More Resources Needed To Support Trainee Officers

Many new officers haven’t had the support they’ve needed because of a lack of resources, the Chair of Hampshire Police Federation has said.

Zoë Wakefield was speaking after the College of Policing surveyed new recruits and found that only half or fewer of the respondents reported being satisfied with the overall education and training they had received. Less than half of respondents agreed that the education and training prepared them for the role.

Zoë said: “I’m not surprised at all that people have felt that way, and I know it’s a factor in why some people have left because they just didn’t feel supported. So much needs to be done to improve it. We’ve now got people with only three years’ service, tutoring new officers.

“I really feel for new officers because they’ve been bashed here, there and everywhere and not had the full support. Not because the forces didn’t want to do it, they just didn’t have the people to do it. Though it’s getting gradually better now that our intakes aren’t so large.”

Zoë continued: “The big problem is that the Government didn’t really think about this when they brought in the degree programme.

“A lot of officers told us that the universities didn’t have the time to properly teach them the subjects. Instead they were teaching them what they needed to know to pass the assessment, rather than actually teaching them the subject matter.

“Then when they went out on the street and were mentored, there weren’t enough tutors so a lot of officers had to share a tutor with somebody else or were just told: ‘That person over there can help you out if you need it’.

“The tutors also had their own huge workloads so they were struggling with finding the time to actually help the officers.

“We’d barely recruited for so many years, so we didn’t have the resources.There was real pressure on officers and the whole internal infrastructure just wasn’t there to support all these people. In our first intake of the police uplift, we had 91 trainee officers, so we needed 91 tutors.”