Learning on the job? Exploring first-year experiences of newly-qualified criminal justice social workers in Scotland
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0264550516682106 |
| Author | Scott Grant |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
Learning on the job?
2017, Vol. 64(1) 33–49
ª The Author(s) 2016
Exploring first-year
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DOI: 10.1177/0264550516682106
experiences of
journals.sagepub.com/home/prb
newly-qualified
criminal justice social
workers in Scotland
Scott Grant
Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
Abstract
Little is known about the experiences of newly-qualified criminal justice practitioners as
they enter the field of community justice for the first time. This article reports on isolated
data on newly-qualified criminal justice social workers who participated in a national
mixed-method study of readiness to practice in Scotland. Findings suggest that new
staff felt well-prepared for practice, but many felt employers failed to provide
adequate support and development opportunities. Participants report that dis-
proportionate emphasis is placed on workload management during professional
supervision sessions where learning needs and emotions are often underplayed.
Professional guidance is often sought from informal sources.
Keywords
criminal justice social workers, practice cultures, professional development, profes-
sional socialization, readiness, training
Introduction
Just how community-based criminal justice practitioners are constituted ought to
matter more to criminal justice policy-makers and scholars of punishment. When
Corresponding Author:
Scott Grant, Glasgow Caledonian University – Psychology, Social Work and Allied Health, Cowcaddens
Road, Glasgow G4 0BA, UK.
Email: scott.grant@gcu.ac.uk
34
Probation Journal 64(1)
‘reducing reoffending’ is declared a national policy objective in most European
jurisdictions, and when numbers of those made subject to community sanctions and
measures continue to rise at unprecedented rates (see Robinson and McNeill,
2016), frontline staff are left with the practical and, some might add, political task of
translating penal policy into everyday penal practice (Garland, 2001). Meanwhile,
criminologists continue to wrestle with the implications of ‘mass incarceration’ in
contemporary society, when new and emerging evidence suggests that ‘mass
supervision’ is starting to challenge the supremacy of the prison as the primary mode
of penal punishment (see Phelps, 2016; Robinson, 2016). Faced with this excep-
tional penal tilt, community-based criminal justice staff, i.e. those who work in
organizations tasked with delivering various forms of penal sanction in community
sites, remain significantly under-researched when compared to staff situated within
prison settings (for example, see Crewe, 2011; Lerman and Page, 2012; Liebling,
2000). Indeed, few empirical studies focus specifically on those who work in areas
of community punishment (Burke and Davies, 2011), leaving scholars with limited
understandings of who these staff are and how they come to be.
Nudging the analytical lens away from prison-based staff towards community-
based practitioners requires a starting point. In many ways it seems logical and
practical to begin with what criminal justice practitioners do in their everyday work,
as this tends to il uminate what matters in community-based practice. But this article is
not about how criminal justice work is done or the effectiveness of it, as these aspects
are covered more extensively elsewhere (see Burke and Davies, 2011; Burnett and
McNeil , 2005; McNeil , 2006; McNeill et al., 2013). Focusing on what practi-
tioners do is important, but this underplays the potential value of understanding, in
more depth, just how and through what means these staff become adept, skilled,
knowledgeable and therefore effective in their role. Underscoring this, we already
have fertile literature which supports the proposition that practitioner skill-sets, prac-
tice cultures and worker attributes help to shape approaches to practice that influence
desistance processes (moving away from criminal activity) in positive and meaningful
ways (see Durnescu, 2014; McCulloch, 2005; McNeill, 2006; Weaver, 2015).
However, these studies tend to focus on experienced workers, i.e. those who have
cultivated their practice through time. We know much less about working practices
and arrangements that enable new staff to reach these levels of expertise in their new
roles. This article will therefore attempt to address a gap in our knowledge and
understanding of what occurs at the start of criminal justice careers, revealing how
newly-qualified staff are currently supported and developed as new professionals
within a Scottish context. This article wil report on a subset of data on newly-qualified
criminal justice social workers (NQCJSWs) drawn and analysed from a larger
national study of newly-qualified social workers in Scotland (see Grant et al., 2016).
Existing research on newly-qualified criminal justice
practitioners
Scarcely anything is known in Scotland about how NQCJSWs assimilate into their
new roles within the criminal justice field. This matters because professional
Grant
35
socialization is recognized in many fields as being a fundamental process for new
employees: essentially a period during which new staff become familiar with deeply
entrenched occupational cultures that can shape practice and workplace beha-
viours in important ways (Egan, 1989; Page, 2005). Indeed, from the limited
research we have on probation staff (mostly from studies in England and Wales), it
follows that working environments seem to have a notable influence on the nature
and quality of criminal justice practice by shaping how this type of work is carried
out, as well as having significant impact on occupational identities of those staff
based in sites of community justice (Deering, 2010; Eadie and Winwin Sein, 2004;
Graham, 2016; Mawby and Worrall, 2013; Robinson, 2013; Robinson et al.,
2015). Interestingly, literature on other types of criminal justice personnel suggests
that newly-qualified members or new recruits undergo socialization processes that
seem to influence praxis in meaningful and important ways (for police, see Don-
nelly, 2014; Peace, 2006; for legal personnel, see Rowe et al., 2012; Westwood,
2015; for prison officers, see Griffin et al., 2014). Indeed, as the reader will soon
discover, the findings presented in this article suggest that professional socializa-
tion, if read as a process of inducting new employees into the way things are done,
appears to occur in Scottish criminal justice working environments through largely
informal and unstructured means.
The only UK-wide study to explore experiences of newly-qualified practitioners
within probation and social work settings was conducted by Peter Marsh and John
Triseliotis over 20 years ago. Indeed, with the absence of significant contemporary
data, it might be useful here to reflect on these findings (albeit dated) for the pur-
poses of this article. This research was ostensibly the first major analysis of how
social workers and probation officers (n¼714) were prepared for, and supported
in, professional practice in the mid-1990s (data collected between 1992 and
1995). The chief finding was that around 85% of participants felt well prepared for
practice. Marsh and Triseliotis (1996) found that social work education (incorpor-
ating probation training at the time) had more positive effects on levels of confi-
dence and preparedness expressed by criminal justice practitioners than staff based
in other fields of social work, e.g. community care or children and families. But
whilst feeling ‘prepared’ was noted by many respondents, good quality induction
and initial support for newly-qualified practitioners was lacking in the 1990s.
Approximately 37% of participants reported having no formal period or process of
induction (for those that did, the arrangements were often described as ad hoc or
makeshift). Marsh and Triseliotis (1996) state that: ‘whilst a minority of social (work)
services departments offered an explicit programme of induction . . . the majority
appeared to have no policy on the matter and no thought-out packages’ (p. 172).
And whilst supervision of staff (often done by senior social workers) is typically
recognized as being crucial for reflective practice and professional development
(Kadushin and Harkness, 2014), Marsh and Triseliotis (1996) found that ‘a sig-
nificant number of newly qualified staff experienced their supervision as totally
instrumental in nature by focusing wholly, or almost wholly, on accountability’ (p.
154). Around 85% of newly-qualified practitioners said they got significantly more
support and guidance from informal contact with colleagues in their teams than from
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Probation Journal 64(1)
managers. Interestingly, Marsh and Triseliotis (1996: 136) found that participants
perceived criminal justice working arrangements as overly-bureaucratic and pro-
cess driven: ‘there is a strong feeling that professional practice is becoming con-
verted into a more technical or administrative process’. They conclude by
suggesting that newly-qualified social workers might be: ‘ready to practise when
they arrive in their new jobs, but they are not fully competent to practise’ (p. 207).
Whilst Marsh and Triseliotis (1996) provide a rare snapshot of how newly-
qualified criminal justice practitioners experienced employment in the 1990s,
more recent scholars highlight that similar research into lived experiences of com-
munity justice staff is still noticeably sparse (Nellis, 2003; Treadwell, 2006).
However, findings from a small but...
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