I'm in two minds about this drive to make every career only open to holders of degrees, I can understand for instance to be a medical doctor and certain other careers a degree is essential but I honestly don't see why policing is the latest lined up for the mandatory degree nonsense.

My opinion is that it will deter the kind of people who have good aptitude and people skills from even thinking of joining the police, another drawback is it will deter those from minorities who may also not be academically minded from becoming police officers.

Since nursing went the degree route, applications for training have dropped off quite considerably leaving the NHS dependent on overseas personal to plug the growing shortfall of British trained nurses, to me it was the stupidest thing and looking back there were plenty of stupid policies implemented by the last labour administrations to ever be forced on the NHS.

To me making the police a degree job is asking for trouble, do we want a police service that has members from across the class divide or do we want another middle class dominated profession not open to those deemed working class and academically minded.

I consider myself middle class but I'm not academically minded so in effect I could not become a policeman under these silly new guidelines, it's discriminatory in my opinion in favour of academically minded middle class folk who can afford to go to uni.

That isn't true. The coalition government cut nurse training posts shortly after the 2010 election, that is why we are reliant on overseas nurses who, incidentally, mainly have degrees from their home countries. Nothing to do with Labour policy. The drive to make nursing a degree profession originated from the nursing profession itself following on from Project 2000 and subsequent major reports about nurse training. Also from 2010 onwards, many nurses were made redundant by the coalition government. We were all invited to apply for voluntary redundancy. I applied myself (knowing I would easily get another nursing position in another hospital) but my skills were considered too valuable to lose so my application was rejected. Many other nurses left at that time though with significant payouts.

Nursing applications may well fall this year following on from this government's decision to abandon the bursary and therefore make necessary student loans. Student nurses spend half their course in clinical placements, working on wards. There is no way that I would ever have applied to do nursing if I had to pay to work 12 hour shifts, carrying out basic care on wards.

A man is on the loose with a knife, stabbing anybody who he runs past. There are two police officers who could chase him. Do you get the fatty with a degree, or the atletic one who does not have a degree to chase him?

One problem with the police is that the more qualified people are probably the ones attending meetings which exist to create impressions and do not have any real influence on what actually happens in practice. The sort of meetings where statistics are presented and credit taken. They are probably bettter paid than the person who answers the calls and decides whether to send officers to the old lady's house that has been robbed, or the disabled woman who has been tipped out of her wheelchair and kicked in the head a few times. It would be better to have fewer of them and more police officers catching criminals.

The point about the impact making nursing more academic has had on the NHS is a good one. Teachers have to spend a lot of time studying and those who aree newly qualified are treated as leser teachers no matter how good they are until they have been qualified long enough.

Rightly or wrongly there is a definite trend towards all decent jobs requiring a degree now, so perhaps it's just a case of the public sector playing catch up?

I never thought about getting a degree much and back in the 90s there were decent vocational training courses available. I did an apprenticeship and got an HND paid for by the company. If I'd gone to Uni. I would not have bought my house before the prices went up ( mine tripled in value in a few years)

The trouble is that now every one under the age of 30 seems to have a degree. Not to mention all the eastern europeans with PHD's willing to pick turnips for min. wage.

I think employers look at my CV and say hmm no degree So yes perhaps Police officers should be expected to have a degree.

i think there should still be an applied route and with the appropriate qualifications taken in service.

a really positive recruitment move would be an attitude test.

Do you reall;y think that all these Police officers with degrees would be content to remain as Constables ?????

I have 2 degrees. However I learnt far more in just a couple of years of policing than I did for both degrees. And none of the qualities a good police officer needs can be taught in a classroom (in fact many can't be taught at all).

It will also reduce the application pool to young middle class people who can afford university. People with 'life experience' and from poorer backgrounds will likely be unable to apply.

You can have degrees coming out of every orifice, but the great British public will remain rude, aggressive, boorish and violent and cops need the physical and moral courage to stand up to and deal with them swiftly and appropriately.

I thought one of the last great ideas was to try and recruit ex forces personnel ~ going to degree only rather knocks that idea on the head.

This is just another facet of overpopulation and handing out degrees like chupa chups. With more people and more competition for jobs, someone high up thinks they can get a better quality of candidate by raising the entrance bar arbitrarily more than the job justifies.
The people who run organisations have always tended to be divorced from the reality of the core jobs at the bottom. Management instead shuffle paper around and talk in their own bogus corporate lingo and when people drop a bit of that crap lingo in applications to them, they lap it up.
No, people don't need degrees to become police. But if almost everybody has a degree, requiring a degree is an easy way for management to show they've run an objective recruitment process. It's all about covering their behinds.
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I seem to recall another country trying this and now they are under staffed in the police because of it.

That rather depends on which group of 'ex-forces' personnel you are after.

So much for having a police force that is representative of the diversity of society, it would become staffed from upper levels of society
They tried this with nursing, dropping on the job training for paper qualification resulting in a crop of "nurses" waiving their certificates, declaring themselves above sorting out patients who had soiled themselves
Guess what, they are going back to on the job training. The same will happen to the police force if this daft idea is ever adaopted

I agree. When I joined, I didn't even have any O Levels, and neither did many others joining.

We know the qualities needed to be able to do the job, and there is no "one size fits all" answer to that. Degrees are far more common than they used to be, but they dont mean someone will make a good police officer.

When I saw this, my first thought too was that it will rule out huge numbers of people from applying, and that would mean ruling out potentially excellent officers because they dont have a degree, which, as you say, really doesn't make a big difference when it comes to doing the actual job.

Others have mentioned we will also have a pool of people looking towards promotion, and high flying careers, rather then joining to become police officers.

i am agreeing with you on a police matter.

That's worrying. I'll have to look at what I said again.

It gets worse. Degrees have now decreased in value considerably with so many people having them so even low paying jobs now have a requirement for degree or higher education level qualifications. The vast majority of jobs now also ask for candidates to have a full driving licence as well even if they are stationary jobs. And in the near future, automation will replace the jobs for those without a degree and/or a driving licence with no job replacements or support for a universal basic income for those who've lost their jobs (it'll even replaced the skilled jobs once robots and computing AI improves). And then there is the ticking time bomb of funding these qualifications in the next couple of decades where people scrambling for degrees won't be able to pay back their student loans and that deficit has to be funded somehow - it will make the Government reconsider funding for higher education and it whilst it'll be sustainable, it won't be fair or equitable for lower income school leavers.

I can't think of any reason why anyone needs a degree to join the police force but I suppose with so many more graduates these days they need to increase the number of jobs that require a degree.

More and more a police force needs to be run like a business. Senior management need business acumen but senior management in a force consists of people who have risen through the ranks and who have a policing, not a business, background. Perhaps a degree might help in this regard. Mind you, having said that, a police officer on the street needs skills that can't necessarily be learnt from books.

Only for specific groups. The nursing degree route will still very much be the dominant entry into nursing.

I am a nurse (with a degree) but I trained the old fashioned way, apprentice style. Even back in the 1980s and before that, the registered nurses needed to meet academic criteria before being accepted on the course, and, post qualification, were mainly involved in the more advanced and administrative aspects of nursing rather than basic care. Basic care was delivered by the students, the auxillaries and the state enrolled nurses (although we certainly helped, as we still do). I was educated in Ireland and had high grades at Leaving Cert but my British student colleagues at my school of nursing all had A levels, one of which had to be in a science subject. There were some other routes into the courses which again involved meeting academic standards eg there was a tough entrance exam and some enrolled nurses were accepted for conversion courses.

Nothing has really changed except nurses get degrees at the end of their courses and they are not expected to do the bulk of the manual work on wards during their training. I did my degree after my initial training but there was a heavy theory element to my own training. If the public want nurses just to be able to carry out practical care then why do we need nurse training at all? Just employ carers and give them 6 weeks on the job training. The NHS would fall apart because doctors would never cope without the support of intelligent, well educated nurses. Additionally, doctors are heavily reliant on nurses performing tasks that previously only they could perform. Nurses are at the very frontline of patient care and mistakes we make can have catastrophic consequences. We must be able to understand why we are giving prescribed treatments, the actions, side effects of medications, be able to alert doctors to abnormal physiological observations, ECGs or abnormal blood results. We need to be able to titrate treatments according to patient requirements eg oxygen therapy, NIV. We are the final gatekeeper of patient safety and many mistakes have been averted by the interventions of vigilant and well educated nursing staff who possess credibility because we can explain the issues with confidence and authority.

You can train anybody to perform a certain practical skill but you cannot 'train' them to critically analyse the implications and potential complications of that procedure.

Our overseas nurses are very well educated and it is ridiculous to dumb down the training of British nurses to avert a looming staffing crisis. The government was extremely short sighted in reducing nurse training places in 2010 as well as handing out redundancies to vast numbers of senior, experienced nurses from 2010-2012.

At senior management level there are all manner of civilian staff, with the necessary qualifications, employed to deal with administrative, and financial demands.

Nevertheless a force's top positions, the chief constable and deputy chief constable, will be held by people with a policing background, and these are the people whose decisions are deferred to. In a police organisation there is a climate of deferring to rank and although this might be appropriate for street policing, it can be fatal at a business level.

Chief Officers receive training for the role they will perform, and are surrounded by senior, qualified, civilian staff. ACPO rank officers have very little to do with day to day policing.

The higher up the rank structure someone goes, the further they get away from policing, and the earlier people get promoted, the less experience they have of the job.

This causes much resentment between lower and upper ranks, because their experiences, and priorities are often far apart. Unfortunately it is the lower ranks that have all the grief.

[quote=MarellaK;84898610] You can train anybody to perform a certain practical skill but you cannot 'train' them to critically analyse the implications and potential complications of that procedure .[quote]

Very true but of course they don't, any analysis, implication, complication, or anything else is referred to the doctor or registrar