Degree Or No Degree That Is The Question

Last updated on October 16th, 2023 at 07:42 pm

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Some will call me a cynic, and some may well be right.

As soon as Boris announced his intention of swelling Police numbers by 20,000 I immediately formed the opinion that the training infrastructure would struggle to cope with a short-notice influx of a lot more than 20,000 officers, allowing for wastage, all chasing an Apprenticeship, or would already possess the relevant degree for Graduate Entry.

The flaw in my cynicism was the fact that the College of Policing had been busy telling us all that IPLDP, Initial Police Learning and Development Programme, (the old-fashioned, traditional route into Policing) was redundant as it wasn’t sufficiently professional.

It’s well known that I don’t subscribe to that theory. Myself and many, if not all, of my previous colleagues also joined under IPLDP, although it wasn’t called that in the Dark Ages, and the majority of us feel that we were totally professional. Those who weren’t mainly found their way out of Policing one way or the other.

In order to test my theory I took out my quill and tested the National Police Chiefs Council with some Freedom of Information Act requests. I have now had replies to all but one of them.

Recruitment under the Police Uplift Programme took on board numerous recruits under all of the different Entry Routes.

Degree Or No Degree That Is The Question

Who’d have thought that the unprofessional IPLDP route would have been so popular?

Which all left me wondering, which Forces had been offering IPLDP as an option, and which had stuck to Graduate or Apprenticeship Entry. The cynic in me thought that some Forces might prefer to access the Apprenticeship Levy. As I have said previously, only about 500 recruits nationally have been funded by the Policing Precept, with the majority of Forces taking none at all under the Precept.

If anyone is interested, below is the breakdown of which Forces have recruited how many officers under IPLDP, to make their contribution to the Police Uplift Programme.

Degree Or No Degree That Is The Question
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