Recommendation 36

125. The Probation Service is working to attract and retain a strong and diverse workforce: supporting every individual to continually build their skills, whilst ensuring they feel valued for their work. 126. We have injected extra funding of more than £155 million a year to deliver more robust supervision, recruit more staff, and reduce caseloads to keep the public safer and we are beginning to see the results of our focus on recruitment and retention. The Probation Service saw an increase of 9.8% across all Probation grades in the last 12 months, including for Senior Probation Officers (9.2%) and Probation Officers (6.3%), following centrally run recruitment for key grades supporting frontline staff. 7 Review of the Dynamic Framework of the National Probation Service - Richard Oldfield.pdf (clinks.org) and The voluntary sector's experience of the probation reform programme - the commissioning of day one services_0.pdf (clinks.org) 127. We continue to focus efforts on targeted recruitment to key operational roles, demonstrated by having recruited over 4,000 trainee Probation Officers between 2020- 21 and 2022-23. We anticipate this will start to directly impact on the reduction of caseloads. 128. In September 2023, we also launched a new brand campaign across HMPPS to promote the different roles available and to highlight the nature of the work undertaken across HMPPS. Its overall aim is to improve recruitment and retention by increasing awareness and boosting consideration of these roles, particularly in challenging areas. The campaign was targeted around ten specific locations in Greater London predominantly, plus Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire. There are positive indications that we are building greater ‘front of mind’ awareness and consideration of our probation roles as; • Website searches for probation jobs rose almost fivefold from 3,206 before the campaign to 16,000 during the duration of the campaign. • There were also significant uplifts in people applying for our roles. Job applications for Probation Services officers were up 76% in the areas receiving brand campaign support. 129. We recognise that in many areas, workloads remain too high. It is a priority for the MoJ to address this and ensure practitioners have manageable workloads. Furthermore, we are scoping other pay measures to support increased demands in probation both in terms of availability of existing staff through incentivisation and to enhance recruitment and retention. 130. An updated Recruitment and Retention Strategy for the Probation Service was published internally in May 2023. The strategy champions recruitment and retention equally and profiles initiatives being delivered across Probation to increase recruitment, improve retention, and reduce workload pressures. 131. Efforts include encouraging agency staff and leavers to return to the Probation Service on permanent terms, offering financial support to incentivise staff to move permanently to areas with the most significant staffing challenges, and launching a Probation Alumni scheme in January 2024 to encourage recent leavers back into the service. 132. We recognise that while the steps taken to boost recruitment are positive, this has brought in a large group of inexperienced new staff. This is why we are also focusing on improving the training offer available to practitioners, as set out in our response to JHAC37. J