Practice and Practitioners in 2020?
| Author | John Deering |
Quite apart from the organisational and governance impact of Transforming Rehabilitation (TR), which has, of course seen the destruction of the unified public sector probation service, the TR changes have called into question something even more fundamental to probation practice. Who will be probation practitioners in this uncertain future and what will they see as the purpose of that practice? What will be their value base , why will they join; will they see the job as akin to a vocation aimed at providing ‘help’ in the broad sense, or as something altogether more basic, managerial and concerned with law enforcement?
Addressing such questions requires crystal-ball gazing, but there have perhaps been some features of the past 25 years or so that might provide a few pointers. It seems to me that successive governments have, since the 1991 Criminal Justice Act made the probation order ‘punishment in the community’, wished to change the ethos and practices of the service, a process that has fallen into a recognisable trajectory that culminated in TR. Quite apart from governance, the attempt to change practice included the intention to do this via changing practitioners, which began with the abolition of social work training in the mid-1990s by Home Secretary Michael Howard. Howard’s intention was to ‘toughen up’ probation by recruiting largely ex-forces personnel who were not to be professionally trained. This was presumably based on a stereotypical assumption that such recruits would necessarily bring toughness, whatever that meant, to the job. This effort failed, as probation services refused to recruit non-social work trained personnel in the period before the incoming Labour government created the Diploma in Probation Studies (DiPS). The DiPS itself was controversial in some quarters due to its non-social work base, but there is evidence that these new recruits came into the job and training with the same underlying value base as had probably been the case for their social work predecessors (Annison, 2006; Deering, 2010).
Various theoretical and empirical studies have investigated and debated ‘probation values’ in recent decades (e.g. Annison, 2006; Annison et al., 2008; Deering, 2011; Farrow, 2004; Nellis & Gelsthorpe, 2003; Robinson & McNeill, 2004; Williams, 1995) whilst a few others have looked at trainees specifically in terms of their values and why they joined the probation service (Annison, 2006; Deering, 2010). In brief, these values coalesced around a belief in people’s ability to change and the legitimate and potentially effective role of probation practice in facilitating that change. Trainees and experienced practitioners alike shared these values, which were to be operationalised via the professional relationship that was seen to be the basis of good practice. The relationship should be...
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