**7. Conclusion**

*Education, Human Rights and Peace in Sustainable Development*

probably be worried police officers, which is not expected at all.

**6.4 Interpersonal communication and critical thinking**

the offers to perform their police work well.

**6.5 Policing in emergencies**

However, examples from their earlier life could be created and delivered through a virtual learning environment to assist the trainees in understanding the contexts and link with the theories. They should be given the opportunity to deal with reallife scenarios as student police officers who are too afraid to test their abilities will

As a professional course, interpersonal communication skills including critical thinking are very important in police education [142]. The nine Peelian principles of policing are the main mantra of policing, which suggests police officers are citizens in uniform and they cannot succeed without the support and approval from the community [143]. Throughout the curriculum of the professional education programmes, there should be an effective structure for teaching essential interpersonal skills so that student officers get a solid foundation, which enables them to remove some of the barriers between the police force and the public. Initial training through academic programmes builds an essential foundation for new officers because they need to master communication skills before they execute tactical and legal tasks in practice. Effective policing occurs when police officers and members of the public become partners to create safe and crime-free communities. This partnership requires well-prepared police officers who display not only strong technical capabilities but also interpersonal skills. Therefore, police forces as the law enforcement agencies must train their officers on how to interact effectively with the public and work with them. In the professional setting, technical and interpersonal skills help

Police officers face unique challenges and critical discourse as part of their role and they need to constantly reflect on their learning and experience to overcome the situations successfully. It is therefore a key focus of the PCDA and DHEP to make the officers critical reflective thinkers and students reflect and write their reflective journals throughout these work-based learning. There is a pressing need to incorporate the practice into degree programmes for effective learning and developing skills as Hornyak et al. [144] suggest that people learn best from direct experience with guided reflection and analysis. It is also essential for the best student learning experience and to develop necessary knowledge, behaviours, and skills for the student officers to become fully operationally competent police constables.

According to a recent study [145], students who are studying police studies at HEIs quickly assimilated a police identity, which affected their attitudes and behaviour. For fulfilling the potential of the PEQF, police services need to embrace, promote, and enable their police officers to become reflective practitioners through critical thinking and policing must be a reflective practice in the fullest sense [62]. If the recently developed academic police studies programmes are able to provide interpersonal communication skills and critical thinking, only then HEIs will be able to provide radically transformed and well-equipped policing degrees for the better future.

In times of crises or emergencies, there are more constraints imposed on the police forces, for instance, the recent COVID-19 pandemic restricted individuals' movements and mass gatherings. As a result, education and training programmes have to be put on hold advised by the College of Policing as the situation demanded the forces to deploy more officers to support the operations throughout the country, to such an extent that the Metropolitan Police Service requested the retired officers to come back on a paid or unpaid role and the officers who are approaching

**24**

Incorporating practice into professional learning is essential as Clapton and Cree [91] suggest to integrate theory and practice to bring the experiences of the field into the classroom as well as take the classroom into the field. It is commonly accepted that experience is a great teacher; however, it cannot replace a classroom, for example for learning law and legal procedure, and vice versa. To find a balance between theory and experience, similarly in between classroom and practice, the professional policing practice needs to be embedded in its entirety in the Pre-Join degree, PCDA programme, and DHEP. Policing is a life-long learning process; indeed it is a part of the professionalisation agenda, and to ensure this life-long learning to happen the police should be a learning organisation [147–151].

Recently introduced, these three academic professional programmes are still under experiment as HEIs are running the programmes for the first time in partnerships with the police forces. HEIs and police forces need to learn from their partnerships through different approaches and efforts of 'trial and error' to find better ways to prepare future police workforce and they must work out their ways to develop effective partnerships to learn from each other to be successful in achieving the goals of the 'Policing Vision 2025'. Then this model of partnership for providing police education can be a beacon for other police organisations around the world as the Leadership Review ([134], p. 5) suggests that many around the world envy the British police service and respect it 'for its strength of purpose and public service ethos'. Especially Commonwealth countries such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Nigeria, where those countries still are continuing their colonial legacy may be able to reform the recruitment process and education and training programmes of their forces to make a graduate level occupation through academic professional qualifications.

Although the newly introduced police education programmes are at the very early stage of their implementation as none of the three programmes has completed its cycle for its first cohort since introduction, continuous careful consideration is required to understand the challenges and overcome them in due course. This ongoing learning by doing effort is like 'trying to build an airplane while you are flying it' as the Chief US Training Officer for the Iraqi National Police Force said while expressing his experience of police capacity building in Iraq [152]. Indeed the recent developments 'offer new and potentially unprecedented opportunities for HEIs to play a major role in the education of police officers at all levels' ([54], p. 67). The success of the academic professional qualification programmes based on the PEQF

will depend on how stakeholders provide the opportunities to the HEIs to experiment their innovative administrative and pedagogical approaches and assist them to run the programmes as smoothly and flexibly as possible bearing in mind that 'the politics of the police and policing is complicated' ([135], p. 20).
