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The Metropolitan Police: Serving the UK’s largest police force

Written by David Pearson

Introduction

Premier Partnership has been working with the Metropolitan Police since 2013 to provide a fully comprehensive, high quality managed training service, designed to both save time and money, and improve organisational performance in line with the demands of modern policing.

We provide a large range of specialist training projects and programmes alongside ‘business as usual’ courses to the organisations 48,000 serving police officers and police staff on a regular basis. Our dedicated account team of learning and development (L&D) specialists works alongside the client’s four business groups, which break down in to more than 60 smaller business areas, to assess learning needs, research best practice, plan demand, design curricula, deploy technology, deliver learning, and provide comprehensive management information to determine return on investment.

The breadth of the curriculum offered covers organisational priorities including Counter Terrorism, Cyber Crime / Digital Policing, Forensics, Firearms, Public Order, Aviation, Marine Policing, Royalty and Special Protection, HR and Training, Finance, Media and Comms, Resource and Management, Road and Transport. Recent specific courses have included Mental Health Awareness Training for frontline officers following changes in legislation to enable them to understand, support and ‘contain not restrain’ members of the public in crisis; and a five day Safeguarding Induction to help command units identify and protect those who are vulnerable in everyday operational activity from missing persons, to child sexual exploitation, kidnapping, human trafficking and more. We have also developed bespoke courses to meet the client’s specific needs where there isn’t a suitable existing solution.

In the year 2018, 91% of delegates rated their training satisfaction as either good or excellent and 97% agreed or strongly agreed the training met the expected objectives. Typical monthly cost savings gained by sourcing all learning solutions through Premier Partnership average £17,000.

Managed Training Services for Police Services

Police services are diverse and complex organisations that often deal with critical incidents and work to incredibly tight timescales. This means that professional development for employees needs to be not only constantly evolving to be at the cutting edge of current requirements, but also easy to access and completely flexible around ever-changing priorities. Movement of people and the short notice postponement of courses must be considered in the planning and management of learning solutions. Working with a training provider that understands and can adapt and respond to these unique needs is critical.

Premier Partnership’s agility, flexibility and understanding of the marketplace, including the best suppliers and latest innovations in L&D in the policing sector, provides a consistency of quality and efficiency that could not be achieved by dealing with different training providers on different courses at different times. For example, we were able to meet the organisation’s requirement to deliver a national programme to ensure a consistent approach to training in all specialist units within a specific sensitive operational area for employees who were spread across the country in different police forces. We managed everything from the resourcing of suppliers, to the consolidating of pricing, receiving of requests, and management of bookings to provide a seamless, easy to access service that would otherwise not have been possible. Likewise, when some of the internal health & safety team were taken away from training delivery due to major events such as the Grenfell Tower disaster, we were able to source an appropriate consultant to step in and provide critical support.

Added Value from L&D Experts

Premier Partnership’s managed training service is much more than just the ad-hoc provision of learning solutions when requested by the client. Our dedicated accounts teams are L&D experts rather than salespeople, and we have the suppliers, IT, systems, resources and experience to save our clients significant amounts of time and money while ensuring the highest quality outcomes for their staff and the wider organisation.

Drawing on our years of experience of working with ‘blue light’ organisations, we are able to challenge proposals and how things are delivered and have created a bespoke course catalogue specifically for police services which brings together in one place both the highly specialist and more general learning solutions that their diverse range of employees may need to access in line with their organisational priorities. This puts exactly what they need at their fingertips to easily access at any time from the best and most relevant suppliers across our network. We even run workshops and drop-in sessions for employees to understand how to access these services and help to promote and market the learning solutions on offer across the organisation to make employees and their managers aware of what’s available to them.

We also have a dedicated CRM system to manage new requirements with a process in place to determine whether the request provides the client with best value and desired outcome and our Account Directors hold review meetings and regularly update processes to ensure they are fit for purpose for the organisation and that we can continue to make savings and add value to the client.

David Pearson
Director