Police now needing a Degree

[southeastastra]

Did anyone catch this story. or are interested?

I went to a college open evening recently

Apparently, even after doing a Uniformed Public Services BTech Level 3 (equivalent of A levels) it is expected you go on to do a Foundation degree

so, yes

Sounds like an excellent way of ensuring entire sections of society feel alienated from the police.

In fact, my local force requires you to have a specific degree before you can join and I can't afford a second degree so I can't apply.

ah good, here is a \link{http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34805856\link}

i am in two minds about it really, i think it may be helpful for the recruits to have something they could use in other areas if they want to... isn't half the job about paperwork now anyhow?

I don't know how it will help the public unless they want IT skills to catch cyber criminals?

i think its gradually becoming expected for all public services isn't it? Dsis is a teacher and she was saying that TAs are now expected to study for degrees.

It caught my eye as one of my children considers the police as a future possible career.

We don't know anything about police training but wondered if there were going to encourage future police officers to study modules in languages spoken by migrants and refugees, international current affairs so that migrants and refugees can be helped more effectively and IT skills.

I think it's a shame that so many careers are out of bounds to those who for whatever reason choose not to go to university or complete a degree.

As degrees become more common, I can see the logic behind it. However, I don't think it should be a 'before you join' it would be good that after doing a year's training you were awarded a degree equivalent.

I can see the logic as well but not when the salary on offer doesn't change once you have the degree, if you pay peanuts and continue to pay peanuts then where is the incentive to get the degree?

I think a police degree should be vocational too. Perhaps a three-year "apprenticeship" leafing to qualified "officer status". I don't see any point in an academic degree for the sake of it.

From what I learned at the college Open Day, a common route into the Police Service these days would be a level 3 BTech and then a year's Foundation degree.

So no, not a full "academic" degree.

Academic training is very useful for distilling lots of other people's knowledge and inserting it into your head. If you were to just learn on the job, you would naturally have to spend many many more hours finding out stuff that may be very useful to you.

Life is complicated these days. There is a lot to learn.

Sounds like it'll be going the way of nursing, thus excluding vast numbers of kind, sensible, compassionate folk from getting a look in

I hate the way those without degrees are now having fewer & fewer options in life.
The increasing requirement for degrees seems intended to force 50% of young people into debt and flush the other 50% down the economic toilet.

It's not that we have new types of jobs genuinely requiring higher education.
Good computer literacy certainly, but nearly all kids have this by age 16.
For the police, nursing and most public service jobs, the most important qualities are common sense, compassion, integrity.

Only 6% of the population went to Uni when I was studying (mid 70s- early 80s) , so it made degrees worthwhile to stand out, but friends who left school at 18, even 16, could still get decent jobs with good career progresssion and pay.

I had no student debt either, because being just 6% of the population, we had all fees paid plus a grant to live on (frugally).

I'm in two minds about this. There is a lot of study involved in policing - you have to know the law! But this tends not to be recognised socially, as the spokesman said. I can see an argument for filtering out applicants without the capacity to grasp the intricacies of the job. But there are plenty of good & useful officers who never progress; would we want to rule them out?

Given the government's determination to [a] reduce the police service to a struggling skeleton, and [b] privatise it - I'm wondering whether the college is pushing for this so that G4S will at least have to find qualified thugs for the job.

Being kind and sensible which are essential qualities for nurses. However so is a level of intelligence or academic ability.

Working out how much of a drug to give needs ability in maths I am sure you will agree. Some nurses perform surgery and endoscopies. I presume you imagine they might need to know some anatomy? How else might they learn it if not in an academic sense?

The increasing requirement for degrees seems intended to force 50% of young people into debt and flush the other 50% down the economic toilet.

This.

Plus it works against mid life returners, who are mostly women, who may have 20 years of practical experience, and 20 years of career left, but are unable to progress up the career ladder, because they haven't got the right degree, or even any degree.

onehand I've just started a degree for that very reason. I'm also changing careers now so my former career lost a very experience worker in favour of a fresh from uni graduate (with a totally irrelevant degree ) because they didn't allow for experience.
Other public sector jobs are looking for masters now too , not essential yet but certainly preferred in some areas.

We should be looking for less people going to university not more. Learning on the job is a better option for many, including police and nurses.

I don't mind a degree pathway but to shut the door completely to a non-degree pathway, for what are essential vocational subjects, is wrong.

The cost of degrees is being pushed through the roof. Police will have to have degrees. Therefore, more and more police will be from richer backgrounds. Add to this the Story I half heard on the radio yesterday that some communities were going to pay for their own local policeman.

So you have the rich looking after themselves and everyone else can go to hell. Bad times.

If degrees were free, then it might be a different matter.

It will be like nursing, in that the simple everyday work will be done by police assistants without the full qualification and the more skilled or paperwork side to the officer.

mehitabel6 nurses do spend a large percentage of their degree learning in the job. They also do not get the holidays of other students, it's a much more intensive course.

It must also have some component of academic learning, as you need to be able to pick up that a patient is becoming unwell, or the Dr has prescribed the wrong dose of drug. Do you really expect me to be teaching students anatomy and physiology let alone CD requirements whilst I am working?

They just would not get the experience to work safely. The other day I picked a patient up that was becoming septic. He had been seen by the HCA who had learnt on the job for several years but did not realise anything was wrong. I had never seen this particular set of circumstances before but relied on academic learning I had undertaken in the past to seek further help for this person. Doing so oroberbly saved his life. He had no idea anything was wrong.

Nursing was always part academic part placement...I really feel angry that those who qualified in the past were not given a degree even though they covered the same stuff in the same way as women were denied a degree even though they studied at certain unis even as late as post second ww.looking at you Cambridge!

What will happen to Specials then? will they have to have a degree before being allowed to apply?

Afterall they have the same powers as regular Police officers.