I spent eight years in the probation service when the traditional duty to ‘advise, assist and befriend’ still applied. The words, taken from the 1907 Probation of Offenders Act, described the approach of probation for most of the 20th century. The Morison Committee (Morison, 1962) had reaffirmed the probation role as one of treatment, rehabilitation and reformation. Latterly, public protection, risk assessment and offender management have become the words used by government and the leaders of the service. This chapter traces that change and examines the place of social work in the modern service.

Although in a 1970 ballot the National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO) rejected the idea of joining the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), social work training remained the recognised route into the service until 1997, when specific training for probation was introduced by the Home Office. Yet social work methods are still used by many probation practitioners who have not wholly accepted the new culture.

Advise, assist and befriend

The service discharged its role through supervision and one-to-one contact with the offender. The nature of supervision was based on insights derived from psychology and psychiatry. In hindsight, it was naive to expect that weekly or less-frequent visits to the probation office for reporting sessions were likely in themselves to lead to rehabilitation.

The introduction of community service changed the focus of probation. The service became responsible for a range of non-custodial sentences, including day training centres, bail hostels and supervised suspended sentences. This greatly expanded the responsibilities of the service and widened the range of staff employed. While those on probation were supervised in the usual way, the responsibility for community sentences meant that social work skills were not the only approach in use.

The core role of the probation officer, the relationship with the offender, came under scrutiny after the IMPACT experiment (Intensive Matched Probation and After Care Treatment) (Folkard et al, 1976). This looked at the effectiveness of intensive supervision by officers with limited caseloads, and tested the long-standing claims of the service that more could be achieved if workloads were reduced. The results were disappointing, showing no significant differences between those subject to intensive supervision and those in the control group.