Police Learning, Practice and Professionalisation

Recent years have seen a substantial shift in the way in which we frame police education, not least with the advent of the PEQF which rearticulates policing as a degree profession. At the same time, the Uplift programme is seeking to quickly expand the number of police recruits throughout England and Wales. Taken together, one might be tempted to conclude, straightforwardly, that this should be considered a positive development in that it seeks to increase officer numbers, enhance the knowledge base of officers and reduce the scope for culturally driven practices.

However, our research, funded by Uplift and the CPRL, seeks to make sense of a key factor influencing the success of both the Uplift programme and the PEQF – the tutor role. Tutors are traditionally officers who supervise new police officers as they experience, for the first time, the different contexts, interactions and situations which make up the occupational world of the police officer. This role has attracted limited attention in research addressing police education and socialisation, yet those research findings which do exist suggest that tutoring occupies a somewhat fragile and undefined space in police training arrangements.

Why then is the Tutor Constable role so important? Research and anecdotal evidence suggest that officers in this role exert a very substantial degree of influence on the working practices of new officers. Similarly, research from the wider field of organisational socialisation indicates that effective assimilation into organisations has a host of positive impacts - including greater effectiveness, quicker proficiency, reduced attrition and lower recorded levels of workplace stress.

These issues, we suspect, are made all the more urgent by the impact of the PEQF. The move towards policing becoming a degree profession has created some pressing challenges in respect of the tutor role. A rich vein of literature into police culture shows us the inherent tension between evidential and experiential knowledge in policing. In other words, police officers are traditionally viewed as favouring knowledge derived from operational experience rather than the classroom. The challenge here is twofold. First, how can tutors play a strengthened role in ensuring that academic degree level knowledge can be meaningfully applied in day-to-day organisational practice? Second, how can tutors manage the expectations of degree educated recruits into a job that encompasses a wide range of functions, from the relatively mundane to the emotionally demanding. After all, as previous research conducted by Katja Hallenberg and Dr Cockcroft shows, having a degree does not necessarily lead to a more motivated police officer, nor do graduates always feel that police organisations adequately make use of degree level skills and knowledge.

The first two phases of this research, running from October 2021 to November 2022, will seek to understand how this crucial role is performed in police forces throughout England and Wales. Furthermore, the research will tackle a range of related issues ranging from the recruitment and incentivisation of tutors through to how the role can be used to ensure greater alignment with the needs of diverse communities.