Paul Senior: An Editor Retires
| Author | Dave Ward |
Only Paul could pull it off! For some time I had been aware that Paul Senior had been planning to organise an extended ‘conversation’ in his favourite Lakeland hotel for colleagues and friends from his career in probation. I had hinted my enthusiasm to be invited and hoped...
A better event it could not have been. Convening in the snowy depths of January 2016, it was a privilege to spend two days relaxed and quality time based in the impressive Georgian Heaves Mansion, now character-full country house hotel, with a group of colleagues who, amongst them, shared well over 300 years of involvement in probation, variously as practitioners, managers, trainers, consultants, researchers and academics. Freely sharing knowledge, experience and understanding, and debating vigorously, the papers in this edition are the product of conversations at Heaves and the continuing interchanges that took place in the weeks that followed. In typical forthright style, Paul led and facilitated our discussions with a strong eye on the production of this edition, ensuring that we did not descend, all too easily, into pessimistic conversation about the current woes of probation but, rather, to focus on the themes that had brought us together, Imagining Probation in 2020: hopes, fears and insights - and to look forward.
As a precursor to the final edition of the British Journal of Community Justice under Paul’s editorship and to his Valedictory Lecture on his retirement from Sheffield Hallam University, on 28th April 2016, the event at Heaves had been a stimulating and inspiring introduction, showing how well-honed knowledge and experience has much to say to the future. That Paul should organise this was entirely apt – our contributions and the direction we took representing, perhaps, a fitting cameo of Paul’s own career.
Paul Senior became Professor of Probation Studies at Sheffield Hallam University in 1996 following a career in probation beginning in 1977, which included 11 years as a Joint Appointment between South Yorkshire Probation Service and Sheffield Hallam University, responsible for the training of new probation officers. Over that time, developing his progressive and critical credentials across the span of criminal justice in which probation officers practised, he worked extensively in the youth offending field, with courts, with the legal professions and in prison resettlement and with the voluntary and community sector. He established himself, through...
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