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.

One of my favourite things to do when a report lands in policing is make a 'thing', send it to a handful of people, and then leave it. This time I am publishing the thing. It is a sketch of what I would build for sergeants if I started from scratch, prompted by last month's Leadership Commission. A starting point, not a finished programme.

What the Commission says about the front line

The report is blunt about where the problem sits, and none of it is new. Much of it has been said before, widely and rightly; the diagnosis is not in doubt, and what to do about it is the harder part. There are more than 22,000 sergeants, and they supervise the majority of the workforce, yet the report describes the training and support they get for that role as inadequate. More than a fifth of new sergeants and inspectors had received no formal leadership training more than two years into the job.

Underneath that is a money problem, stated plainly. Central spending on leadership development runs at about 0.02% of the police budget. And there is a consistency problem: the same first-line course is built forty-three different ways across forty-three forces, so what you get depends on where you serve. One sergeant, quoted in the report, put the human end of it in a single line: "I have nothing to explain my skills."

That is the brief. Not "run more courses." Build something worth the name for the people the whole service rests on. And, as Casey argued, it should be management-first, leadership-second. I am a strong proponent of that: the day-to-day management of a team is a prerequisite for leadership training, not an afterthought. A supervisor needs to know they can supervise, and feel confident in it, before we talk about leadership.

Where would you start? Not with a curriculum

The current framework treats a sergeant's competence as finishable. You clear the behaviours, you get signed off, you are done. That teaches three things by accident: that leadership is a destination you arrive at, that a gap in your own skills is a fixed trait to work around rather than a task to close, and that learning happens on a course and then stops. What it produces is a supervisor who waits for things to happen to them.

I would flip that. Treat the standard as something you meet, then hold every year, and can fall below if your practice lapses. There is a real moment you have met it, worth marking, because people are entitled to know when they have reached the standard and should feel confident in their role. But meeting it is the start of holding it, not the end. The working question becomes "am I working at the standard that can reasonably be expected of me, and what could I do to make it better?" You never finish holding the standard. That is the point.

What would it contain?

Four stages, and no exit. Before the process, an honest picture of what first-line command asks, so the choice to lead is a conscious one. The first ninety days, the most exposed and least supported moment in a new sergeant's career and the one the current framework says nothing about, given real scaffolding: a named coach and a cross-force peer network from day one. Then establishing supervision over the first year, and continuing management after that, where most of the learning happens in the work itself.

Seven strands run through it: expecting and delivering high performance; holding difficult conversations and keeping them on track when they turn; pushing past "that'll do for today"; leading peers and challenging seniors when you have no rank to fall back on; setting standards and intervening early on underperformance; staying current and managing your own week; and being fluent in the systems the job runs on.

What I would not compromise on is where the content comes from. It is built from the operational judgement of serving, effective sergeants, captured and turned into the material, rather than from a leadership textbook, because the front line will not trust a programme written by people who have never understood what it feels like to do their role.

How would you know it is working?

This is the bit most training, despite best intentions, ends up dodging. Happy sheets at the end of a course tell you whether people enjoyed the room, not whether anything changed in their next conversation.

I would measure impact from data forces already hold: complaints, use of force, grievances, retention and sickness, whether appraisals get done, how a team performs. The trick is not collecting more; it is assembling what exists. Every force already runs on Microsoft 365, and most now have the automation tooling to pull those signals together into a picture without anyone filling in a new return. Build the evaluation on that, and the same automation that shows whether the practice is landing also takes reporting work off a sergeant's desk rather than adding to it.

It has to be honest about its own limits. These are proxy measures, and a movement in the numbers is correlation, not proof that the programme caused it. And auto-assembling data about identifiable people carries real obligations, so the data protection and governance would have to be settled before a single pilot ran, not after. But the direction is right. A sergeant should see the evidence about their own team first, before it is ever aggregated into a report written for someone else.

What makes it defensible, and what it can't dodge

A real, met standard, held continuously and perhaps officially renewed every five years, gives forces, promotion boards and any external recognition the answer to a question that has none today: what standard has this person met? Without that, forces invent their own local versions and you are back to forty-three schemes. With it, the answer is national and consistent, and it still is not a certificate you file and forget.

Two caveats I would be honest about. The senior constable rank the Commission recommends would strengthen all of this, giving reward and status a route of their own, but I would not make the programme depend on a rank reform that may not happen. And it has to be properly funded: more than 0.02% of the budget, with protected time and backfill for 22,000 people. Better to say that at the outset than to let it read as something the current spend could absorb.