EMPAC’s Senior Research Fellow, Dave Hill, offers a thought leadership piece on how to bring Police Learning and Development into the 21st century.
Introduction
“It is not surprising that police forces of the United Kingdom today face a range of pressures wider and deeper than any which have previously confronted them. The pressures reflect changes in society, in social values and attitudes, and in policing itself. Society has become more fragmented and diverse in composition, and yet also more uniform in many of its perceptions and attitudes. This uniformity is largely due to the influence of the media. Social attitudes are more permissive; authority is no longer accepted without question…. Technological advances have offered new ways of preventing and fighting crime, protecting life and property and quelling disorder without the need of maintaining close personal relationships with the community. Indeed, not the least of the problems the police now face is how to take advantage of their technological aids without destroying the human factor, so essential if policing is to command public support” (Scarman, 1982).
The above quote is from The Scarman Report into The Brixton Disorders 10-12th April 1981, a report written over 40 years ago and yet reflective of the current issues facing policing in 2025. In his report, Scarman, refers to the complexity of policing in a modern muti-cultural, technologically advanced society, that was over 40 years ago, in 1982, it would be a further 7 years before Sir Tim Burners-Lee invented the world wide web which would lay the foundations of the information age in which we now live and work.
This report is the outcome of an exploration of police learning and development conducted by Dave Hill, Senior Research Fellow at the East Midlands Policing Academic Collaboration (EMPAC). Dave worked in a variety of roles in policing in the United Kingdom (UK) over 27 years before moving into academic and professional roles exploring policing and organisational development.
21st century policing
The context of policing in the 21st century is, for the most part, highly complex, ambiguous and uncertain (College of Policing, 2020). For this reason, it is important that officers are trained to think and make decisions in complex and uncertain situations. When faced with such uncertain and complex situations it is important for officers to feel confident and comfortable making decisions that are based on ethical, and value driven criteria as there may not be a single “right” answer (King and Kay, 2020).
The demand to deliver first class learning and development to officers and staff is at an all-time high, due in part to the findings of recent reviews highlighting a drop in standards which has contributed to a crisis of police trust nationally. Despite these evidenced issues arising, training practices have changed little over the past 20-years, presenting a danger that practices that have caused the current issues faced, will be repeated. Coupled with a workforce that is increasingly made-up of the Generation Z age group, who are shown to have alterative learning styles to that of traditional police training, there is an urgent need to ensure our learning and development is fit for purpose, highly efficient and effective.
“Gen Z students are digital natives who prefer an independent learning style with less passive but more visual and kinaesthetic learning. They also desire convenience and are open to honest feedback”
“The similar yet distinct characteristics of the millennials and Gen Z have necessitated the need for educators to alter educational practices, pedagogies and teaching approach to provide an optimal and holistic learning environment that meets their learning needs.” (Shorey, et al. 2021).
Contemporary crisis
There is a current crisis of trust and confidence in policing nationally, with reviews of police discriminatory and inappropriate behaviour, and delineation of standards, found in both Casey and Angiolini reviews (Casey, 2023) and (Angiolini, 2024). This has impacted on the level of training required to improve standards, with an increasing expectation that staff in learning and development departments act as important role models within the organisation, ensuring they uphold and promote high ethical practice.
Ethical practice itself is not to be confused with a written set of ethical standards which are generally quite rigid and inflexible. Ethical practice, especially in a complex environment in which policing operates, must turn these standards into ethical principles which are more adaptable and flexible to the context or situation, but which allow behaviour that always aligns towards the standards. Campbell (2010) argues that in an educational environment “moral dilemmas facing teachers are potentially resolvable only by communities of educators internalizing and applying principles of ethics, not formalized codes or standards”.
I would argue that policing is currently facing this same dilemma, observations would suggest that the current ethical standards that have been created by the College of Policing are being delivered in the manner of an authoritative set of rules against which decision making will be tested, rather than interpreted through narrative, discussion and professional abilities, into a set of adaptable principles that can be used to support decision making in complex and ambiguous situations.
Reactive vs Proactive
The College has high expectations that learning and development will all be delivered as individual sessions, increasing the time officers spend in training, something that will have a major impact on officers’ operational availability, however, where learning and development programmes crossover in their underlying themes they should be approached in a more thematic manner when being delivered so that duplication across programmes is reduced. Simply following the expectation of individual sessions can make the work of the L&D department reactive, rather than proactive, when thinking about and promoting the skills needed for the future.
Levels of abstraction from operational duty are always of concern when considering the increasing public demand on the service, the organisation needs to undertake learning and development activities in a way that keeps these levels to a minimum, whilst still having time to deliver quality, effective training fit for the 21st century. To save time and valuable resources greater emphasis should also be given to recognised prior learning (RPL).
‘Recognition of Prior Learning is a method of assessment (leading to the award of credit) that considers whether learners can demonstrate that they can meet the assessment requirements for a unit through knowledge, understanding of skills they already possess and so not need to develop through a course of learning’ (Educating England, 2025).
Changing environments
The environment of policing is ever changing, and learning and development needs to therefore constantly adapt to ensure officers are continually being prepared for the evolving situations they find themselves in. For example, providing wider support for missing people, people in mental health crisis and other vulnerabilities, requires a wider skillset rather than just traditional operational skills and legal knowledge.
There is also an increased need for individuals to be prepared for encountering situations that will be volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and in turn as stated previously, officers’ need to be able to be adaptable, to make decisions and deliver outcomes based upon the context of the situation, rather than a checklist of prescribed set of behaviours.
“Today’s line officers and leaders must meet a wide variety of challenges including international terrorism, evolving technologies, rising immigration, changing laws, new cultural mores, and a growing mental health crisis” (US Department of Justice, 2015).
The ability to adapt in such situations is key to delivering services that best meet the needs of the individuals and groups who are affected, the communities that incidents occur in, and to the wellbeing and resilience of the staff delivering the services.
“the world around policing is changing dramatically, such that our police institutions are no longer a match for the challenges they face. Globalisation and technology are currently transforming our economy and society as profoundly as the industrial revolution and urbanisation did in Peel’s time” (Police Foundation, 2022).
Keeping up with the times?
Current learning and development staff have commented that most initial training activity delivered has not significantly changed in the last 20 years, aside from some additional focus on domestic abuse and newer emerging crime. Therefore, given the changes and consequential pressures on policing within that time, the organisation needs to understand if learning and development is fit for purpose, and have confidence that officers are being equipped with the necessary skills to meet the needs of today’s requirements.
“Reappraisal of the method and content of training should be a continuing process as society changes” (Scollan, 1982).
With a now significant proportion of the workforce being classed as ‘Generation Z’, the organisation needs to adapt the way it delivers learning and development. Research suggests that Generation Z have more of a preference for hybrid working, are more likely to prefer learning visually and by experience, to learn at their own pace, have a shorter attention span, and expect information to be given rather than seeking it themselves.
“Unlike passive learning styles, Gen Z students crave active participation and collaboration. They learn best by doing, discussing, and working together. This aligns perfectly with the growing focus on project-based learning and student-centred classrooms” (Ramadhanya, 2024).
Fit for purpose?
Officers from forces in England and Wales (n=809) were asked to respond to the following question, on a seven-point Likert scale, as part of a research study.
“With regards to my role within the Police Service in the past 3 years I am satisfied that the ongoing training arrangement met my learning needs”.
49% disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement and only 8.2% agreed or strongly agreed (Honess, 2020).
Adult learning
There is a plethora of literature on adult learning and certain concepts should be introduced within learning and development to promote different ways to think about and approach design, delivery and assessment of learning and development products. There is no single approach or model that will suit all learners and therefore the staff within the department should be exposed to some of the key academic discourse and debate.
An example of this would be a greater understanding of the difference between child and adult learning and development or pedagogy versus andragogy. Adults learn best when education is self-directed, experience-based, problem-solving focused, and immediately relevant, whereas children learn best in structured, guided, and subject-based environments with external motivation.
“Therefore, according to Garrison, in a formal learning situation, it should be seen as a collaborative process between the teacher and the learner. Seen from a critical point of view, it is incomplete to reduce self-direction to a question of external control. “We live interdependently and knowledge is socially determined”” (Loeng, 2020).
Self-directed learning begins by a self-motivated drive to solve a problem or answer a question, it simply needs that self-motivation to be engaged either by the person themselves or by an external event or problem presentation that they are then engaged with. Due to a process of historical path dependence, policing and police learning and development needs to understand where it is, how it got to where it is and what the next best place is to take it in the direction it needs to go.
This is a reflexive process that allows those involved in designing and delivering learning and development interventions to uncover their own path dependent based historical assumptions and biases in order to be able to approach the work with a different mindset so as to generate different behaviours based around a different departmental cultural setting.
Culture
“Culture arises from actions in the world, ways of doing things which may never be articulated, and which may not be capable of articulation. In effect culture is always complex, never complicated. So it follows that cultural change is an evolutionary process from the present, not an idealised future state design” (Snowden, 2013).
The above definition of culture underpins the approach of this report which seeks to identify the next best place for Learning and Development Departments to move too. In this way, as changes are implemented, the outcomes can be observed and measured across the system to gauge if they are moving things in the direction we want to go.
If the answer is yes, then we keep that change in place and ask ourselves what the next best place is. In this way we can observe the department as a complex system and look to identify the way changes to different areas impact across the system and develop the culture shift that we want. If changes do not move the department in the desired direction we learn from the experience and seek a different resolution to the issue identified.
Moving beyond the transactional
The process of understanding the current culture within learning and development begins with listening to the stories that are told within the department and the stories told about the department from people passing through.
As shown above, the word “abstraction” is consistently used to describe the impact of delivering learning and development. If learning and development activity is talked about using this term, then the process becomes very transactional. Coupled with the fact that “refresher” training is seen as a must do rather than to maintain and update skills in line with the organisational strategy. Generally learning and development is seen as something to simply get out of the way or to find ways of avoiding.
The transactional nature of Learning and Development tends to lead to outputs and outcomes being measured in numbers of programmes being delivered and numbers of staff passing through those programmes. With Learning and Development being seen as an “abstraction” there appears to be very little evidence of the effectiveness of programmes delivering improvements in the capacity and capability of the workforce.
Return on investment
Delegates on programmes are generally asked to complete and evaluation form, this is then used to assess the learning experience at the time. There is little evidence to suggest a real understanding of the return on investment that Learning and Development should be delivering when linked to efficiencies and effectiveness around increasing capacity and capability in the organisation to achieve its strategic direction.
A Learning and Development Department is an open system that sits within the wider organisational systems and is therefore constrained, enabled and influenced by these. It must be understood that changes in any part of the departmental system will have impacts to the behaviours in other parts and the system that makes up the Learning and Development Department will have impacts on the wider organisation. For this reason, those involved in a process such as this must be cognisant of the need to monitor where the changes have a positive impact and where there is a negative impact.
Any impact observed or felt must be analysed, understood or made sense of in the context and then responded to: if positive, reinforced or added to; if negative then learn adapt and act.
You can read more about heutagogical approaches in learning and continual improvement here:- https://empac.org.uk/educating-bobby/ https://empac.org.uk/adaptive-learning-to-boost-entrepreneurial-policing/ Using metacognition circles for police CPD – EMPAC home page
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