Police now needing a Degree

[southeastastra]

Did anyone catch this story. or are interested?

No idea but I think you'll find that requirements rise in line with popularity, supply and demand if you like.

In the 1980s nursing fell out of favour with young people, they preferred uni so struggled to attract, so requirements for the course were low. Now it's one of the ones with the most applicants even compared with places so they are able to increase requirements as they have plenty of kind compassionate young people with very good grades.

I know that you have a certificate of policing for some/all HO forces, which already alienates potential officers who couldn't afford to stump up £1000 for something that isn't worth much outside of applying for the job.

I don't know what a degree in Policey stuff or a degree in a non-p subject + conversion course is going to do to help.

But what do I know compared to the HO?

my sister is a police officer, she doesn't have a degree, but her work ethic and commitment to her job far exceeds my own and i have 3 degrees. So I think its a load of bullcrap that police should have degrees. Thank God she will never read this I would hate for her to see me admit that she is better at her job than I am at mine.

It's a general problem with the status of employment and education at the moment isn't it. It's become the norm to have degrees, and as decent policing is a difficult job just as much as nursing it makes sense to require degrees. But, at a time when they are so expensive to pursue it puts it right out of the realm of most people.

We need either free degree level education or stop requiring degrees for everything I think, the present situation is ridiculous and unsustainable. Question is who should be doing the training I suppose, should it be general society providing the training or should it be the employers taking on you gsters to train. At the moment with the economy in such a mess the employers have everything their own way, and then certain sectors have the nerve to complain about a skills shortage on top, when the reality is that they're requiring more skills than ever before and no one is prepared to train starters properly.

This was predictable, I think, due to the totally daft drive to get everyone to go to university. Qualifications at degree level have become meaningless unless they're in niche subjects or from the very best universities. All a degree proves nowadays is that you're willing to borrow a load of money. I don't know how the situation will right itself.

If you joined a few years ago you had to do a police diploma at uni anyway, apparently it was to do with the social aspect of crime and families and had nothing to with the job and had didn't help you to do the job in any way

as decent policing is a difficult job just as much as nursing it makes sense to require degrees.

I don't agree that you need a degree to do difficult things. A degree is largely proof that a person is capable of academic study. That's not a skill required by every job. As a PP said, nursing was a mix of study and practice, and policing is the same. Now nursing is excluded as a career to many because,for whatever reason, they don't get the grades at school. I think we're losing lots of potentially brilliant nurses this way.

Policing is one of the few careers people can start on a level playing field and succeed with their own efforts. The cadet joined, did an in-house training programme, and this is supplemented by continual training throughout their career.

Are we going to need degrees for the military, for catering, for HGV driving? It's really getting beyond ridiculous.

Taking nursing as the example, though, we do need academic ability. Drug doses can be prescribed in mcg/kg/min -a tiny increase mls/hr, which is how the drug is delivered, can be a huge increase in mcgs/kg/min and could be life threatening. In a life threatening situation, they have to be able to prepare a drug extremely quickly by diluting it with precise quantities of a fluid.

Nurses have to know huge amounts of anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, sociology, chemistry, etc., and they largely have to learn it on their own because the university courses major on values based curriculum, especially after the Francis Report.

I can see that as crime becomes more sophisticated, the Police have to know so much more than they did.

Lots of our police are ex service men and women...good thing they're all rolling in it so can afford the extra education.

In 'the old days' when degrees were something that far fewer people had and A levels were far harder to pass than today then a police officer with A levels was fairly common. The police officers with degrees were selected and promoted quickly as they were earmarked for high office early in their careers.

The requirement for a degree today is just a recognition surely that people with A levels (or BTEC equivalent) that are far easier to pass than they were 30 years ago simply are not qualified enough. Hence the requirement for a degree.

Qualifications have been made easier but people have not become magically more intelligent therefore employers of all kinds now have increased the level of qualification required to compensate.

In other words a degree holder from a fairly low level university ('former poly') in a vocational subject now is basically no better qualified than someone who had 'just' A levels 30 years ago who would never have gone to a university

I'm against. Soon there'll be no decent jobs left which young people can aspire to without going to university (and taking on a massive debt) first. Necessary skills can still be taught on the job, or day release at a local college - why on earth do people have to go to university to be a nurse or a teacher?

Sorry - scratch 'teacher' and replace with 'police officer'. I do actually think it might be quite useful to have a degree if you want to be a teacher!

devora you realise that lots of nurses actually prescribe drugs don't you? Or give drugs without even seeing a Dr?

Devora nurses do as standard things which used to be the role of doctors. We have to make decisions about whether to give a drug that is prescribed, based on our patient's condition. It really isn't even the same job as 10 years ago.

I know quite a few teachers and quite a few teaching assistants. There isn't a lot of difference between them in terms of subject knowledge and general knowledge; I find it shocking just how bad their general knowledge is and how little they seem to know. I've seen many lessons where the children are taught things that are plain wrong when I've been doing lesson observations, I've seen things taught that are wrong and seen children correcting teachers; having a degree clearly isn't helping some teachers to be knowledgeable about their subject.

I do understand that, lougie - I used to work in the NHS. I'm not doing a 'how many ologies do you need to empty a bedpan' rant - I know it is a very skilled job that requires higher learning. I'm still not convinced that that learning is best delivered through a conventional university degree - and I know many nurses and midwives feel the same - but accept I may be wrong. It just bugs me that back when I was a nipper, when a tiny minority of the population went to university, there was a much richer range of career paths. Now it's like there's one path to a career, and it's university. Anything else is for losers. And in practice, universities are not always well adapted to meet the differing needs of a range of vocations.

It is ridiculous how many jobs now require a degree. So many jobs were done perfectly well without the need for a degree...eg, nursing, teaching. It is all a big con to me. Fair enough for specialist roles, medicine, engineering etc but not most jobs. My grandparents were teachers and nurses and had full careers without ever having to get a degree.