© British Association of Social Workers
The probation service and the press: the curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Meryl Aldridge is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Studies, University of Nottingham. Her main teaching and research interest is the news media; she has also provided sociology teaching for the MA in Social Work/CQSW programme.
Correspondence to: Meryl Aldridge, School of Social Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD.
Summary
The preoccupation with adverse media coverage in many sectors of social work is not shared by the probation service. On the contrary: increasing resources are being devoted to trying to raise its profile in both national and local news media. Based on an analysis of press coverage and interviews with staff involved in probation external relations work, the paper opens with an examination of a number of incidents which might have been expected to result in unsolicited negative coverage but did not get taken up. What parallels can be drawn between national press reporting of the controversial child murder trials involving local authority social services and the only probation equivalent: the Colin Evans case? Pro-active news management by the service both locally and nationally is then discussed and, in the final section, the likely success of this strategy given the existing media treatment of the probation service is considered.