We are delighted to offer the second in our series of Guest Blogs from informed individuals keen to make a difference to the theory and practice of policing. This blog is from Tom Andrews, Lecturer in Policing at the Business, Law and Social Sciences, University of Derby. Tom explores the current, and in many cases, heated discussions around the need for UK police officers to have a higher education.
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The current discussion around the need for UK police officers to have a higher education is raging intensely. On the one hand are a collection of people who are generally but not exclusively, former and senior officers with degree backgrounds themselves – who advocate in favour of the benefits that higher education can bring. On the other, again generally but not exclusively, current and retired officers who don’t have a degree background but who largely frame their views around the ‘argument from tradition’ – they didn’t need a degree and therefore today’s officers don’t.
There is of course the other small subset of anti-degree rhetoric, which largely seems to stem from a purely financial basis; these being a small number of Chief Constables and a minority of (entirely Conservative) Police and Crime Commissioners (PCC’s) sharing the same short-term perspective. This can be summarised as “we need officers now, and the degree programmes are abstracting them for up to six weeks a year”. Most notable was Hampshire Chief Constable, Scott Chilton and PCC Donna Jones terminating their degree programmes and moving all officers thereon to an in-house training programme “to save 10,000 hours a year”. This is clearly beneficial in the short term, but what about the long-term future of the police service? Neither Chilton nor Jones are likely to be around to witness that; but the Scarman, MacPherson and now Casey reports have laid bare the failings of previous training regimens as well as serious leadership issues. It also fails to address the significant retention issues in the police currently. Record numbers of Officers are leaving nationally; Hampshire has numerically the fifth highest voluntary resignation level in the country, which possibly equates to the highest per officer level, as the four above it are large metropolitan forces.
Policing only switched to requiring a degree level qualification in 2016 with the launch of the Police Education Qualifications Framework (PEQF). It had still not transitioned entirely to this route by the time Suella Braverman made her overnight decree to reverse the initiative of her own party’s numerous predecessors in her role. This merely two weeks after taking up the position as Home Secretary and with no evidential basis to support it. On the contrary, the evidence supporting degrees has been made clear since before the Neyroud Review in 2011.
Why policing has failed to gain popular support for the degree programme so badly, is multi-faceted and needs exploring in more detail.
Firstly, the initiative was the flagship policy of the relatively newly incepted College of Policing. It is therefore easy for the PEQF to attract criticism as solely having been created to justify the existence of the College. This claim casually overlooks the existence of the NPIA and prior to that, Centrex since 2001, it also completely discounts the wide variety of other tasks the College performs. The College was established from a desire to increase the ‘professionalism’ of the police service, from a desire of the three staff associations and government. It was envisaged to be the policing equivalent of the Royal College of Nurses, the Chartered College of Teaching, or the Royal College of Surgeons.
Another oft-levelled criticism of the PEQF is that it has been introduced solely to keep a cadre of former police officers in employment, and to provide money to universities. Again, the latter part of this is demonstrably false, as the Police Constable Degree Apprenticeship is funded by the government which saves forces money on training. Whilst many lecturers are police officers, I and many others left mid-service specifically to deliver this programme, others are retirees. Furthermore, soon to be published research I have conducted with student officers shows that overwhelmingly, they want former officers to deliver training, bringing experience to the theory. Significant percentages of in-house ‘police trainers’ too are former or serving police officers, so once again this argument carries little weight.
Requiring a degree as a barrier to increasing diversity, or by not being representative of the population are also regularly arguments raised against the PEQF. Once again, it is easy to undermine the veracity of these. The Global Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) provides statistics for education levels internationally, which show that over half (57%) of the UK population between 25 – 34 now have a degree-level qualification. The government also highlights that Black, Asian and Chinese students are 15, 21 and 39% more likelyrespectively, to go into higher education than their White peers. Higher education is an enabler to diversity, rather than a blocker. This is reflected in the diversity of PCDA entrants. I recently obtained from a Freedom of Information Actrequest to the College of Policing details which show that 55% of recruits are male, 38% female and 7% don’t state. 92% of PCDA officers are White, 4% Asian, 2% Black, 1% East Asian and 1% ‘other’. The PCDA recruits mirror, or slightly better the statistic of the current police workforce nationally, where 93.1% of officers are White, and only 34% are female. In terms of age too, the average age of a PCDA recruit is 24.4 years. In 1998, the average age of a police recruit was 26. I don’t have the figures for the degree-holder programme, which will necessarily only recruit people over 22 (post-graduation), and thereby increase the average age. 92% of PCDA respondents to my research also had prior employment before starting. It’s clearly not the PEQF pathway that is the blocker to diversity or life experience. I may suggest that a low starting salary, along with the shift working, danger and general societal negativity towards the police are much bigger factors here.
Finally, to address the argument from tradition; policing in the 2020’s is incomparable to policing even only 10 years prior. I can say that as I was a serving officer at that time. Austerity decimated swathes of front-line officers, especially in community roles. I joined a neighbourhood policing team in 2013, which then numbered 12 officers and 20 PCSO’s. I left the team in 2016 when we numbered just 5 officers and about 10 PCSO’s; numbers halved in just 3 years. This was not unusual across my force. Officers were redeployed to CID or telephone crime report handling to process the volume of reports as there were fewer officers, and replace those forcibly retired under Regulation A19. Front line response teams too were destroyed in a similar manner. I joined a team of some 20 officers, with a small satellite station that had a further half dozen. When I left, covering the exact same geographical area, was a team of 12. Workloads had been moved partially – some to an expanded prisoner handling department, others to the telephone criming team to negate attendance. None of these were available post 10pm, or at any time to attend a 999 call from a person in need. In the words of Theresa May, officers needed to “do more with less”.
The nature of police demand has shifted significantly as well. Policing is no longer simply about arresting shoplifters and knocking heads together outside the pub on a weekend. When up to 40% of police time relates to mental health concerns, and up to 83% doesn’t relate to crime, officers of today clearly need to know more than legislation by rote. Those same officers are the ones needing to do more with less, and to do that, it simply isn’t possible to continue operating as the police always have done.
Recent experiments with hot spot policing have seen huge successes. Methods of counting crime by the harm it doesrather than simply assigning each a numerical value of ‘1’, have allowed for a much better understanding of key ‘dangerous’ locations or even individuals, allowing a far more targeted patrol strategy and tailored interventions. Pair this with myriad other academic research that is now being undertaken in policing around subjects as diverse as psychology, crime prevention, offender rehabilitation, and deterrence strategies and the result is that the potential to prevent crime is unprecedented, through evidence-based methods. As one of the few 9 so-called ‘Peelian Principles’ that can actually be directly attributed to policing’s founding father, “the key aim of the police is to prevent crime, and not be measured in their effectiveness at dealing with it”. Even in my training where I achieved a level 5 Foundation Degree in Policing in 2009, I didn’t learn or even hear about any of these initiatives. All new officers on the PEQF routes do, and the different they can make in using them simply cannot be measured at this current time, such is the novelty of the programmes.
I am by no means saying that the current entry routes are the be all and end all. Satisfaction rates are not great with any of the programmes, and whether this is due to their actual methodology, or the outside influence of respected ‘senior’ (in service and/or rank) colleagues that the degree aspect is pointless is largely a moot point. There is plenty of scope to reassess the entry routes based on experience and feedback from all parties. However, the need for some form of higher education (level 6 equivalent) is evident.
In perhaps the most similar parallel to policing’s current debate, nursing became a degree-only profession in 2009, after more than a century without. Nursing however formally proposed the idea as far back as 1984, following a 2-year in-house consultation period. It received professional and governmental support in 1987. It still took until 2009 (a quarter of a century later!) for nursing to become degree entry only. Depending on where you take the launch point for policing – The Neyroud Review in 2011, Winsor Review in 2012 or even the National Police Chiefs’ Council Policing Vision 2025 report in 2015 which confirmed the requirement for the first time, the first policing degree entrants started in 2018: an implementation period in years of single figures. Is it any wonder then that it’s not perfect?
Feedback and justifiable criticism must be listened to, especially from those experiencing the programmes first-hand; but what is certain is that we cannot, must not, remain mired in a past where police officers are seen as mere guardians of the street, there to break up a pub fight or intervene in a neighbour dispute. That is not what policing is today, and to suggest as much is an insult to all those who solve complex, life-altering problems on a daily, if not hourly basis, often without adequate training or the resources to do so effectively.
Tom Andrews,
Lecturer in Policing at the Business, Law and Social Sciences
University of Derby