As part of their attempts to re-package probation supervision as 'punishment in the community' and concerned with risk assessment and the protection of the public, recent Conservative and Labour governments abolished social work training for probation offi cers and, over the last 10 years have sought to recruit trainees from a wider base than previously and train them in these new objectives. This study looks at the attitudes of two cohorts of trainees over a range of issues and concludes that they may be more 'traditional' in terms of these attitudes than government may have wished.

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In this article, we discuss the impact of changes to the organisational structure of probation on the legitimacy of probation practice. In particular, we explore how the division of probation into the National Probation Service (NPS) and Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) could affect the self‐legitimacy felt by probation practitioners in both organisations and the implications for probation of a possible lack of overall legitimacy post‐Transforming Rehabilitation (TR). This article is based on empirical research exploring the views of probation staff of the (then) impending changes introduced via TR and reflections on what has happened since.

This article provides a critical perspective on the political and policy history of probation in England and Wales to develop a better understanding of how TR came to be. TR was only the latest act in a longstanding process of changing probation to fit ideological ‘flavours’, and we suggest that it is the hidden nature of probation work in combination with a lack of public legitimation work by probation institutions and probation staff that has placed probation in such a vulnerable position.

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