Reading room
What we're seeing in practice.
Diagnostic pieces, sector analysis, and perspective articles on L&D, operational knowledge capture, and AI-enabled skills programmes in policing and the wider public sector.
Commissioning Learning & Development in the UK Public Sector
A 2026–27 guide for people who buy training: whether training is the answer, what good looks like in a bid, how to tell expertise from AI slop, and what to put in the specification. Seventeen supplier questions and a one-page checklist included.
- People & impact
If you designed a national leadership programme for police sergeants from scratch, what would it look like?
The Police Leadership Commission named first-line leadership as the neglected foundation of British policing. Designing a national programme for sergeants from scratch, the shift that matters most is treating the standard as something you meet and then hold every year, not a course you pass and finish with. Built from serving sergeants' own judgement, evidenced through data forces already hold, and honest that none of it works without protected time and money.
Ellie Pyemont · 7 min readRead → - Strategy & integration
How do you capture what an expert knows before they leave?
Asking a departing expert to write down what they know almost never works. The valuable part is the judgement they've stopped noticing they have, and a forty-page handover note isn't a form anyone reaches for under pressure. Capturing it properly is an interviewing job rather than a documentation job, and it's better done while the expert is still in post, not in their final fortnight.
Ellie Pyemont · 6 min readRead → 
Technology & digital transformationPoliceAI is the right idea. How does it avoid becoming a watchdog by accident?
PoliceAI, launched in June 2026, is the right idea: a national centre to develop and test AI once and give all 43 forces the approved tools. The risk is not a governance remit over how forces adopt, because it has none. It is drift by perception: a body this public, asked to comment on every incident, can come to feel like a watchdog, and that alone tempers the momentum policing has only lately started to build. Avoiding it is a matter of posture, held on purpose.
Ellie Pyemont · 7 min readRead →- Delivery
What should a really good train-the-trainer programme actually achieve?
Train-the-trainer is usually treated as a content handover: here are the slides, here's how to present them. A really good train-the-trainer programme is something different. It builds delivery judgement, transfers genuine ownership of the programme to the organisation, and leaves behind trainers who can handle the room when it doesn't go to plan. This piece sets out what good looks like, how to select the right trainers, and how to know whether the capability has actually transferred.
Ellie Pyemont · 7 min readRead → - Strategy & integration
What does the 2026 Build Economy report mean for UK public sector L&D?
Lovable's May 2026 Build Economy report is the first substantive look at who is now making software. 50 million projects built; 4 in 5 builders are non-technical; the UK is the third most active country. But 82% of builders are men, and the public sector has barely entered the conversation. This piece sets out what the findings imply for UK public sector L&D, including the cost-saving opportunity that procurement and operating processes have not yet caught up with.
Ellie Pyemont · 8 min readRead → - Strategy & integration
What is the integration layer in police L&D?
The integration layer in police learning and development is the connective tissue between strategy, technology, and frontline practice — the work of making sure a reform programme, a new system, or a piece of policy actually lands as a change in how officers and staff do their job. It is where most transformation programmes succeed or quietly fail, and where specialist L&D work is most valuable.
Ellie Pyemont · 6 min readRead → - Strategy & integration
What is operational knowledge capture?
Operational knowledge capture is the discipline of getting tacit, experience-based expertise out of practitioners' heads and into formats that can be taught, audited, and used by others. In public services — and especially in policing — it is what stops decades of operational judgement walking out the door with the people who hold it, and what makes training, technology adoption, and reform actually land.
Nick Bradley · 6 min readRead → - People & impact
Police leadership training in the UK: a practical guide
Police leadership development in the UK is under more scrutiny than at any point in a generation. A graded PEEL leadership domain, an HMICFRS thematic inspection, and the Blunkett–Herbert Commission have all raised the bar. National College of Policing programmes set the floor, but they cannot tell a specific force what its own gaps require. This guide covers what police leadership training actually means, the components that change how people lead, how a local programme complements the national offer, and a practical sequence for building one, including when the honest answer is that training is not the fix.
Ellie Pyemont · 9 min readRead → - Technology & digital transformation
What should training look like in a police digital transformation bid?
Police digital transformation bids tend to treat training as a deliverable. Treating it as part of the cultural moment of the transformation, designed against operational reality, built openly between partners, and sequenced around how policing actually learns, produces measurably better outcomes for the people on the ground.
Ellie Pyemont · 4 min readRead → - Strategy & integration
What is EnlightenWorks?
EnlightenWorks is a specialist UK consultancy for L&D, change, and operational knowledge capture, working at the integration layer between strategy and delivery in policing, public services, and complex organisations. Founded as Enlighten Training & Consultancy in 2013 by Nick Bradley, we relaunched as EnlightenWorks in 2026. The new name reflects work the firm has always done across a wider change-and-performance continuum.
Ellie Pyemont · 5 min readRead → - Technology & digital transformation
What's most often overlooked in systems training (and why it derails programmes)?
Systems training programmes rarely fail at the obvious level. The content is usually right; the delivery format is usually sensible. What derails them is the bit before the design begins: the operational detail of how the system actually meets the work, who holds the decisions about what gets trained, and whether the training team has the granular access they need. This piece sets out six elements that get missed regularly, drawn from experience of major digital transformation programmes in policing.
Ellie Pyemont · 7 min readRead → - People & impact
What does police leadership development need next?
Senior police leaders are asked to operate across a vast operational range while also running complex modern organisations. Most of their development happens inside policing, which limits the breadth of perspective they can bring to strategic decisions. Closing that gap requires deliberate exposure to learning, methods, and people from outside the service.
Ellie Pyemont · 5 min readRead → - Delivery
What does good work-based learning design look like?
Work-based learning is moving to the front of the conversation in police L&D, partly because the January 2026 White Paper signals a deliberate move away from classroom-only training. But 'work-based learning' is loosely used, and most of what's labelled work-based learning isn't designed at all. This piece sets out what good design actually involves: the structural components, the supervisor capacity required, and the practical considerations for operational environments.
Ellie Pyemont · 7 min readRead → - Strategy & integration
What does the January 2026 Police Reform White Paper mean for policing L&D?
The January 2026 Police Reform White Paper, 'From Local to National', is described as the most significant policing reform in nearly 200 years. For L&D, the headlines are a first-ever National Workforce Strategy, mandatory national leadership standards, a Licence to Practise, multi-route entry pathways, mandated wellbeing and trauma training, and the migration of the College of Policing into a new National Police Service that will set standards centrally. This piece walks through what the paper says about L&D, on what timeline, and what it means for buyers and suppliers.
Ellie Pyemont · 9 min readRead → - Delivery
Is training the answer? A 5-minute diagnostic
Most 'training problems' turn out to be something else once you look at them closely. Before commissioning a programme, work through four self-diagnostic questions. If two or more of them point somewhere other than a skills gap, training on its own won't fix the problem.
Ellie Pyemont · 5 min readRead → - Delivery
How do police training providers set their prices?
Police training providers don't usually open up about pricing. This piece walks through the five factors that drive what training actually costs: synchronous vs asynchronous delivery, off-the-shelf vs bespoke, the cost of running the business, user vs organisation licensing, and the years of expertise baked into the design. A separate section covers what generative AI is changing about each, with a recent example where we built a complete draft programme from a 200-page piece of statutory guidance in hours using a bespoke eight-agent team.
Ellie Pyemont · 7 min readRead →