‘I don't like this job in my front room’: Practising probation in the COVID-19 pandemic
| Author | Sam Ainslie,Jake Phillips,Chalen Westaby,Andrew Fowler |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02645505211050867 |
‘I don’t like this job
in my front room’:
Practising probation
in the COVID-19
pandemic
Jake Phillips, Chalen Westaby,
Sam Ainslie, and
Andrew Fowler
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Abstract
The Exceptional Delivery Model for probation practice in England and Wales meant
that probation practitioners predominantly worked from home during the COVID-19
pandemic, engaging and supervising service-users remotely. This article explores the
impact of the Exceptional Delivery Model on staff and their practice. We begin by
considering how probation practice changed because of the implementation of the
Exceptional Delivery Model and the impact that this has had on probation staff.
The reality of probation work is brought into perspective when there are children in
the home and the demarcation of work and home life is easily blurred, especially
when considered through the lens of ‘emotional dirty work’. We then present analysis
of interviews with 61 practitioners and managers in the National Probation Service.
The interviews were primarily focused on staff wellbeing and emotional labour as
opposed to the impact of the pandemic, but participants regularly raised the pan-
demic in discussions. We focus on three key themes: the challenges of working
from home and remote communication, experiences of managing risk through door-
step visits and the spill over of probation work into personal lives. The article con-
cludes by considering what the findings tell us about probation work and potential
future implications.
Corresponding Author:
Jake Phillips, Department of Law and Criminology, Sheffield Hallam University, Heart of the Campus,
Sheffield, S10 2BQ, UK.
Email: Jake.phillips@shu.ac.uk
Article The Journal of Communit
y
and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
2021, Vol. 68(4) 426–443
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02645505211050867
journals.sagepub.com/home/prb
Keywords
Probation practice, emotions, dirty work, pandemic, COVID-19
Introduction
On 23 March 2020, England and Wales entered a period of lockdown to bring the
COVID-19 pandemic under control. The message was simple ‘Stay at home!’. The
National Probation Service (NPS) responded by implementing an Exceptional
Delivery Model (EDM) for England and Wales reducing face-to-face contact
between people on probation and their supervising officer (HMPPS, n.d.). This
required most probation staff to work from home, halted unpaid work, the delivery
of accredited programmes and most court-related activities (Phillips, 2020).
Face-to-face contact was prioritised for service-users who posed a very high risk of
harm, prison leavers and those without access to a phone who were seen
face-to-face in the office and through doorstep visits (HMI Probation, 2020: 23).
This accounted for around 14% of service-users (Russell, 2020) and so most super-
vision was conducted remotely by telephone or video calls (HMPPS, n.d.). This
resulted in a fundamental change to how probation is practiced and impacted
upon probation staff already working in a challenging environment. The aim of
this article is to elucidate how staff in the NPS experienced these changes.
How did probation work change and how did it impact
on staff?
In giving evidence to the Justice Select Committee, senior probation leaders recognised
that probation work significantly changed during this period although there was reti-
cence around acknowledging a substantive increase in workload (A Rees, 2020).
Despite this, others suggest practitioners’work inevitably increased because of the
need to conduct additional risk assessments and cover for absent colleagues due to
COVID-related sickness (Lomas, 2020). Moreover, while remote service-user supervi-
sion was necessary, concerns around the effectiveness of telephone supervision resulted
in a direction to double the frequency of supervision appointments at the beginning of
the lockdown (HMPPS, n.d.). With no workload compensation granted to practitioners,
this created additional pressures for probation staff:
The workload has actually increased as a result of the exceptional delivery model,
because it requires a higher frequency of contact with clients –albeit not all face-to-face
contact, but a higher frequency of contact all the same. (Lomas, 2020)
Having to do complex and challenging probation work from home resulted in
considerable burdens to practitioners. Whilst some practitioners who felt able to
work successfully at home welcomed this, demarcating their work and home life
and enjoying spending more time with their family, others struggled with this new
way of working (HMI Probation, 2020). For some, home working resulted
Phillips et al.427
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