Building the Evidence Base for the Tutoring of Police Recruits - Phase 2 Report

Abstract

This phased project exploring police tutoring was initiated to generate insights into current
practices throughout England and Wales. Taken together, the three phases explore a range of
issues, including: the tutor role and variations in operationalisation; whether or not the role is
seen as a specialised role or an extension of core skills and knowledge; recruitment;
performance review; delivery models (and the implications of these); potential for
standardisation; and the relationship between tutoring and retention.
These issues can be viewed as historically embedded (see HMIC, 2002, for example).
However, the opportunities and challenges presented by both the Police Uplift Programme and
the Policing Education Qualifications Framework (PEQF) suggest that it is vital to understand
the role that tutoring can play to ensure such initiatives are successful.
This first phase of this research project offered insights into how police forces understand and
position the role of the police tutor and explored the benefits and challenges of current tutoring
arrangements. For example, it identified opportunities and issues around relationships/working
practices between Higher Education (HE) providers, the police organisation and the tutor; role
profiles; consideration of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI); different delivery models;
assessment; recruitment; incentives; retention; oversight and Continuous Professional
Development (CPD).
The second phase builds upon the first phase of the research by drawing on qualitative data
from interviews and focus groups with tutors and assessors. The report will refer to established
tutoring models, identified by College of Policing (2020), of PDU (where tutors belong to a
development unit), On shift (where tutors are members of a response team) and Hybrid (where
tutoring draws on elements of both PDU and On-shift models). However, during the course of
this report we will argue that the use of such models to articulate tutoring practices are not
always helpful. Furthermore, we argue that they may better be understood through envisaging
tutoring delivery as occurring on a spectrum from tutoring being completely separate to
deployable policing structures, such as response teams and neighbourhood teams, through to
tutoring being completely controlled by such teams