In this compelling interview, lived experience consultant Sosa Henkoma (SH) shares his journey through the criminal justice system from childhood exploitation to adult rehabilitation. He reflects on the critical role probation services can play in supporting adult survivors of child exploitation. Speaking candidly with Ann Snowden (AS), SH offers insights into how trauma-informed practice, relational engagement, and the prioritisation of safety, as well as rehabilitation, can transform lives. His testimony underscores the importance of listening to those with lived experience and challenges professionals to rethink how they approach vulnerability and risk.

Intensive Intervention Risk Management Service (IIRMS) is a time-limited enhanced level of input for those who are subject to probation service supervision and present with high risk and a likely personality disorder. In order to understand experiences of delivering or receiving this service and ways in which the service might address need or reduce risk, semi-structured interviews were conducted with all those providing the service ( n = 10) and participants who had accessed the service ( n = 9). Data were analysed using thematic analysis, first by group (provider or recipient) and then together. Themes concerning the ‘purpose of IIRMS’, ‘relational working’, ‘IIRMS experience’, ‘practical challenges’ and ‘outcomes’ were shared across the two participant perspectives whilst ‘engagement and change’ was unique to those accessing the service and ‘future directions’ to those providing the service. Addressing risk and promoting well-being requires an individual focus and flexibility and effective support and supervision for staff.

Social workers with lived experience of incarceration can be more relatable and empathetic, improving their ability to connect and advocate for those they support. However, they face significant barriers to entering the profession, including difficulty obtaining accreditation to work with children, placement requirements, professional association eligibility, and exclusion from employment through criminal history checks and accumulated marginalisation. For women, this marginalisation commonly includes experiences of victimisation, mental health issues, intellectual and cognitive impairments, child protection involvement, substance dependency, and poverty. Their exclusion from social work reduces the profession's ability to best support marginalised people. This article explores these barriers and incorporates the lead author's personal journey from imprisoned student to practising social worker supporting incarcerated women, exploring the personal and broader costs of excluding a criminalised person from entering a profession that espouses social justice and inclusivity. This discussion is positioned in the context of the Transform Lives Program, an innovative, co-created model of service delivery for incarcerated mothers and their children which incorporates mothers’ voices by creating a skilled clinical team, inclusive of staff with lived experience. We challenge the sector to dismantle these barriers and foster inclusive practices that value those with lived experience.

There has been a lot of discussion about incorporating social capital-building opportunities for people on probation. We seek to inform practice on embedding these pathways into probation services. Following a discussion of social capital and its relevance for probation work, we present a one-page social capital-building tool that can be used to identify, assess evidence, plan and commission these resources. The tool has been developed, refined and aligned with the theoretical social capital and desistance literature. In this way, we hope that probation services and practitioners can further their own knowledge and practice around what social capital-building opportunities look like in practice.

Tidmarsh and Uche detail three broad opportunities for professional registration (i.e. increasing confidence in probation, professional identity and values, and enhancing continuous professional development frameworks) and three challenges for professional registration (i.e. organisational readiness, unnecessary bureaucracy, and an imbalance of scrutiny). This practitioner response analyses how the imposition of the probation professional register, and its accompanying policy framework, bring risks to the organisational culture of the probation service that ought to be considered. Furthermore, there are wider needs that the service must overcome to maximise the effectiveness of the register and for staff to buy-in. Despite these risks and needs, there are also many strengths associated with professional registration. Although the Probation Professional Registration Policy Framework has now been implemented, it is still in its infancy. This discussion comes at a time when the organisation itself is still establishing internal structures to support the rollout and so encouraging staff to buy-in to the new policy framework is essential.

The Northern Ireland Social Care Council, as the social work regulator and the Probation Board for Northern Ireland outline how probation officers, as qualified social workers, have been regulated from the outset of regulation for social work across the UK in 2001. The regulatory landscape in which probation operates in NI provides the backdrop for exploration of the impact of regulation for probation professional identity, practice and strategic influence. The value of working to professional standards that carry regulatory authority in making decisions about fitness to practise from a risk perspective requires focus but is not the full story. The added value of regulation in supporting professional standards of conduct and practice is critical to the registration debate. We will tell the story of probation officers who have used the Professional in Practice Framework for Social Work in NI as a quality and governance benchmark to demonstrate and provide assurance of safe, effective and high-quality practice. Workforce regulation provides opportunity to address the challenges of risk and protection from a wider perspective of ensuring that people with the right knowledge, skills and values are supported to work in partnership across the justice and related systems in making communities safer.

In England and Wales probation was regarded as social work for most of the twentieth century, but some thirty years ago the government rejected this conception. In the context of continuing deliberations about the purpose and character of probation, it is timely to revisit its relationship to social work. It is argued that a principal reason for the politically motivated repudiation of social work was its associations with care, but this rested on confusion about care and a comparable misunderstanding of the concept of control. Appreciation of social context is argued to be fundamental to the work of probation. Social capital is no less important than human capital in achieving desistance. The skills and values of social work continue to inform probation because they match up to the demands of the job. Reaffirming connections between the professions would enhance the policy and practices of both.

The Humberside Enhanced Resettlement Service (HERS) was a psychologically informed, supported accommodation service for people on probation whose presentation is consistent with personality disorder. An evaluation, utilising semi-structured interviews, identified four themes of experience for people on probation and their probation practitioners who worked with HERS: (1) relationships; (2) practical support; (3) expectations, and (4) risk. This suggested that providing psychologically led supported accommodation enhances therapeutic relationships between professionals and people on probation, which may assist in reducing reoffending. Conclusions are tentative due to methodological limitations and future research should employ more robust methods to assess the impact of similar psychologically informed supported accommodation projects.