Introduction

One-to-one supervision of those on probation or licence is both a core element in probation and also relatively hidden work (Shapland et al, 2013). The supervisor is (usually) alone in a room with the supervisee and any monitoring or managing tends to be on the basis of perusal of records afterwards. Yet, if the aim is to promote desistance and rehabilitation, or to increase reintegration, it is the interaction with the supervisee that bears the key load in accomplishing this (Dowden and Andrews, 2004; Raynor et al, 2014). A key aspect for promoting quality in one-to-one probation supervision is hence to focus on what practitioners actually do with those they are supervising during supervision sessions.

The Skills for Effective Engagement and Development (SEED) training package was developed in the United Kingdom by the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) for practising probation staff in England and Wales. The package aimed to provide staff with additional training and continuous professional development in skills they could use in supervising offenders, particularly in one-to-one meetings, drawing from research on effective probation delivery and on desistance. This was a new initiative that aimed not to teach individual skills or ‘tools’, or just to provide refresher courses, but to enable staff to draw on their existing knowledge to provide the most appropriate supervision for the individual supervisee and to plan the course of that supervision. Current knowledge of desistance suggests that an offender-centred, individually tailored approach to supervision is the most beneficial (Sapouna et al, 2015). A pilot of the SEED package was undertaken by NOMS in England in 2011–12, evaluated by ourselves. The training was subsequently implemented by the Romanian probation service and evaluated in three areas of Romania, again by ourselves. This enabled us to: test whether a model developed and piloted in England would be suitable in a different EU jurisdiction; explore whether the model needed to be adapted for use in this jurisdiction; and test whether the approach developed by the University of Sheffield to evaluate the model, in England, could also be applied in another EU jurisdiction.