Ms Una Doyle:

I thank the Deputy for the question. As mentioned in the opening address, there are three key areas for us in relation to that training for our staff in service.

I will take a step back. In recent years, probation officer entry requirements have led to us having an upskill or uplift whereby all new probation officers coming into the system have to be qualified in social work and registered with CORU. The relevance of that is that they would work from a professional base around social justice and the values pertaining to the social work profession. They are strong in terms of the ethical requirement around that. We would be naive to think that wipes out all unconscious or subconscious bias but it puts our staff interfacing with the clientele in a positive place to start off with. Similarly, throughout their time in probation, staff have access to continuous professional development and, as we referred to earlier, we have been doing a lot of work around cultural awareness training. We have been revisiting that in the last couple of years.

Another area we have been revisiting in the last year has been with the assistance with the Travellers in Prison Initiative, TPI. We brought the ethnic identifier into our data collection systems. While staff were given guidance on how to engage with their clientele around that, people felt uncomfortable and were not sure if they were being offensive or whether people were happy to be asked these questions. Our training is around supporting our staff to understand the importance of asking the question. If we do not ask the question we cannot get the data to inform service delivery. It is also to help them to understand and develop skills in how best to ask those questions in an appropriate manner. That is important for our staff.

We prepare pre-sentence reports for courts at all levels nationwide. While we work at an assessment being about an individual and his or her offence at a given time so it is around the uniqueness and them taking responsibility for that, we also set it in a context. That is one of the added values we bring to the court process. That said, we are looking, as Mr. Wilson referred to, at updating our guidelines to ensure they are culturally sensitive and more informative for the court, particularly around issues for the Travelling community or ethnic minorities.