September 2013 49 Peter Raynor Pamela Ugwudike Swansea University, Wales Skills and Training in British Probation: A Tale of Neglect and Possible Revival ATTENTION TO SPECIFIC practice skills in the training of probation officers in Britain has been inconsistent, variable, and even haphazard. (The following comments apply mainly to England and Wales: Scotland has no separate Probation Service and uses Criminal Justice Social Workers instead.) Like most wel- fare services in Britain, the Probation Service enjoyed a period of major expansion and professionalization during the third quarter of the twentieth century, and people seek- ing appointment as probation officers had to receive appropriate training, either on the small courses run by the Home Office (the responsible government department at that time) or, increasingly, in the rapidly-expanding university social work courses. The Home Office courses were specifically for proba- tion; the university courses were increasingly wedded to the idea of social work as a generic profession, and offered probation as a minority option with varying degrees of specialization. By way of illustration, one of the authors of this article was sponsored by the Home Office at the beginning of the 1970s to train as a probation officer on a university social work course, in which the main elements of special- ization were practical placements in probation teams and 10 lectures on criminology. He joined the course expecting to receive at the end of it a Home Office Letter of Recognition, but by the time the end came two years later the social work profession had succeeded in introducing a new generic qualification, the Certificate of Qualification in Social Work, and rather to his surprise he was awarded one of these instead. In Scotland the process of unification went further and the separate Probation Service ceased to exist: Criminal Justice Social Workers there train on social work courses with specialist input. In England and Wales the unification process helped to fuel decades of debate about genericism versus specialism, practical training versus academic knowledge (sometimes presented as a choice between teaching social work or teaching about social work), and whether the Probation Service should be seen as part of the criminal justice system or part of the Welfare State (of course it was both all along). Much of this discussion and debate had little to do with the practicalities of probation work or its effectiveness (largely undemon- strated at the time). Many of the leaders of the profession, like many of the university social work teachers, were enthusiastic adherents of the theories of psychodynamic social case- work that had reached Britain from the United States, and many of their students, particularly after the 1960s, added critical social theory and concerns about poverty and social justice to the mixture. By the 1980s most universities that trained social workers were also training probation officers on the same courses, and the Conservative government of the time became concerned that training probation officers on social work courses made them too left-wing, too lacking in specialist knowledge, and not “tough” enough. One Home Secretary (the Minister in charge of the Home Office) tried to abolish probation officer training completely. Eventually these political debates led to the situation we have today, in which probation officer training is separate from social work training and offered by only three universities, largely by distance learning, and most of the universities that carry out research on probation work do not provide initial training for any probation officers. Throughout this period the question of practice skills was largely left to supervisors of practical placements, who became known as “practice teachers” and were experienced probation officers but could be adherents of a variety of different models of practice. The psy- chodynamic tradition placed a useful emphasis on the quality of relationships and on paying attention to what offenders said, but it also tended to assume that insight alone would bring about change in thinking and behavior, and it understated the need to help offenders learn new ways of thinking and behaving. Ideas about more effective ways of working based on social learning theory eventually entered the probation field from psychologists such as Philip Priestley and James McGuire, whose book Social Skills and Personal Problem Solving appeared in 1978 (Priestley, McGuire, Flegg, Hemsley, & Welham, 1978) and was an imme- diate hit in probation services, backed up by their own short courses. These inputs were generally at the level of post-qualification and in-service training: A few academics and train- ers tried to introduce skill-centered training to basic qualifying courses for social workers and probation officers (see, for example, Raynor & Vanstone, 1984), but the necessary small-group work was hard to sustain with the limited resources available to most social work courses. By the time British probation became com- mitted to evidence-based practice and “What Works” in the 1990s, this was seen as mainly to do with cognitive-behavioral group pro- grams and the skills needed to deliver them.