Pioneering postgraduate courses for Met officers

Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) officers can now take on postgraduate courses covering themes such as honour killings and inter-ethnic conflict at Middlesex University’s Criminology Department.

Partnering the Hendon-based MPS Crime Academy, the university has developed three work-based learning programmes, to offer serving police officers the opportunity to obtain a Postgraduate Certificate or a Masters Degree, recognising their professional expertise and to help them perform in their daily roles.

The postgraduate and masters courses consist of the PGCE Homicide and Serious Crime Management, the MA Critical Incident Management and the new MA Criminology and Crime Management.

Each covers approaches to researching and evaluating crime and offender behaviour, as well as key issues and debates relating to crime and its contexts, offender behaviour, management of offenders in the community and risk evaluation and management.

The PGCE Homicide and Serious Crime Management and the MA Critical Incident Management cover topics including the political context of crime policy, the social context of honour killings, violent crime and inter-ethnic conflict, crime governance, public enquiries, human rights, risk management and risk communications.

The MA Criminology and Crime Management aims to provide students with an understanding of criminological theory, management of offenders in the community, working with young offenders, organisational management within criminal justice organisations, public protection and risk management.

Senior criminology lecturer at Middlesex University, Dr Robin Fletcher, is the leader of all three of the programmes. A retired detective superintendent who spent 26 years in the MPS, Dr Fletcher said: “The training that we’ve developed in partnership with the MPS’s Crime Academy has gained a worldwide reputation. As a result of this we were invited to develop a Masters Degree programme that would recognise the professional expertise of senior officers in the MPS.

“This programme, from which the first group graduated this summer, proved so successful that the MPS Crime Academy then asked us to develop a further Masters programme, the MA Criminology and Crime Management.

“Now we have been approached by the London Probation Service to look at partnering with them to develop a work-based learning programme for the probation service.”

The three PGCE and MA programmes use a hybrid approach to learning that doesn’t require traditional weekly attendance; something that would not be viable for the busy officers of the MPS. Instead, the programme brings together workshop style short teaching programmes with independent learning.