Introduction

Professionalising Initial Police Training and Education in the West Midlands region

This case study sets out to overview the journey undertaken for the transformation of initial police training in the West Midlands. For many years, across England and Wales the Initial Police Learning and Development Programme (IPLDP) was delivered within Police Forces by their own trainers to all new recruits. This comprised of 3-4 months fulltime, ‘upfront’ learning, following which trainees would be deployed across the various policing functions supported by a Tutor Constable. Whilst deployed, they would complete portfolios of competence, progressing through Independent Patrol Status (IPS) within 12 months and ultimately achieving Full Operational Competence (FOC) at the end of their 2-year probation.

The Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) set out the long-term professional development strategy for policing in ‘Policing Vision 2025’ . This articulated the police service’s own plans for transformative change across the entirety of policing and identified the development of an improved service for the public as its core professional aspiration. In particular, the vision emphasised the critical reliance of the police service upon the quality of its people, and established the workforce principle that policing needs ‘to be delivered by a professional workforce equipped with the skills and capabilities necessary for policing in the 21st century’.

In order to realise this strategy, in 2016 the College of Policing (CoP), the professional body representing policing in the UK, published a consultation document entitled the ‘Police Education Qualifications Framework’ (PEQF). This contained several ambitions to ‘professionalise policing’, such as aligning each rank within policing to achievement of a stated educational level, and for policing to become a graduate occupation. The latter represented a sea-change in initial police training since, until then to become a police officer required only qualification to Level 3. The ambition was that by 2020 all IPLDP programmes would be replaced by new entry routes into policing.

In their document ‘PEQF PC Initial Entry Routes – Strategic Overview’ the College of Policing stated that there was a need to develop a new framework for the professional education of the police constable to:

• Develop a professional infrastructure • Achieve national standardisation • Get the professional level right • Develop a practice-based degree-level education • Enhance the professional capacity of officers