“By 2025 policing will be a profession with a more representative workforce that will align the right skills, powers and experience to meet challenging requirements and be the most trusted Police Force.”

The MET have a big challenge to become the most trusted police force in the world, a key component in achieving this is via Community involvement in both the design and delivery of key learning outcomes, this is to ensure Officers receive more enriched training and are able to use that knowledge and experience to serve and protect the community in which they work.

The overarching ive is to ‘Increase public confidence in policing by improving public perceptions and increasing trust through fair decision-making by putting the community at the centre of training and development.’

The MET are looking for a third party supplier to help attain this vision, which is likely to be in the form of a pilot project to test both the concept and key partnership approach.

There are several areas that have already been identified to test as pilots:

1 Officers Induction week – Feb 2022. A community member to speak of a positive encounter with the metropolitan police. As induction is the first 3 days of training for new recruits we require community members to inspire, encourage and speak about the positive steps the new recruits have taken by joining.

2 Public and Personal Safety Training (PPST) – Feb 2022. Experience of handcuffing, use of force, stop &search. We would like the community member to deliver a frank and honest talk on their experience, but are able to be controlled in their delivery, respectful and open minded to questions that may be posed from recruits.

3 PPST – April 2022. Digital content to be developed looking at both good and bad experiences. The digital content will be used within the e-learning packages and will be relevant to the learning outcomes.

Benefits of a third party partnership approach:

• Transform Learning – Brings the best innovation from the market;

• Consistency of management – Including terms, payments, feedback, strategy development, vetting and events;

• Speed – Not constrained by MPS limitations and can leverage existing resources and investment;

• Sourcing – Development of a sourcing pool of community members in conjunction with the MET in a controlled and seamless way;

• Scale – Ability to deliver volumes necessitated and provide a consistent approach;

• Flexibility – Ability to deal with differing requirements and delivery needs.

Moving forward

The MET is currently developing a Community Strategy to this learning style and provide a concrete way forward to ensure the community is at the centre of learning.