Engaging with formal training: dependence on past work experience

As said earlier, individuals adopting this orientation normally came from a policing-relevant background. At the onset of initial training, their pre-socialisation was attached with both advantageous and disadvantageous value at the academy. While the hierarchy in this context institutionally privileged tenure and policing working experience, and the operational knowledge of ex-PCSOs and ex-specials did earn a little seniority over their peers in the intake, the training academy’s centralising practices, conversely, disqualified the practices these newcomers had formerly performed daily. The training faculty iterated that ‘bad habits’, i.e. deviant work norms in local areas, should be abandoned and supplanted by organisational licensed ‘gold- standard’ practices, which elicited a host of veteran newcomers’ identity crises.

Since individual actors’ characteristics, motive, contribution and connection with colleagues and the public were all inextricably imbedded in their work habits, norms and experience (Van Maanen, 2010: 123), the practical norms veterans used to maintain were infused with their sense of ‘ego’, self-esteem, and socially recognised competence (Down and Reveley, 2009; Goffman, 1959: 22; Pratt et al., 2006). The gold-standard discourses, however, gave almost no credit to, but explicitly criticised the norms into which these veterans invested so much of their identity. Without doubt, this engendered destructive effects on their pride, dignity and self-assertiveness. The following excerpt clearly indicates how critical and corrective articulations on past local practices influenced a veteran’s self-perception.

‘I feel like I am great at talking. I used to go and visit loads and loads people… get good intelligence, visit old people… go to schools. And I really miss all that stuff. Because I’ve built bridges with those people… every month I’ll go to somebody. And I always used my radio... But neither we were being taught. Again, it feels like what I did was wrong, although I know it was right, and everything was lawful. I feel I am losing in my brain, some of what I already knew. Because I am doubting myself now… I have been

taken the idol of the area and now I am in training I feel I have lost all that information and have to start over again.’ (Officer 07)

This did not mean that the authoritative portrait of ideal police identity defeated their practice-stemmed past identity, or overshadowed the police identity to which they aspired, in that their cognition of the difference and separation between training and the practical world allowed them to conceive the current training was temporary and would ultimately give way to the practical world. By then, the practices they identified with would be appreciated and allowed again. Besides, practitioners exploited opportunities for practicing job performance, such as role-play exercises and PDU placements, to enact their existing skills and improve practical competence. That was why officer 07, after reporting her thwarted self-confidence, expressed that she ‘missed’ getting involved in the real policing routines. Apparently, she held onto the idea of re-activation of her practical competence after passing the temporary passage of initial training.

‘But I think that having the PDU where we go out will help bring it back again… it’s been 3 or 4 months that I had been in the PCSO… I miss it. And I am trying to forget things. Just simple things. But I know once I get back out there, it will be just like sack or turnover to do them over again.’ (Officer 07)

Among practitioners, a shared view of the training programme was that it was far from sufficient to prepare the new intake for the practical work, because most of the crucial practical elements were not covered in the training. They maintained that those tacit, nuanced and locally adapted aspects in particular could hardly be imparted without practicing in real situations. Commonly noted was the wide gap between training and real work, of which the following comment is a good example.

‘It all comes down to experience. It’s going on and being able to deal with it. And getting the experience and getting the practice to make you better... you can sit in the classroom and you can talk about it all there every day. But you’re not gonna to know what is gonna be like until you get out there and you do it. It’s completely different element to it, from being in the classroom and talking about it, and then being there and being in the situation. It’s quite scary’. (Officer 10)

Moreover, in the context in which all-inclusive learning and gold-standard policing were intensively espoused, and newcomers’ status was arbitrarily defined as ‘ignorant novice’, practitioners could hardly freely enact their practical skills and work norms, and were thus unable to constitute and construct their identity. Under this circumstance, they tended to demarcate an ontological space separated from the formal regime, whereby their past practice-based identity could be recognised and celebrated. In this independent space, by drawing on their past practical experience in a real policing context, practitioners could cast their identity in a favourable light again and sustain their identity when living out the identity could not be enacted.

First of all, they anchored their current sense of identity in their highly agentic working experience in the past, which served as an undeniable and irreducible ‘identity peg’ (Goffman, 1963: 57) or identity ‘building block’ (Van Maanen, 2010: 120). By doing so, they strived to cast themselves in the role of pre-socialised, experienced and competent newcomers, thus at a much higher level than their peers in the cohort. Secondly, their account of episodes of socialisation in the previous policing role often came with a conclusion that new starters were often able to perform better than they had thought. By saying this they constructed a highly agential identity and defended against the vulnerability and inadequacy imposed by the formal regime. These could be well illustrated in the recollection of a first-time patrol experience from an ex-PCSO, who believed that the only issue impeding new recruits from stepping onto the stage was their own fear and self-doubt, rather than lack of knowledge or anything else. He also conveyed that he had passed the threshold and been ready for the new job.

‘I remembered thinking to myself --- I don’t really know … what to do here. And then I went on ‘’okay, I am gonna go this direction’’, and I uttered to my mouth… I don’t remember what I said. But what I can remember (is) thinking is subconsciously going, ‘’I am talking here and everything coming out here is the right things’’. And then in their head, I was going along with things. I was saying all the right things. But I just I don’t know where it came from. It was out there somewhere. It just takes that little push. Getting dropped the dependents.’ (Officer 01)

The practitioner recruits not only used past experience to rejuvenate the practice- constituted identity, but also actively resisted the discursive domination of the formal regime. They used real work experience as concrete evidence to argue against the

formal assertion that learning all legislation by heart and behaving in accordance with perfect standards should be the preoccupation of newcomers and be the attributes of their future police identity. As this ex-PCSO continued, based on his own reflection after breaking into the role, he believed that what the training authority tried to enforce upon recruits and rookies accordingly strived to achieve was almost impossible and unnecessary in working realities.

‘There is nothing in this job, unfortunately, is clear-cut. I mean you can do the same job a thousand times. And each time it would vary in some degree. It’s best to know the legislations, A, B, C, D, as a whole. I agree, with all the framework of it… you may use A, but you may not use B or C, but you may use D. So, you take what you need and put it into context. So, all these what- if questions are just irrelevant. But it all comes with (experience)… some (people) haven’t done before, so...’ (Officer 01)

Another good example is officer 06. His somewhat ironic description of what happened in lectures, in association with the self-abasing account of his own experience as a rookie before, implicitly suggested that the rigid formal training misled and unnecessarily confused the current recruits.

‘Operationally, you don’t actually have to know everything they are telling you. But I can understand why they have to tell you. So … sometimes, it’s like me and Louise, and a couple of other guys who I know have done (policing) before. You can see us come to going down slumping in our chair a bit, because … it’s stuff that we know. But you were starting to look over to people like, eh, Andy and Dan. They’re going ‘Oh. God. What’s going on?’…… And I remember back to I did it for the first time and it was all a blur. And they’re all throwing all these words in ears, and you’re going (like) ‘oh my god, my god’. I know…’

By drawing upon and sharing among one other the abundant experiences that highlighted individual agency, competence and progression, practitioners constructed an ontological space independent of the formal regime that focused on rule following but restrained individual agency, competence and progression. Through these efforts, they not only stabilised and sustained identity, but also derived epistemological autonomy, which allowed them to plan their learning activities during the training

based on their own judgement from practical experience, regardless of the prevalent ‘all-inclusive’ principle formally avowed. In this way, practitioners concerned themselves only with the ‘relevant’ elements and let go all the ‘adjacent’ information. As for the useful parts, they learned only to the extent that was pragmatic and practically helpful, rather than in-depth exploration encouraged by faculty (e.g. ‘reading around the subject’).

‘As I said, I am not very academic. So … I don’t need it to be complicated. But the way they lay out the things --- this is the bit the law says, this is the bit you need to prove. Okay. Cool. Got that. And this is all the bits around it. So, I sometimes zoom out a little bit after that, because otherwise it confuses me.’ (Officer 06)

Also, the gold-standard policing discourses were filtered and diluted at the reception of practitioners. They were understood more as political rhetoric than as real behavioural references, thus only adding to their scope of exposure but not necessarily provoking changes in how practitioners carried out work. Among practitioners, there was an ‘open-minded’ yet indifferent orientation to the principle of ‘well-rounded’ policing, as clearly revealed from the following narratives. Apparently, the narrator interpreted the gold-standard policing discourses mainly based on his standpoint from experience in the practical world. In his assumption, the rules of work were ultimately determined by experienced experts according to real work conditions.

‘I would stay open to this (gold-standard policing) … because it’s not like saying you are wrong, it’s more that they are trying to help you. And that’s something that we, as students, should be open-minded about, like things we have not necessarily been told in area on how it should be done… obviously if you relate it back to the new manners we got told of majority benefits, and justify in proportion, the upper bit of it, and you still think you can do (gold- standard policing in realities), then I personally wouldn’t necessarily see an issue of it. But if you get told by someone, who has a greater knowledge and experience, I would be more inclined to believe them but, again, if I am in doubt, I would speak with my supervisor, sergeant to clarify that.’ (Officer 13)

As regards the role-play exercises, practitioners were appreciative of their usefulness in facilitating recruits’ enactment learned knowledge in task performance, but at the same time were highly aware that the exercises barely resembled what happened in the real policing routines. As the following quotation indicates, practitioners did not really expect to get good preparation for the real work from these exercises.

‘‘I think the role-plays are good... It’s better for your own development. And it does put you in a bad situation. Obviously, the trainers can’t push you too far. But they push you as far as physically they can then ... It’s a good element of what you are going to face out there, and may not be the exact way, but it’s a good insight of how you are going to deal with things’ (Officer 10)

In short, since the formal training context mainly presented abstract written rules and codes of ethics, but little practical elements, practitioners’ understanding of the new identity was barely expanded. Accordingly, they remained heavily reliant on their past work experience to direct their learning activities and identity construction in this stage. As they held that the classroom-based training only offered limited relevant resources for building the new identity, they anticipated more significant identity work in the next phase.

5.4.2 Engaging with the first tutored-placement: expanded understanding, learning and