Police Strategic Applied Leadership in Data and Technology Course

Senior police leaders were on campus in Milton Keynes for four days at the end of April. This follows CPRL winning a contract late last year to deliver an innovative programme for the College of Policing’s National Police Well-being Service (NPWS)

The new multi-disciplinary course, ‘Police Strategic Applied Leadership in Data and Technology’. The College of Policing offered one free place to every force in the country with 35 registered delegates in total including most of our member forces.

The course comprises four modules – the first online; the second and fourth residential; and a supported practice-based element as the third – to show how collaborative innovation can create better risk management, improve public service, and reduce ‘hindrance stress’ for officers and staff.

It also aims to help senior leaders understand key strategic issues in the emerging technology and data fields, to enable confidence in leading IT teams, working with private sector suppliers and asking strategic questions to gain high value for their policing organisation.

The cross-faculty module was well received by both attendees and the course sponsors, with the prospect of more courses to come.

Feedback from both the NPWS and participants on this pilot course has been plentiful and constructive and will help us improve the content. Some of the comments are set out below:

Module 1

“The content was very relevant to policing covering the areas that I wanted to gain more knowledge in. It was well set out, easy to access and I took several screen shots to help me capture my learning. Spot on.”

“There was a fantastic blend in the content throughout between - clear definitions, case studies, academic references, workshops / studies and practical tools and frameworks which I believe created a great foundation for this course and indeed for my professional considerations of how I approach and execute each of the module areas in my daily professional life”

“Useful and thought-provoking content regarding innovation, criteria for judging successes and developing a culture of innovation”.

Module 2

“The combination of academic evidence messages and supportive case studies were useful in understanding approaches that I will adopt in leading on my project. It's interesting in policing that we regularly talk about evidenced based policing and yet we rarely get the opportunity to engage with the evidence. This course did just that.”

“It's given me several ideas for things that can be improved at my force”.

“The teaching was excellent. Clearly knew their stuff and many were able to actively demonstrate their passion for the subject”.