On the College of Policing

In the previous post I discussed the perception of the police as a woke institution, looking at how various influences over several decades have led to a culture of identity politics that is endorsed by chief officers despite substantial public opposition. But there is another element which requires closer examination.

I am talking about the College of Policing (CoP). It is a body that is part-quango, part-commercial enterprise. Few people outside policing knew much about it until the organization attempted to defend its ‘hate crime operational guidance’ in the Court of Appeal and lost in predictable but noteworthy fashion in 2021.

So, although the College of Policing is now spoken about more widely, I suspect it is still little understood. In this article I will summarise its structure and functions. I will discuss how CoP sets rules for police forces to follow. I’ll also draw on my police instructor background to talk about their training programmes.

Although the College of Policing was launched in 2012, its origins go back to 1993 when it was founded as National Police Training (NPT). The mission of NPT was to create a consistent standard for police training, which had hitherto been arranged, designed and delivered by police forces independently.

NPT became the Central Police Training and Development Authority (CPTDA) in 2001, but it was always known as Centrex. Recruit instruction was provided at a number of residential district training centres (DTCs) around the country. It was at one of these facilities that I undertook my own basic training in 1999.

I noticed right away that the teaching material was poor. Recruits were given ring binders stuffed with NPT content, but the writing style was convoluted and vague. Clear instruction was entirely absent. I had already qualified as a scuba instructor back then, so I knew what high quality training material ought to look like.

My experience was uninspiring; the shorter ‘local procedures’ courses run by my home force were more informative and useful to me as a probationary officer. By contrast, a 2003 undercover BBC documentary entitled The Secret Policeman reported a handful of seemingly racist attitudes at Centrex’s Bruche facility.

The allegedly racist comments were mostly instigated by the journalist and did not reflect policing as I saw it, but chief officers, who were still reeling from accusations of institutional racism, expressed melodramatic horror and claimed to feel ‘physically sick’. Centrex needed to reinvent itself again to restore its reputation.

The DTCs were shut down around 2006 – recruit training returned to forces in its entirety – and Centrex became the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) in 2007. I had become a probationer trainer at my home force prior to this transition. NPIA was rebranded as the College of Policing five years later.

Had the DTC project been a failure? Well, opinions vary. Some former officers had good experiences, but that seemed to depend upon the individual centre. As someone involved in training at the time, I think we made a much better job of it locally. Centrex had a diminishing influence but ran our instructor courses.

Training had returned to the pre-NPT days of local provision but with central oversight. Trainers rewrote lesson plans and presentations because the official material was so poor. It was also often plain wrong, which led me to believe that the NPT / Centrex / NPIA content creators didn’t know much about policing.

They were keen on pushing ‘equal opportunities’ and ‘community race relations’ material on police officers though, and this obviously aligned with the timeline I described in the previous article. They also started to dictate recruitment rules to forces, and meritocracy seemed to lose ground to immutable characteristics.

Little of note happened during the rebranding of the organization’s pre-College of Policing incarnations, with perhaps the sensible exception of aligning trainers’ certificates with City & Guilds standards. (A Centrex certificate was not a formal qualification; it simply authorised the trainer to run their courses.)

And while I have thus far only mentioned probationer training, it should be remembered that CoP and its precursors had oversight of promotion examinations, leadership training, driver training and other specialised skills. They also hosted an e-learning platform known as NCALT for online training material.

NCALT became obsolete with the demise of Adobe Flash and was not maintained for about seven years. This prompted many forces to acquire more up-to-date learning management systems from external providers so that their own content could be hosted. The annual cost is tens of thousands of pounds.

Much more recently, the College of Policing finally replaced NCALT with a superior system called College Learn. But as forces had by then found alternatives and developed their own content, the new platform was mostly redundant. College Learn also represents one of CoP’s many attempts at income generation.

The commercial side of the College of Policing is the most significant difference between the organization as it is now and its earlier versions, even though licensing fees have been charged to police forces for software and training privileges for many years. But their income generation has run into a few obstacles.

One swiftly abandoned project was to introduce a subscription model for police officers and civilian staff to access CoP’s online document library and e-learning modules. But everyone knew how bad the material was (having endured the NCALT packages), so no one signed up to pay. It was an unworkable proposition.

They tried again with a ‘diploma’, clumsily called the Certificate in Knowledge in Policing (CKP), aimed at people hoping to join as police officers. CoP licensed this product to several colleges. The problem was that the qualification was of no value and gave aspiring recruits no advantage with their applications.

CoP quietly dropped the CKP when they decided to move toward a degree-level programme called the Policing Education Qualifications Framework (PEQF). They claimed that standards in policing would be raised if probationers had a degree, comparing it to the (unwanted) changes in the nursing profession.

I remain unconvinced, however, that improving standards, either by recruiting graduates or making officers undertake a degree while learning the job, was the real motivation. There is a telling line in the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report about the College of Policing that hints at a different purpose:

“The College suggests that raising education standards may attract more applicants from minority ethnic backgrounds. It draws upon evidence that participation in higher education is rising faster amongst ethnic minority applications than in the general population.”

The implication is that ethnic minority recruitment could increase by making it more difficult for the most disadvantaged demographic – young white men – to join the police, because families from certain backgrounds place more emphasis on education. So it was always about skin colour, not standards.

Even if the motivation had been ethical, experience in the last couple of years has shown that applicants coming straight from university seldom make good police officers, and those who have to earn the qualification at work find the process tiresome and worthless. Life experience is the best qualification.

The PEQF programme encountered and created many problems, one of which was having to coordinate with universities so that degrees could be awarded. A greater obstacle was the fact that CoP provided hundreds of learning objectives but no lesson content, expecting forces to write their own material.

Forces had gained some experience of this during the post-DTC days, but the problem was the College’s insistence on starting the PEQF programme months before forces were ready. Lincolnshire Police tried to challenge CoP via judicial review, but their application was rejected because it was submitted too late.

Not only did CoP require forces to work to their deadlines, but they also adjusted the learning objectives while forces were midway through writing the material. And while CoP claimed the programme would improve policing, their recruitment standards remained poor. It was more about numbers than quality.

While many capable people still join the police, CoP’s decision to lower the minimum application age to 17 naturally attracted school leavers with no work experience or communication skills. This has an effect on officer retention, which in turn creates a professional deficit in terms of investigative competence.

To what extent the degree programme was discriminatory can be debated, but the mistake at insisting upon that standard was plain to see at its inception. Police trainers predicted it would not last, and they were swiftly proved right when it was announced that a non-degree entry route would be restored.

This means more revisions by police forces to their training schedules. The new system will be known as the Police Constable Entry Programme (PCEP). It will start in April 2024, which leaves forces very little time to prepare. Forces will still have to manage this alongside the degree-based training programmes.

Another College of Policing project that went very quiet was their inspector and superintendent ‘direct entry’ scheme, which allowed forces to recruit directly into those ranks. The idea was to bring business experience to policing. Forces dabbled with this but soon abandoned it. CoP has ‘paused’ the project.

A lack of policing experience turns out to be a not insignificant hindrance when running major incidents. Anecdotal evidence from constables who have worked with these senior recruits is seldom favourable, but only one, to my knowledge, has been dismissed for gross misconduct in undisclosed circumstances.

The College of Policing also has responsibility for IT training and key computer systems used by the police, the most famous of which is the Police National Computer (PNC). This is the system which holds data on criminal convictions and court orders. It is used thousands of times every day but it is nearly 30 years old.

Thus the most important police database in the UK is running on a system that looks very much like MS-DOS. Its replacement, the Law Enforcement Data Service (LEDS), was meant to combine PNC with the Police National Database (PND), which was the intelligence system built in the wake of the Bichard Inquiry.

Bringing these systems together would have been a huge gain for the police. Unfortunately, CoP and the Home Office decided that this was too difficult to do, so the PND side of the project was dropped, leaving LEDS as solely PNC’s replacement. Its completion date will be about six years later than planned.

There is one other CoP project I want to mention. The Authorised Professional Practice (APP) is ‘the official source of professional practice for policing’, but I challenge you to find a single page with clear guidelines. To avoid liability, the portfolio is as circumspect and ambiguous as those documents I read as a recruit.

Although the College of Policing positions itself as a business, it is funded by taxpayer contributions via the Home Office. It currently has salary costs of around £47 million. It has ambitions to sell products to non-police domestic agencies and foreign police forces, but these lofty goals seem unlikely to be reached.

While I believe there is a need for a central body to oversee police training, I have to conclude that the current system needs substantial refinement and reform. The College of Policing is a quango populated by staff with little or no policing experience. And yet it wants more power and less accountability:

“The protocol between the College and the Home Office should be revised to give the College more freedom from central government bureaucracy, allowing it to operate in a more dynamic, agile and flexible way, more akin to a police force. The College should become an adviser of first resort for officials and ministers.”

The diminishing public confidence in the police does not have a single cause. Redefining the role of Robert Peel’s creation will require a lot more than giving chief constables more robust direction; the organizations linked to policing also need scrutiny. I will propose a selection of ideas for change in the next essay.