Are you concerned about how you will cope with learning the law at Training Centre?

Once you pass your selection process you may, quite rightly, be very pleased and proud of yourself. After all you will have achieved something that 1 out of 7 applicants fail to do. So enjoy and celebrate your success. The selection process, however, is only the first step, and let’s be honest, probably the easiest one, in you chosen path to becoming a fully fledged officer or PCSO.

The next challenge you are going to have to face is Initial Training, and we at Talking Blues know that an awful lot of recruits find this very tough. Indeed changes to police training introduced over the past couple of years or so have made it even harder for many.

As you probably know from your research, during your initial training you will have to master knowledge and skills that will enable you to show that you are competent to be a street duty officer working independently. That means learning a lot of law and procedure – including, in nearly all forces, having to learn chunks of law word perfectly and off by heart (the “Definitions” in police parlance). In short there is a big academic content to initial police training.

From our experience as police leaders and trainers we know that a lot of recruits do struggle. We also know that this problem has got worse since April 2006.

If you joined the police before that date your initial training would have taken place on a 13 week residential course at a district training centre. There you would have had support and assistance from your fellow students and from the training staff who were also available in the evenings, and finding study time was not an issue.

Now, with initial training run in force, those informal support mechanisms have been removed, but the amount you will need to learn and the depth of understanding you will need to achieve hasn’t. You will undertake 26 weeks of classroom study. So studying in the evening is required as much now as in the days of the district training centres. The difference being that now you are going to be largely on your own and with all the distractions of family life going on around you. Even finding time to study can be hard; never has having great learning skills been more important.

Having brilliant learning skills means that you need to spend less time studying. Brilliant leaning skills mean that you can get much better results for the time you invest.

As part of the service we offer to you we have introduced a proven Learning Skills course that has been designed to meet the needs of police recruits.

In 2002 then Detective Inspector Phil HARDY was the Head of Foundation Training at Sussex Police. (To learn more about Phil please click here) He became concerned that so many new officers were performing below par in the exams at the District Training Centre. On exploring the issues he found that many recruits had not studied, or even picked up a book, for many years. Furthermore, very few officers, regardless of previous achievements, had any idea of how to study efficiently and effectively – they were working very hard, harder and for longer in fact than was necessary – and yet not getting the results.

As an experiment Phil introduced Accelerated Learning workshops for his recruits before they went to the Training Centre. The feedback from those who took part was excellent, the level of knowledge they gained improved dramatically and their exam results were much better as a result. So Phil expanded the workshops into a one day course that became an essential part of the first week of training in his force. If you want to know what some of the recruits who have done the course have said about it click here.

Hundreds of new recruits of all educational backgrounds, from those with no qualifications at all to those with master’s degrees, have benefited from the Course and we are pleased to be able to offer it to you now.

Attend this course and apply the skills and techniques you will learn on it and you will be able to:

• Spend less time studying
• Have more time to do the other fun things in our life
• Learn all the law and procedure easily and deeply
• Pass your exams without stress
• Minimise conflict between the demands of family/social life and those of studying for your chosen career
• Avoid the stress of not doing as well as you’d like and deserve to do

Being able to learn quickly, easily and deeply is a skill, just like driving a car. People aren’t born with able to do it; it has to be learnt; and, just like being able to drive, once you have the skill it has life-long benefits.