Policing doesn’t need a National Academy: It needs a bar raiser

7th August 2026Michael Stephenson, Organisational Psychologist

The recent report of the Police Leadership Commission put forward a range of proposals for policing in England and Wales, including a National Academy of Police Leadership, a leadership recruitment ‘fast stream’, and a standardised promotion pipeline; but organisational psychologist Michael Stephenson argues that the report has “diagnosed a complex problem and prescribed a complicated-domain solution”, because but it never sorted the problem enough to know which question it was actually answering.

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Policing doesn’t need a National Academy: It needs a bar raiser

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