UK Probation
Service:
A New Road
Forward
Functional & Technical Briefing
4th October 2010
1. Project Overview
New Road Forward is a social enterprise with the mission of fostering closer and more
efficient collaboration between probation officers and the Third Sector agencies that offer
rehabilitation services to offenders.
New Road Forward (NRF) will develop and license a web portal with two key features of
benefit to the probation service:
1. An online, searchable database of Third Sector agencies that support the
rehabilitation of offenders
2. Automated referral forms to refer offenders to listed agencies quickly and
efficiently.
At the present time, probation officers rely primarily on a small set of agencies they are
familiar with to provide rehabilitation services, which may not be the best option for the
offender. A paper directory of local agencies exists but is generally not used. Referral
forms currently differ between agencies and can take hours to fill in. Each form must be
completed individually and information cannot currently be transferred between forms,
leading to inefficiency and reducing the number of referrals that can be made in a day. By
providing an easily searchable database and automated referral forms, New Road Forward
will increase the efficiency of the probation service and expand the range of services that
can be offered to offenders, thereby improving their prospects of successful rehabilitation.
The purpose of this document is to provide a briefing for the development team in order for
them to understand the purpose of the New Road Forward portal and to be able to
commence development work.
2. Functional Overview
The initial development of New Road Forward will be a low budget operation that aims to
provide the basic functions of the site in fully operational form, in order to be able to run a
pilot study within the probation service that will allow us to attract further funding and
license revenue. Further functionality of the site is anticipated to be added in the future,
therefore ease of code maintenance is critical. New Road Forward will be hosted on
London Net, run by the London Probation Trust, and must therefore use ASP.Net 4 and SQL
2005.
London Net currently pulls offender details from the Delius case management software into
a data pool on London Net in SQL 2005. The New Road Forward service will use data from
this data pool to populate the offender details for the search and referral process. New
Road Forward will also use a unique reference number for each offender (this may be the
National Insurance number in cases where NI number is available, or will be created by the
system).
All probation staff use Internet Explorer version 6 with service pack 2, so the system must
run effectively on this browser. London Net is isolated from the general internet by a
firewall, therefore an external interface must be created on the internet that will allow
agencies to log on and register their details.
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New Road Forward
The foundation of the system will be a database of agencies that provide services to
offenders. This may be populated by transfer from an existing database (e.g. from Start
Here or Clinks), may be manually populated by the NRF admin team or may be populated
by the agencies themselves registering on the system.
Fields to be included in agency details:
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Name of agency
Address of agency
Telephone number of agency
Areas where agency services are provided
o Maybe within x miles of postcode
 Maybe within x miles of each office, in which case addresses of
multiple offices will need to be entered
o Maybe single/multiple boroughs
o Maybe county/regional
o Maybe nation wide
Type of services offered
Are sex offenders accepted?
Are arsonists accepted?
Are both men and women accepted?
Email address where referral forms will be sent
2.1 Searchable Database
As well as the actual database containing agency information, a search utility would need to
be developed on top of this database. This would allow searching for suitable agencies
based on criteria such as postcode, type of service offered, restrictions on type of offender,
date of availability of service and offender profile. Usability of the search function is critical,
as the success of New Road Forward will depend on being able to provide a superior
customer experience – i.e. making life as easy as possible for the probation officers.
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New Road Forward
Probation officer user story – new offender:
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Log on
Select new offender
Pull offender details from London Net data pool (see referral form)
Select service(s) required – e.g. housing, drug rehab, employment/training
Select subsets of services – e.g. supported housing
Select location – by postcode within a range of miles, by
borough/county/region/nation wide
Select whether any issues precluding certain types of housing/employment (e.g. sex
offender/arsonist)
System provides a list of matching services
Select which agencies to refer to (option to see agency details in full)
System autopopulates referral form from offender details entered above
Verify form
Print and/or email
Send & autosave
Also include the option to save the process at any time
Probation officer user story – new referrals for old offender
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Log on
Select old offender
Retrieve offender details
Option to change offender details
Option to change agency services required
Option to change agencies being referred to
Verify form
Print and/or email
Send & autosave
Agency user story – create new agency
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Register as new user
Log on
Create new agency
Select type of agency (option for more than one service)
Enter agency details
Select offenses that preclude offering of services and/or services offered only to
male/female offenders
Save
Make agency details available on the system (these details must then be verified by
NRF admin team before becoming available on the search function)
Probation and agency users will require different levels of access to the system. The
different types of log on access for each type of user are outlined below:
Probation officer:
 Request registration as probation officer user
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New Road Forward
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Create offender
Edit offender
Create referral
View all offenders
Agency staff:
 Register as agency user
 Create agency
 Edit agency
NRF admin:
 Create account
 Create agency
 Verify agency and publish details to search function
 Edit permissions
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New Road Forward
2.2 Automated Referral Forms
Referral form templates will be pdf based. There will be one common form, which must
cover all types of referrals, so some fields may be left blank for some types of referral.
Fields included in the referral form will be:
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Name of offender (compulsory)
Address
Telephone number
Date of birth (compulsory)
Gender (compulsory)
National Insurance number
Current status – on or off license (compulsory, default off)
If on license – date of license expiry
If on license – requirements of license (free text)
Current risk of harm (free text)
Current issues for referral (free text)
Current health (free text)
Vulnerability concerns (free text)
Current benefit status (free text)
Previous work experience/qualifications (free text)
Supporting statement (free text)
Name of referring officer (compulsory)
Email address of referring officer (compulsory)
Phone number of referring officer (compulsory)
The forms could either be emailed out in their entirety to the agencies or printed off for the
record. Details of referrals that have been made will be stored on the system.
Details of offenders will be stored on the system, however these are confidential and must
therefore be encrypted.
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New Road Forward
3. Technical Details
The search utility would need to be scalable to allow for London-wide use of up to 640
probation officers, performing up to 50 searches per day each for the first two years. A
scalable architecture should be put in place to allow for use by all 11,000 front-line
probation officers in the UK, giving a long-term goal of 150,000 searches per day.
No sensitive information about offenders can be stored unencrypted on the system – the
NRF team would need to work with probation to ensure that government data protection
rules are adhered to. Security will be a key aspect and so the system must be secure enough
to allow probation officers to use it. London Probation has offered one of their developers
to liase with the Imperial College development team on this issue.
The system must be compatible with the technology of London Net – i.e. ASP.Net 4.0 and
SQL Server 2005. Additionally, for ease of maintenance by London Probation’s existing
development team, ASP.Net is the preferred development language, although others
compatible with this technology would be considered on request. During development
maintainability of code is a key aspect for consideration.
The following aspects of the system have been identified as being particularly desirable if
these can be incorporated:
Firstly, search should be available by location (within a certain radius of particular
postcode), with a Google maps mash-up of location included in the search results.
Secondly, the system would be able to autopopulate offender details from London Net’s
existing SQL 2005 data pool, rather than the probation officer having to type in these details
manually (although manual entry should also be available).
Thirdly, integration to a mail server will be required for emailing referral forms to agencies.
Ideally this would work so that the referral is sent from the referring officer’s email account.
Finally, a review system for agencies such as a star rating based on a number of criteria
(speed of response, quality of service, helpfulness) with a free text box for other comments
would be a useful feature. However, this should only be available to probation officer users
and details of who submitted the review should only be available to NRF admin.
Completeness and usability of individual aspects should be considered higher priority than
including greater numbers of aspects.
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4. Timescales
4.1 Imperial College Computer Science Project
The following timescales apply to this work, to develop the project in conjunction with a
five-strong group of Computing students at Imperial:
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Early September 2010 – submit project brief to Imperial College Computer Science
department to request Computing group project
September – December 2010 – Elaboration & Construction - work with Computing
team to prepare detailed functional and technical specifications and advise
Computing team on development and testing
January 2011 – end of Computing team involvement
January - May 2011 – Transition – UAT and bug fixing
May – November 2011 – Pilot with few users in Lambeth
November 2011 – May 2012 – Full 6-month pilot & return on investment analysis
with all users in Lambeth.
5. References
Please refer to the following for more information:
New Road Forward Business Plan (2010). NRF_BusinessPlan_v1.0_final.docx
Inside CRM (2008). The Top 10 Open-Source CRM Solutions.
http://www.insidecrm.com/features/top-open-source-solutions-121307/
Imperial College Computer Science MSc (2010).
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/computing/teaching/postgraduate/msc-computingscience/description
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