February was a busy month for all our teams. It’s been particularly good to be able to restart our core local probation inspections – albeit by video link – with a focus on the South West, where both Bristol, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire (BGSW) CRC and the NPS South West region have been receiving virtual visits from our inspection team. Fieldwork in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall CRC will start soon as well. We’ve been completing the fieldwork for our thematic inspection of transition planning by the probation service, for the move to a unified service in June – which we hope to publish in April. Also due for publication, by the end of this month, is our inspection of supervision and services for black, Asian and minority ethnic probation service users (and the views of minority ethnic staff) – on which, I’ll offer reflections in next month’s blog.

On the youth side, the team have been testing out our new standards on resettlement and out-of-court disposal policy and practice in Sheffield and Darlington and preparing for a national thematic inspection of YOT work with black and mixed heritage boys – given increasing concerns about the levels of disproportionality in the youth justice system. We’ve also published an excellent new effective practice guide for YOSs based around case studies of where we’ve found our standards being delivered well.

The government’s four stage roadmap for easing the national Covid-19 lockdown has brought some welcome clarity on the journey back to a ‘new normal’ for all of us.  It will also have been a relief for the probation service, who can now look to ramp up face to face and group delivery again as they go through a second ‘recovery’ process.

We undertook a major national inspection of the progress that the probation service made against their first recovery route-map last autumn and published the results of this thematic last week. We interviewed staff, managers and service leaders in six areas and looked at a large sample of 240 cases, to compare the quality of work that was done with cases that started before the pandemic and during the recovery period from July to September. Perhaps surprisingly, we found that quality was actually higher in our ‘recovery’ sample with a particularly impressive 21 percentage point improvement in the quality of risk of harm planning we found in CRC cases – helped by smaller caseloads and a chance to focus on risk assessment and welfare.

We engaged an independent consultancy, EP:IC, to interview 71 service users and we published a companion report of service users’ views on the recovery period – continuing my commitment to giving the people being supervised by the probation service a greater voice in our inspections. This is now a standard part of all our national thematic inspections and is adding a really rich set of additional evidence to our reports.

As the first recovery phase progressed last summer, we found that most service users started to get some sort of face-to-face contact with probation services – though blended with phone calls, which continued to form a majority of contacts. It looks like this blended approach will continue after the pandemic. Although popular with the service users we spoke to, we urge caution about a switch to a phone-only approach – particularly for delivering behavioural interventions – and recommend an urgent and robust evaluation to test the most effective blend of phone and face-to-face supervision.

Delivery of unpaid work orders and accredited programmes has been difficult during the pandemic, given social distancing restrictions on group work. Neither could be delivered during the first lockdown, but delivery picked up from July and had reached 51 per cent and 62 per cent of pre-pandemic levels by the end of November. This has not stopped significant backlogs developing, with almost a quarter of unpaid work orders reaching the 12-month point without completion by the end of November and further challenges will have followed the latest national lockdown from January, when group work had to be suspended again. I hope the restart of outdoor unpaid work groups in Wales last week means that delivery can start to ramp up again in England before long too.