Introduction – evaluation then and now

One of the authors, remembering their early years as a newly qualified probation officer in the 1980s, recounts that on their ‘patch’ there were many Asian boys, aged 14 to 15, getting into offending. Supervising them as a White female seemed remote and unhelpful so they felt a group work approach might be more effective. After finding an Asian male social worker to co-work the group, approval was sought from local managers. They asked how much it would cost, decided the budget could afford it and left the author and co-worker to get on and plan the programme.

With hindsight it seems astonishing that no questions were asked about whether the proposed approach could be shown to work or how it was to be evaluated. The group appears to have been successful, attendance remained high throughout the 10 evenings and the boys participated enthusiastically. The author cannot be any more certain than this because they did not evaluate the programme. Looking back, although professionally exciting and creative for the workers involved, there was little protection for group members in terms of tried and tested methods of intervention. A great deal was learnt from the experience but this learning was not shared beyond immediate colleagues and it did not contribute to the development of practice more widely. This was a missed opportunity.

In contrast, the principle of evaluation is now largely accepted as an essential component of evidence-based practice. Practitioners will need to be evaluating their own work with individual offenders and may find themselves contributing to the development and evaluation of new initiatives. However, evaluating the impact of work with offenders is complex and practitioners may, at times, wonder how they can realistically contribute to this process. This chapter is very much an introduction to evaluation with a view to encouraging the practitioner to feel more confident about evaluating their own practice with offenders and also to read and make use of published research. It begins by exploring the historic lack of evaluation of work with offenders before outlining the benefits to the offender, particularly in terms of ‘ending well’, but also for the practitioner and service delivery as a whole.