Supervision skills and practices

Increasingly, studies are beginning to show that the quality of skills probation practitioners use can affect the processes and outcomes of offender supervision. Through much of the mid-1990s and until recently, the focus of empirical and theoretical interest in the field of offender rehabilitation in England and Wales has primarily been on the implementation of the ‘effective practice’ or ‘what works’ approach that emerged in the mid-1990s, and on group work programmes (Raynor 2007). Insufficient attention has been paid to the nature and impact of the skills front line probation practitioners use to implement the approach – whether in groups or in individual casework (Dowden and Andrews 2004).