Advance Into Justice | HM Prison & Probation Service

Community Payback Supervisor

Are you looking for a rewarding career where you can motivate and inspire others to change for the better, and build better and safer places to live? One where your personal attributes and transferable skills are more important than qualifications?

Working in a Community Payback role, you’ll play a key part in supporting people on probation make improvements to local communities while they make positive changes to get their lives back on track. It’s varied, meaningful work, with job security, great benefits and career progression opportunities.

Community Payback (CP), previously known as Community Service, is an alternative to a prison sentence for people who have committed a crime.

CP isn’t just an alternative to custody, it’s a way of helping to create better outcomes for people on probation and better communities. As a CP supervisor, you’ll be at the heart of this work, leading small teams to complete their unpaid work hours. You’ll supervise and motivate them to complete a range of manual tasks to pay back for the harm they’ve caused. These tasks could include clearing overgrowth to make public spaces safer, restoring community facilities such as sports halls and playgrounds, planting trees or laying flowerbeds, and litter picking and graffiti removal.

You’ll support and motivate people from different backgrounds to get the most out of their time on CP. You’ll be helping them to:

make positive changes to local communities
access training and development to learn new skills
improve their chances of employment as they make positive changes in their own lives.

On a typical day, you’ll spend up to seven hours supervising a group at a CP unpaid work placement.

There may be a chance to work part-time in some regions. You can discuss this at your interview..

Eligibility

There are no qualification requirements for the Community Payback Supervisor role.

You’ll get all the training you need to help you work effectively and safely with people on probation.

To be a success in the role you will require great people skills, the ability to supervise and guide a group.

In addition it’s important that you hold a driver’s licence as you’ll need to drive one of our CP minibuses to take equipment to and from CP project sites. You may also need to drive people from your group to and from a central pick-up point. A standard driving licence will be fine, but we’d also welcome applications from people who have a D1 licence.

While not essential, we’d love to hear from you if you have a skill or trade such as painting and decorating or carpentry, for example as this will be useful experience to take into the role.

Pay

The national starting pay for the Community Payback Supervisor role is £23,367.

If taking up a role in London, a London Weighting Allowance of £4,126 will be added to your national pay, where applicable, totalling £27,373.

To accommodate people on probation who work or have caring responsibilities, CP projects run 7 days a week and some during the evening. The CP supervisor role therefore includes frequent weekend working, and you may be asked to cover some evenings. You’ll be paid a higher rate for any evening and weekend days you do work.

Benefits

Annual Leave: Annual leave is 25 days on appointment and will increase to 30 days after five years’ service, plus 8 public holidays and service days. Leave for part-time and job share posts will be calculated on a pro-rata basis
Pension: The National Probation Service is covered by the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) run through the Greater Manchester Pension Fund (GMPF). Please visit www.gmpf.org.uk for further information.
Networks: The opportunity to join employee-run networks that have been established to provide advice and support and to enable the views of employees from minority groups to be expressed direct to senior management. There are currently networks for employees of minority ethnic origin, employees with disabilities, employees with caring responsibilities, women employees, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.
Civil Service Benefits: A wide range of other Civil Service benefits including childcare vouchers, a cycle to work scheme and travel loans.

Application process

There are just three steps to apply:

At application we will ask you to upload a CV and complete a 500 word statement of Suitability. Your statement of suitability should address the essential experience criteria outlined in the job description. On succesfulling passing this sift you will then be invited to interview.

Training and progression

Before your start your new role, you will receive paid for training on a range of subjects to help you work effectively and safely with people on probation. This will include the principles of Community Payback, plus training on health and safety, risk awareness, and dealing with challenging behaviour. You will also have full training on any tools your group will need to use, and you will work alongside and shadow an experienced colleague before taking responsibility for supervising a group on your own.

Before you start, you will also have an induction into ways of working in the Probation Service and the Civil Service.

To support your professional development, you’ll have access to a range of Probation Service-related training on topics such as best practice approaches to demonstrating life skills, positive reinforcement and desistance, and substance misuse and domestic abuse awareness.

Prison Officer