Most officers preparing for a promotion board spend their time writing and rewriting STARR answers.
That’s good and you should. But there’s a step that comes before that which most officers skip entirely.
Understanding what your panel is actually scoring you against.
The CVF 2024 isn’t background reading. It’s the document your panel has open on the table in front of them while you’re speaking. Every answer you give is being measured against it in real time. If you don’t know how that measurement works, you’re preparing blind. And the CVF shapes both your behavioural STARR answers and your forward facing question answers equally.
What the CVF Actually Is
The Competency and Values Framework, updated by the College of Policing in May 2024, is the behavioural framework used to assess officers across recruitment, development and promotion at every rank.
It’s made up of six competencies and three values. At a promotion board, your answers will be assessed against the descriptors relevant to your target rank level. Those descriptors include specific positive indicators that you should be evidencing and negative indicators that will cost you marks if a panel hears them.
The six competencies are:
- We Support and Inspire: leadership of people and performance
- We Are Emotionally Aware: understanding and managing emotion in yourself and others
- We Take Ownership: personal accountability and follow through
- We Are Innovative and Open Minded: problem solving and embracing change
- We Analyse Critically: analytical thinking and sound judgement
- We Collaborate: working across boundaries to achieve outcomes
The three values are Courage, Respect and Empathy, and Public Service.
Your board won’t necessarily assess all nine. Most forces run a structured interview covering between four and six competencies depending on the rank and process design. But you won’t always be told which ones in advance.
The Part Nobody Explains
Here’s where most preparation goes wrong.
Officers learn the competency names and some learn the descriptors. Very few understand how the scoring actually works on the day.
Your panel isn’t sitting there deciding whether your answer was broadly good or broadly weak. They’re working through a structured scoring sheet. For each competency they’re listening for specific positive indicators and watching for specific negative indicators. At the end of your answer they’ll assign a score, typically on a 1 to 5 scale, based on how many indicators you hit and whether any negatives were present.
A strong answer that hits four positive indicators but also triggers a negative can still score a three. An answer that’s technically fine but evidences nothing specific can score a two regardless of how confident you sounded delivering it.
This is why vague answers fail. Not because they’re dishonest. Because they don’t give a panel anything to score.
What Each Level Actually Means
The CVF uses three levels, and the level you’re assessed against depends on your target rank.
Level 1 covers PC and PCSO. The expectation is personal conduct and awareness. You’re expected to demonstrate the competency within your own role and behaviour.
Level 2 runs from Sergeant through to Chief Inspector. The expectation shifts to leading others. Your answers need to show you influencing, directing and developing people rather than just doing things well yourself. What that looks like in practice changes at each rank: see what panels look for at sergeant, inspector and chief inspector level.
Level 3 covers Superintendent and above. The expectation is strategic leadership. You’re expected to demonstrate awareness of the wider organisational picture and to show you’re driving change across functions rather than managing it within a team.
This is what rank calibration means in practice. It’s not about using bigger words or sounding more senior. It’s about where your actions sit in the organisation and how far their impact reaches.
A sergeant who describes what they personally did well rather than how they led others through something will score poorly regardless of how strong the underlying example is. The content might be impressive. But it’s not answering the question at the right level.
The Competencies Officers Most Commonly Fail to Evidence
After sitting on enough boards to lose count, there are patterns.
We Are Emotionally Aware is the one most officers think they’re evidencing and rarely are. Describing a difficult conversation or a team member who was struggling isn’t enough. The panel is looking for your own emotional response in the moment. How did you feel? How did you manage that? How did the emotional dynamic affect your decision making? Officers describe the other person’s emotions. Panels want yours.
With We Analyse Critically, officers lean on instinct and experience to justify decisions, which sounds compelling but doesn’t evidence this competency. The panel wants to see your reasoning process. What data or intelligence did you consider? What did you discount and why? What was the gap between what you knew and what you needed to know?
We Support and Inspire is where rank calibration bites hardest. At sergeant the panel wants to see you leading a small team through something. At inspector and CI the panel wants to see your leadership reach further, across teams, across functions, across a problem that was bigger than your immediate span of control. Describing a single conversation with a direct report won’t cut it at CI level.
How the 2024 Update Changes Things
The 2016 version of the CVF had nine competencies. The 2024 update consolidates them into six and reframes the values around three principles: Courage, Respect and Empathy, and Public Service.
The most significant change for officers preparing for boards is the increased weight on courage as a live behaviour. Panels are now more explicitly looking for officers who demonstrate ethical challenge. Moments where you stood for something, raised a concern, or held a position under pressure.
You don’t need a dramatic example. You need a real one. What matters is that you can show the panel a moment where doing the right thing wasn’t the easiest thing and you did it anyway.
One important note: not all forces have transitioned to the 2024 framework at the same pace. Before your board, confirm with your force HR or promotion coordinator which version you’re being assessed against.
Your Force’s Inspection Picture Is Part of This
Your panel knows your force. They know what HMICFRS said about it. They know which areas are graded Requires Improvement, which causes of concern are live and what the chief officer team is focused on right now.
An officer who weaves that context naturally into their answers, showing that their individual leadership choices are aligned to wider organisational priorities, demonstrates a quality of strategic awareness that panels notice. It’s not about name dropping the PEEL report. It’s about showing you understand the environment you’re leading in.
Most officers don’t do this. It’s one of the clearest ways to show level 3 thinking even when you’re not going for chief inspector.
One Question to Ask Before Every Answer
Before you walk into that board room, ask yourself this.
Does this answer show me operating at the level I’m applying for, or at the level I’m leaving?
If you’re going for inspector, is your answer describing what you did as a sergeant, or what you did that showed you were ready to lead at inspector level?
If you want to see what applying the CVF looks like in practice, the We Are Emotionally Aware example answer shows a weak and a strong response at inspector level side by side. For sergeant level, the We Support and Inspire example answer does the same.
The CVF isn’t a mystery. It’s a framework. And frameworks can be learned.
For a complete overview of the promotion process — from how the NPPF works through to what panels are scoring at each rank — see the complete guide to UK police promotion boards.