Samenvatting

It is often assumed that ‘evaluation’ is about judging or assessing a particular piece of practice or intervention, for example after an initial pilot stage to determine whether to continue, or at the end of a programme of work to determine the impact on client behaviour and recidivism. What may be considered less frequently is the importance of integrating evaluation within the ongoing process of offender supervision, or indeed any form of supervision or therapeutic work with people. It is common in pre-qualifying training programmes for students to be required to reflect on their practice as it develops, to be aware of ways in which they could have worked differently, and to be open to supervision and scrutiny by their supervisor or trainer. This could be described as a case-based qualitative approach to learning and evaluation. Once qualified it is less likely that this will be a requirement of ongoing practice and more likely that the practitioner will be asked to submit ‘returns’ or statistics on the ‘outcomes’ of their work with clients, from which judgments are formed about the meeting of overall, quantitative agency aims, objectives and targets.
In the Netherlands, Bas Vogelvang, Professor of Probation, Parole and Safety Policy at Avans University has, together with colleagues, developed a blueprint of an application that can be used by practitioners in a wide range of settings, to simultaneously record their work and to collate data that can be used to evaluate and reflect on the effectiveness of their day to day practice with offenders. This application has been named ‘Dashboard’, in recognition of the advantages of having key information instantly available to the worker on a mobile phone, notebook or laptop as a compass, to guide both their future practice and ongoing professionalization. The application has been designed to offer both the facility to track the progress of the offender and to monitor and evaluate the interventions of the worker. This article offers an overview of the key features of Dashboard with the suggestion that it can provide practitioners with the means to take ownership of, and responsibility for, the development of their own professional practice.