What is it about?
A key part of the government's Transforming Rehabilitation reform programme - launched in 2013 - involved the resturcturing of the probation services that support and supervise people recently released from prison or who have been given a community sentence. This paper reflects on how challenging probation managers in one area found the experiencing of leading their organisation as it moved from the public to the private sector during a period of great uncertianty as timelines altered and working relationships amongst colleagues and partners changed.
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Why is it important?
Our paper helps illustrate the dangers of trying to implement profound organisational change without a clear mandate for driving change and without securing the participation and shared ownerhsip of change with leaders within the sector. Here probation managers are charged with overseeing significant restructuring of their organisation (and indeed of their profession) in a process where they feel their professional wisdom has not been sought or meaningfully utilised to engineering change.
Perspectives
Those who work in probation services often do so out of a deep sense of duty and an ambition to help others. A powerful feature in this paper is how probation leaders never lose sight of these values and of their strong sense of occupational duty. This determines that despite deep anxieties about their own personal and professional status they endeavour to prioritise the routine services they deliver to those on supervision and to supporting their staff through an unsettling period of profound change.
Matthew Millings
Liverpool John Moores University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Lost in transition? The personal and professional challenges for probation leaders engaged in delivering public sector reform, Probation Journal, December 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0264550518820120.
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