there is a real passion and a real enthusiasm from people at
all levels. And I think it is now recognised
by by people at the very top, the policy makers of that need
to try to build in that protective time and to engage in
that critical reflective practise and to keep learning.
So that preservation of a professional probation craft I
think is something that's shared across all sorts of levels.
A third key point is around probations legitimacy to outside
audiences and the importance of how on a day-to-day basis, how
people act, how people behave and what they say does
communicate messages to outside audiences about what probation
is, what it offers, the nature of the work that the probation
service undertakes. In the work that we've done with
policing partners, people working in youth justice, people
working in the courts and the judiciary themselves, we found a
sympathy and an empathy for the plight of the probation service,
The sense that they're being overworked, the sense that there
are problems with recruitment and retention in the service.
And although that sympathy on one level is quite nice, so it
shows that people are understanding and respectful of
the challenges that you're facing.
We don't really want a service that has sympathy.
We want a service that's better funded and better able to do its
job and, and is respected for what it brings to the
conversation. But what we are seeing is there
is a, there is often a sort of deep respect for the service and
the intuitively good work it does.
There is also inescapably A problematic reality with the
visibility of probation officers currently and their ability to
be able to perform some of the more pragmatic and basic
day-to-day jobs that are tied up in multi agency working.
And so it's important for people who working in probation is
recognising that they are ambassadors for the service.
And that although at this moment in time things are challenging
and tough, there is still a real recognition of the moral work
that the probation service does. And it's about keeping that
visibility and representation in the eyes of partners.
And then the final thing I'd say is what we can see in our
research from this this project, there is undoubtedly this sense
of individual and collective vulnerability that that the
service feels. This is a service that is under
scrutiny. And what we find in our research
is that people actually, although they often reflect
quite well when they think about their own level of confidence
and their own level of competency in doing their job,
they're a lot less confident in the ability of the wider service
to work. Now that for us is slightly
worrying because what it does is it tells us, as often happens in
moments of organisational strain, workers engage in a
little bit of preservation itself.
And you focus on what you can control and on the workload that
you can manage and maybe become less concerned with or feel less
responsibility to some of the wider patterns of organisational
behaviour around you. In an organisation like
probation, which I think is built on that sense of
collaboration and working together, that can be damaging
to the organisational and occupational culture.
So it's about trying to create those conditions where
practitioners can rebuild their confidence, can have the
opportunity to engage in critical reflective practise,
can try to strive to engage in those processes of professional
curiosity that try to address some of those worrying trends
where that's individual and collective vulnerability
actually starts to have an impact in the practise that
that's delivered out there. Yeah, thank you, Matthew.
That's really interesting. And encouraging to hear actually
that you're saying there's this support and buy in from higher
levels of the probation service about the importance of critical
reflexive practise. But also, I think your point is
really key about being an ambassador for the probation
service when you're working with other agencies.
And maybe there's still some concerns about workloads
enabling that. I remember even before TR,
moving to a more rural office that had been really
understaffed for a while and going like being the first
probation officer for a long time that had gone to the
housing meeting, for example, and just because we hadn't had
the staff to go. But actually, if you're not
there to advocate or support it compacts, doesn't it?
So really useful learning. Thank you, I just wondered what
are some of the key takeaways from your own research into P
quip training and probation identity?
I think that it's easier. To do this with reference to a
couple of quotes, one of them was this would have been in
2022, but she was enrolled on the P quip at the time and she'd
only worked in the service for just under 2 years.
And she said that she already felt overworked, understaffed
and in the organisation and underpaid.
And for me that set off a few alarm bells and thinking, well,
you know, you haven't been here that long.
It's, it's really concerning that you've said that.
Actually, I think some of my other researchers tried to
explore how people cope with those pressures.
The constant feeling as Matthew raised a couple of times that
you're firefighting, you're you're dealing with the
organisational change aspect rather than the the sort of
day-to-day elements of your practise and where your focus
perhaps should be. But in terms of the other major
findings, what I found was there's a real persistence of
values and it doesn't really matter who you speak to and at
what level of the service. People will will roughly
articulate similar reasons for why they entered the as a
service. Sometimes that's phrased in
terms of public protection, but not typically I think is phrased
in terms of wanting to work with people.
That said, there are a few different ways that people
approach that working with people.
I think for some, they resolutely identified with their
clients and said we believe in the job, we believe in the
values, it's why we endured no matter everything that's thrown
at us. And that sort of retreat into
values was one way of coping, I think, with organisational
change. I also found evidence of those
values beginning to wane within some stuff.
And I guess they're people who are I would consider to be most
at risk of exiting the service responses.
Like there would have been a time in my career when I would
have gone the extra mile and I would have put that work in.
But but why would I do that now? I'm sick of having to constantly
go the extra mile for very little reward.
And they weren't talking about financial reward, they were
talking about how the job made them feel and what the job gave
back to them. And the third way is that so
much work now is outsourced to the multi agency landscape.
So there was a real frustration, I think with people wanting to
work with people but not feeling like they were able to.
So a lot of this work was directed outside to, for
example, substance use recovery charities, mental health and
those, those organisations clearly have a role to play
because clearly probation practitioners and it's not
necessarily their job, I think to provide really in depth
mental health support to people. But certainly I think there's,
there's a big reliance and perhaps an even bigger reliance
now on that multi agency infrastructure.
Umm, and I think the importance for this for people on the P
quip is I interviewed A practise tutor assessor and when I asked
him about how his, how he understood his role, he said
something that really stuck with me.
He said that he saw his role as training people for the future.
Possible. And what he meant by that was he
very much saw his role as training people for a time when
caseloads were more stable, when there were there were more
staff. And I think that's why where the
reflective practise element comes in.
I mean it's getting those good habits I think into people that
ability to look critically, to look reflexively at what you're
doing. And if that is perhaps somewhat
challenging to fit in or potentially even to see the
relevance, I've given all the stuff that you've got going on.
At the same time, if and when case loads do settle down a
little bit, you do have more time.
It's a way to build that development into your practise.
And finally, I remember asking a regional director about this
once, why don't you offer, I put it didn't put it as bluntly as
this, but why don't you offer some comments to staff?
And they told me because if they go to youth justice, they won't
come back. So, and they were being
facetious, but I think that it would be nice to see those other
avenues outside of the service I think opened up as a form of
professional development and also giving scope for people to
reflect on their work and on the service itself.
Yeah. And I think that was probably
something. Else that people liked when they
joined. Isn't it the variety of roles
that you could do? But also I think it's really
key, the point you both make about actually the need for
continual professional development, you know, always
thinking that there's something else you can learn.
What we can we learn from research about the best skills,
the best things that we can do to work with people on probation
and that point about continuous. Professional development makes
me think of the professional register.
I'm sure you can speak to that, Matt, because this is something
that's been brought in quite recently.
But that is a key part of it, isn't it?
Ensuring that people keep up to date.
Yeah, definitely. It's it's a noble ambition.
As well, I think the professional register, I think
that in many ways that it is it is very welcome.
This idea that probation is more formally recognised as a
profession. Obviously it has its challenges.
I think like anything in probation at the moment, in
terms of people finding the time to engage in continuous
professional development, excellent, so thinking.
About your findings and P quips and people new to the service,
what key points would you make to those at the start of their
careers within probation in. Terms of thinking of the
rehabilitating probation projects specifically just take
a lot of people's views around what they think probation should
be and what probation is. And there's a bit of a
difference between those two things currently.
But when you actually speak to policy makers, when you speak to
organisational leaders and you speak to practitioners and you
speak to partners and people on probation, it does come back to
some of those core, quite simple things really about what good
probation practise is. The importance of relational
work and building up a connection between two people
ultimately is at the core of a lot of this work.
That probation practitioner having an understanding of a
series of resources and responses and interventions that
they can use to help support the person sat in front of them.
Some of those come from within the service and some of those
are from local organisations. The importance of being able to
empower local leaders as well, to be able to shape the response
of how a probation service responds to the people that it
supervises. The nature of the issues, the
nature of the backgrounds that people present with are
different in different locations and so you have to allow for
some flexibility in the system. If we accept that changes are
constant within the probation service and history tells us it
probably will be and is, then we have to then start to look at
some of those things that do centre us and that do give us a
bit of sort of empowerment and a bit of hope in how we do our
practise. And some of those things are the
office we work in, maybe some of the regional identity that we
belong to. Maybe it's about how we can
access structures and organisations that sit outside
of the hierarchical structure of HMPPS and your local probation
delivery unit or the specialist team that you're in.
Maybe it's the Probation institute, maybe it's your local
Napo branch, maybe it's a network of peers that you work
with in a multi agency space. But again, it's looking at and
fostering and nurturing those relationships that provide you
with the sort of resources you might need to build your
resilience to protect you when you go through process of
organisational change. I would absolutely identify the
importance that is put into training and continuous
reflective practise. And we're dealing with an
organisation now where nearly half of the people who are
working in the PD, us in England and Wales have been in the
service for less than two years. So all those people won't have
experienced unification, won't have experienced, certainly
won't have experienced transform and rehabilitation.
And as you've explained in this podcast, you know, yes, there's
a necessary there's there's there's a bit of learning our
history and there's a bit of understanding that
organisational context, but there's also understanding how
we can keep our focus on the sort of values and the
principles because change will be coming again and there will
be tweaks and there'll be other changes that will happen.
But actually good probation work looks pretty much the same in
2025 as it did in 2005 and 1985 Change.
Yeah. Thank you for that summary.
Matt, any thoughts from Yeah, I think this is quite.
A difficult question to answer, principally because I've never
worked in probation. So there's part of me, the
doubts, my own legitimacy, I think in terms of giving advice
to people, new starters, in terms of how I would encourage
them to approach the job and the things to keep at the forefront
of their mind. But I think Matt raised lots of
Matthew, sorry, raised lots of really valid points.
He spoke about the core of the work and about relationships,
that relational aspect to supervision, to remember why or
strive to remember why people got into the job in the 1st
place, which, you know, the overwhelming majority of the
research says is to do with personal values.
Matthew also brought up how new a lot of people who work in
probation are. And I think that there's also
part of me that thinks that there should be some onus on
experienced colleagues to to step up and help with younger
colleagues and share in terms of sharing their experiences,
strive to build local networks and get to know people who work
in organisations in the communities that you work in,
because you will undoubtedly lean on them in the future.
And just to reframe this slightly away from what I would
tell people that enrolled on the Pequip, but rather anybody with
responsibility for policy, I think is remember what happens
when people qualify and the the stress that it causes when
people participate in the project.
I've been doing with Matt Kraknell, people spoke to us
about a Cliff edge at the end of training whereby they sort of
graduate into A to become a probation officer and suddenly
the caseload increases and it's really, really difficult to
manage. So keeping that at the forefront
and not over overloading and overwhelming people literally
just after they've qualified. There was also quite a lot about
job insecurity. I think, for lack of a better
word, people move it being moved to different offices potentially
an hour away from where they've trained.
And the implications that has to what Matthew described as place
based identities, different office cultures.
I would, I think I would try to encourage HMPPS to consider that
when people qualify and not telling them that suddenly they
have to move an hour away for work.
But certainly I think there are lessons there in terms of what
the organisation can do to help people who are on and have
recently completed the P quip, in terms of how they help people
to adapt to their role. Really important points there.
And it's important for P Quips to know that people are aware of
those, the governance issues. So I'm really pleased that
you're pointing out because you know, they do share these
thoughts with us often and they'll be pleased to know that
people are raising them. Just wanted to go back to.
The point about critical reflective practise because it's
a key part of the Peakwit training for both of you.
Can you share your thoughts about the importance of
reflective practise for probation staff?
So I guess reflective practise. I think it's good because it
obviously provides an opportunity for people to look
critically and inwardly at themselves and at their
practise. And I think that looking
critically at yourself is just as important as looking
critically at practise because it's such an important way to
help check bias, any subconscious biases that we
hold, for example, as well as being that vehicle, that motor
for continuous professional development.
I spoke earlier about how it would be nice to see
practitioners with more time to do their jobs.
And I think that that's where really where I think start to
reap the benefits of being reflective in practise as, as
and when people begin to have more time to approach their
work. I think it helps to situate the
processes work in broader context as well.
And I think that's important for build building resilience in
work. You know, you are not alone in
this. There are broader systemic
systematic pressures that you are currently working under.
And I think the critical reflective practise can help to
create that space in which to reflect on those things.
And the final thing I'd like to say on this is that I hope that
in some way the people that I've interviewed and done focus
groups with over recent years have found interviews a form of,
of reflective practise, that they have been cathartic for
them in terms of reflecting on the pressures of.
Great. Thank you, Matt.
And. Matthew, your thoughts on the
importance of reflective practise?
Yeah, just to 11. Thing to add with a very clear
focus on people at the start of their probation career or who
are embarking on or completing the P quip is very often I found
in in in research projects I've done with people who worked in
probation and people who've been in probation for a very long
time. When they reflect back on what's
been important to them and what they've enjoyed most about their
career and their sort of create highlights or memories they have
from their career. It's amazing how frequently they
can often identify people who were significant to them, who
weren't their line manager, who didn't have immediate
responsibility for them, but with whom they worked with, with
whom they went to with a case with an issue, with a problem,
had a discussion they could talk it through.
And also those people that they remember starting in the
service, that they felt a sense of duty to mentor and to offer
back to them as well. Things.
It's not just about what you can extract from people around you,
but also that sense of responsibility you have to the
others who are, who are coming through after you as well.
And just those sharing of experiences through process of
critical reflective practise are often those things that people
look back on in their career with pride.
They remember those things fondly.
So I guess if we are to do anything by drawing on the
insights of people who are, who are much further away in their
career than maybe the people that we're focusing on here, is
to learn from those people and to see how just how impactful
having those conversations are. Continually developing your
practise, sharing your experiences, sharing your
vulnerabilities with some of those people that you work with,
and also not being bashful and sharing some of those pieces of
work that you think you've done well.
And, and that can enrich what is is happening in your, in your,
in your operation delivery unit, within a specialist team within
which you work, whatever it may be.
It's just, you know, a more professionally curious and a
more professionally confident workplace is going to be a place
that's going to be more rewarding to work as well as
being more impactful in the long run.
Thank you for that. So we're coming towards the end
of the podcast now, and I'm going to give both of you a
special power. I'm going to give you a magic
wand, and you can use this magic wand to make one change to how
rehabilitation is thought about or supported in probation.
So what you would do with your magic wand, what change would
you put in place? I do think.
There is a need to locally empower the probation service
and to the actual original vision of the target operating
model and the role of the regional probation director
within that did actually look like it could have a lot of
those powers to be able to really strengthen a probation
voice in a local level and how it worked with partners in how
it commissioned services and how it could create a nurture a
culture within a region. And I don't think it's quite
worked out that way. It's not worked as effectively.
So I would say you need to empower local leadership so it
can properly resource and work with local partners to respond
to local need. And that way when you then
engage in that meaningful relational work, you've got the
resources, you've got the interventions, you've got the
local knowledge that is appropriate and suited to that
space and you you can really influence that.
Empowering local leadership is about how they Commission
resources, how they can work with partners, how they can
recruit the people that they need to fill the gaps where they
know that they need to fill those gaps.
And I think what that would then do is just allow for probation
to have a little bit more visibility and to all its
audiences, to the public, to its partners, to be more visible
and, and to have a clearer understanding of what the job is
doing. Which feeds then into the bigger
point, which is I do think that probation just does need that
stronger, more visible, more vocal, high level political
leadership to both educate wider audiences about the job of the
probation service and then to suitably manage people's
expectations about what can be achieved within which time,
within the timeframes it can be achieved and how communities
have a role to play within processes of rehabilitation.
I'm going to finish with this. So this I remember doing an
interview with with someone very senior in HMPPS who said to me,
the public can imagine a prison, you talk about a prison, they
can visualise a prison, they can visualise a prison door and they
can imagine being sat behind that prison door and start to
invoke a series of emotional responses.
That means you, when you're in that position, the public in the
main don't know what probation supervision looks like, doesn't
understand what probation supervision involves.
And they were saying that there is a good story to tell there.
And it's the job of the probation service to try and
tell that story a bit more, a bit more publicly because people
will find interest in this and they'll be hooked by this.
And that has been highlighted in the.
Sentencing Act, hasn't it? They've been highlighting if
we're going to push to use community penalties more than we
need to make sure the public have a greater understanding of
it. Yeah, I mean, I won't go as far
as naming. And shaming photos of people.
Let's not you know, don't get me wrong there, Matt.
What? What are you going to do with
your? Magic wands.
Tell us what? Right?
OK. So I am going to come at this on
a bit more of a conceptual level, but there's going to be
lots of overlap with the answer that Matthew gave.
And Matthew said it has to start with the local.
And I would, I would sort of come in it from the other way,
not in the sense that what we need is another big top down
reorganisation. But part of the question was you
asked about changing the waves. We think about probation.
And for me, what I would like to see is probation be sort of
increasingly more in terms of public health perhaps than
criminal justice, because I think there needs to be a focus
on the needs of people on probation and how they can be
addressed and to sort of work upwards, if you like, from
there. And that's I think that's where
the local element comes in. And that means building
connections with local organisations.
It means local probation delivery units, regions having
the power to also make those relationships, to formalise
those relationships, what in whatever form that looks like,
giving regions, giving probation delivery units, the autonomy to
explore those things that fundamentally put people's needs
to the forefront. In an ideal world, using my
magic wand, people would have more time and more space to, for
example, sit with people for longer to talk to them in ways
that aren't driven by what performance targets you need to
meet. It means helping people put
together benefits claims, benefits applications,
accompanying people to multi agency meetings, Co supervising
people if you like, perhaps from substance use recovery or from
escorting people to housing appointments, things like that.
To me, that's what a good relationship and probation
should, in an ideal world, look like.
Of course, there are there are many, many reasons why they
don't look like that at the moment, and I don't think we
need to dwell on those. But I would like to see that
more public health element creep into a probation thinking to
probation practise, to produce a practise, I think where
practitioners walk alongside people, perhaps to a greater
extent than perhaps the kind of sit opposite them, if you like,
approach. I think that dominates a lot of
work. So again, that's that's a very
broad wave of a magic wand that requires many other wishes to
come true. But yes, certainly I would like
to see us decenter that criminal justice element slightly and
really elevate that public health element.
And I think there's some great research in this.
I mean, Coral Soda Field and her colleagues work at Lincoln, I
think is really great on public health and probation.
And there are others who work in this space.
And I think that there's a lot to learn from that area as it
relates to criminal justice. Yeah.
Thank you for that, Matt. And.
It's just reminding me times, the probation service has been a
bit more like that, hasn't it? And various IOM projects, for
example, that I've been involved in, there's been more freedom,
more roles to do that kind of work with people, meet them out
in the community more, because actually that's where we're
wanting people to be rehabilitated to the point where
they are in the community. So in some sense is just seeing
people in the the office isn't really the reality, is it?
But great. Thank you for that.
So could you both recommend maybe a book or an article or a
source for our listeners or particularly P Quips who are
listening in this area? Matthew, do you want to go
first? Yeah, more than happy to.
I mean first. And foremost, I would recommend
visiting our project website, rehabilitating-probation.org.uk.
And you'll find there a. Whole series of things that I
think will be of interest in that.
There's that there's a number of links to some podcasts that
we've done. All of the articles published by
the research projects are available through that website
and they're all available for free.
So I would then say with the money you save on accessing
those free articles and go and buy Matt's book now, how is that
the spirit of collegiality there?
But yeah, look at the website. Thank you, Matt.
How about yourself? Obviously, people should buy.
My book no, it's it's incredibly expensive.
So please encourage your library if you're involved at university
to order coffee. But in all seriousness, I think
that in addition to all of the Matthew and his colleagues,
great work on their website and all the resources that are
available. I've joined the Probation
Institute and access loads more resource and resources and but I
think in terms of articles, there's two that I wanted to
recommend. The first one is as a Network of
relationships by Jane Domini, where she talks that she's kind
of fleshes out this notion of thick supervision and what that
looks like in practise relative to thin supervision.
She calls it where it's largely an administrative process.
So I'd highly recommend reading that.
The second one is that there is, there was a report going back to
what I said a minute ago about I think the importance of
centering the needs of people on probation.
There's a really interesting report by Public Health England
that they've changed their name now, but Public Health England
on the health and social care needs of people on probation.
And this is a fascinating insight, I think, into the kind
of issues with which people present when they come on
probation, but also, and I think most importantly, the extent to
which these issues intersect and overlap with one another.
And I think if you really want to understand and get to know a
lot of people on the probation caseload, then research on needs
is the best way to do that. And highly recommend those two
pieces. Thank you, Matt.
We'll make sure we get those. All of those put on the the show
notes. So it's been a really
interesting episode. Thank you both for all your
thoughts that you've shared. Is there anything else that we
haven't covered today that Eve if you wanted to share with our
listeners to? Wish all those people who listen
to this who are undertaking their P quick training, wish
them well and from my experience of speaking to people who stay
in probation, they go on to have long really rewarding careers.
Excellent. Thank you both of you for.
Your insights in this episode. Thanks for listening to
Probation Perspectives Insights into community justice.
We hope our conversation with Professor Matthew Millings and
Dr Matt Tidmarsh offered fresh perspectives on the future
probation and the importance of professional identity from the
insights of the. Rehabilitating Probation project
to the work of the Probation Institute.
We trust this episode has sparked reflection on what it
means to be part of a profession committed to justice,
rehabilitation, and change. If you found this episode
valuable. Please subscribe, leave a review
and share it with colleagues or anyone you think would benefit.
And do let us know your thoughts on who you'd like to hear from
next. A big thank you to Matthew.
And Matt for sharing their expertise and to the team behind
Probation Perspectives for making this podcast possible.
We'll be back soon with more. Conversations that shine a light
on the practise, purpose and people behind the probation and
community justice. Until next time, take care.