Lessons from Leicestershire: mentoring, rehabilitation, and local leadership
Yesterday I attended the launch of the new ‘Advance to Go’ mentoring service at a community centre in Leicester.
Funded by the Leicestershire Police and Crime Commissioner Sir Clive Loader and delivered by the probation community rehabilitation company (CRC), the service targets short sentenced prisoners who pose a high risk of reoffending but don’t currently qualify for statutory supervision by probation, matching them with a mentor – including trained peer mentors who have direct experience of the criminal justice system.
The launch comes at the crest of a wave of interest in mentoring for offenders. As a recent Centre for Social Justice report stated, mentoring is moving “from the margins of rehabilitation practice to the mainstream of national policy”. It is set to play a key role in the government’s Transforming Rehabilitation reforms (which will extend supervision to short sentences prisoners for the first time), with Chris Grayling expressing his admiration for peer mentoring approaches in particular – “making good use of the old lags in stopping the new ones”, as he so eloquently put it.
The benefits of peer mentoring are clear, and were described most powerfully at the event by one of the mentors recruited by ‘Advance to Go’. Speaking without notes (and putting Ed Miliband to shame with his powers of recall), he outlined his journey through family breakdown, drug addiction, offending, and repeated spells in prison to a moment where he was able to build a positive relationship with a prison drug worker who had themselves experienced homelessness and addiction. This helped him to begin his recovery journey, and he is now proud to be using his experience to improve the lives of others.
It is an inspiring story that echoes the experiences of our service user forum members. Mentoring works because it recognises the centrality of relationships to effective rehabilitation. It offers constructive and informal support, away from the power imbalance inherent in the relationship with a probation professional who can sanction you, and as one worker on the project stated it “helps offenders to help themselves”.
Peer mentoring also provides people with a realistic role model – an inspiring relationship with somebody that has the lived experience to show that change is possible. It also helps those delivering the service to build confidence and skills to support their own recovery, and there were former peer mentors at the launch who had used the experience to help them move into paid employment.
Peer mentoring, then, is a win-win. It helps the mentor and the mentee, and provides the kind of inspirational and relational service that overstretched frontline professionals can’t hope to achieve alone.
However, it is also important to pause consider what mentoring is not.
It is not a panacea that alone can rehabilitate these short sentenced prisoners, who we know are likely to experience entrenched disadvantage and multiple and complex needs. Nor is it a simple way to cut costs by providing a cheaper service staffed by volunteers – whether they are volunteers or not, mentors must be trained, supported, and provided with the resources required to provide an effective service.
Bearing this in mind, there are some key lessons from the launch of ‘Advance to Go’.
Firstly, as those supporting and running the ‘Advance to Go’ service recognise, mentoring is something that requires investment, and must be linked into a broader system of rehabilitative support to be effective in cutting crime. There were a range of partners engaged at the launch, with representatives from probation, integrated offender management (IOM), community safety partnerships, housing and resettlement services, prisons and the police all pledging their support and thinking about how they could link in with the new service. It is also promising to see that the service will work ‘through the gate’, and builds on established work around mentoring by the Probation Trust (and the Derbyshire Leicestershire Nottinghamshire & Rutland Community Rehabilitation Company, as it has now become).
Secondly (and crucially), the service has strategic buy-in. It is funded as part of the Police and Crime Commissioner’s broader strategy to cut reoffending in Leicestershire, with the PCC helping to bring key partners together, identify gaps in the system where more effective approaches are required, and joint-commissioning new approaches to plug these gaps. As the PCC Sir Clive Loader said himself at the launch, the broader “and crime” side of his role is the most important bit – and this focus is helping to drive important work, including schemes targeting short-sentenced prisoners (the classic ‘revolving door’ group), and the brilliant multi-agency Young Adults Project (YAP!) which is taking a ‘whole system’ view and seeking to drive improved responses for young adults (18-24).
Despite widespread criticism of PCCs, in Leicestershire this leadership and strategic drive is enabling promising developments, which are ahead of the curve in seeking to deliver key aspects of the Transforming Rehabilitation agenda early through local leadership. Whatever happens with the forthcoming changes to offender rehabilitation, and indeed regarding the future of PCCs, there are lessons to learn from Leicestershire.
