The Police Leadership Commission has published its report, and if you're preparing for a promotion board it's one of the most useful documents to land in years. It's the most thorough national review of how policing develops and promotes its leaders in a generation, and its verdict on the current promotion process is blunt.
This guide covers what the Commission is, why it called the sergeant and inspector promotion process broken, what it recommends changing, and what you should take from it as you prepare.
One note before we start. The report sets out recommendations, not law, and it sits within a wider government programme of police reform. As at July 2026 a reformed process was being piloted in five forces, but much of what follows is a direction of travel rather than a rule in force today. It still matters, because it tells you what the service is moving toward.
What is the Police Leadership Commission?
The Police Leadership Commission was an independent commission set up by the College of Policing with Home Office support, chaired jointly by Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert. Its report, Professionalism and performance: Police leadership for the future, examines how the service attracts, develops, appoints and supports its leaders at every rank, and makes a wide set of recommendations for reform. It's published under the Open Government Licence, which is why we can quote it directly here, and you can read the full report for yourself.
Its central finding is uncomfortable. Despite falling crime and many examples of strong individual leadership, the Commission concluded that “the overall quality of police leadership is inconsistent and fails to provide the policing that the public deserves.” That single sentence is why the report reaches all the way down to how you'll be assessed at your next board.
The verdict: the promotion process is called broken
The Commission doesn't soften its language. It states plainly that “promotion processes to sergeant and inspector are broken,” relying on “an out-of-date exam that only half of prospective sergeants and just over a third of prospective inspectors pass.”
The survey evidence behind that is stark. 78 per cent of sergeants and 64 per cent of inspectors who responded said they didn't believe the process identifies the officers who go on to be effective in the role. Many described getting on to development as a matter of who you know rather than what you've done. Over three quarters of sergeants had acted up before getting the substantive rank, and more than half for 13 months or longer. If you've ever felt the process was a lottery, the national review has now said the same thing, with the data to back it.
Why leaders were never properly developed
The report traces the problem to decades of underinvestment. Central spending on leadership development runs at only about 0.02 per cent of total police funding. A comparison made in the debate around the report makes the gap vivid: fifteen years after Sandhurst, an Army colonel commanding 1,500 people will have had around 72 weeks of leadership development, while a comparable Met chief superintendent is likely to have had two or three weeks.
The effect shows up in how the workforce feels. Just 25 per cent of respondents to the 2025 National Police Wellbeing Survey agreed they worked in a well led and managed organisation, and frontline officers were the least likely to agree. More than a fifth of new sergeants and inspectors said they'd received no formal leadership training more than two years into the role. Most sergeants said their training had prepared them “not at all” (38 per cent) or to only a “slight extent” (34 per cent) for their promotion.
What the verdict means for you
It's easy to read all this and feel discouraged. The more useful reading is the opposite. A process the service itself admits leaves most officers underprepared is one you can stand out in by preparing properly. The officers who take their own development seriously aren't competing against a well drilled field. They're competing against a system that, by its own account, has left most officers to work it out alone.
That's the real message of the Commission for anyone sitting a board. The bar is moving toward demonstrated leadership, and the officers who prepare on substance will meet it while others are still revising for an exam the report itself wants to demote. What the report recommends instead is set out below.
A new national definition of police leadership
The single most useful thing in the report for you is that it sets out, for the first time, an agreed national definition of what good police leadership is. The Commission frames leadership as what a leader should be, know and do. The values a leader should hold are selflessness, integrity, moral courage, impartiality and fairness, taking responsibility and being accountable. The knowledge and actions cover sound judgement, clear communication, developing people, making fair decisions grounded in evidence, and setting standards through their own conduct. The full report sets out how it frames each of these.
The report also names six broad domains that effective leaders need to work across: strategic leadership, operational delivery, people leadership, change and learning, personal effectiveness and political astuteness. It's explicit that these are intended to shape future promotion criteria. Read as a candidate, that's a preview of the yardstick your future boards will be built around.
How promotion is being rebuilt
The Commission recommends rebuilding promotion around demonstrated leadership rather than exam recall. Three shifts matter most for how you prepare.
First, leadership capability would become the primary test. Under the recommended model, eligibility would rest on your annual performance reviews and completion of leadership development, with the legal exam moved later and modernised, taken only once you've been assessed as suitable to lead. As one submission to the Commission put it, passing an exam doesn't make you a leader. The report even recommends that the modernised exam should test your ability to find and understand law using AI and other modern technology, rather than recall it from memory. Preparing with the tools that will be part of the job, rather than against them, sits with the direction the report sets.
Second, your day job would become your evidence. The Commission wants a mandatory, consistent annual performance review that follows you through a career and feeds a professional record, and it wants that review to gate promotion at every rank. Reflecting on what you've delivered, and how, stops being an annual admin task and becomes the spine of your case for promotion.
Third, acting up would end. The report recommends abolishing temporary promotion and replacing it with a probationary period in the rank itself. The same standardised, centrally overseen approach is recommended for chief inspector and above, ranks where there's currently no national process at all.
The senior constable rank and the leadership fast stream
Two structural changes are worth knowing even though they sit outside the board itself. The report recommends a new rank of senior constable, a formal rank recognising experienced officers who lead and mentor on the front line without necessarily wanting to promote. It's not a compulsory step to sergeant, and selection is meant to be based on capability.
It also recommends a police leadership fast stream, described as the largest talent scheme ever introduced into policing. It would be open to serving officers up to inspector without a degree requirement, aiming to develop the most capable toward superintendent over five to ten years, with a target of at least 400 people a year. For an ambitious officer, it's a signal that the service wants to reward demonstrable capability earlier rather than time served.
Do you need to mention the Commission at your board?
No. As with any external report, no panel awards marks for naming it, and anyone who recites recommendations will sound like they're performing rather than leading. The value of the report is orientation, not vocabulary. It tells you what the service now means by good leadership, so that your answers pull in that direction naturally: capability over time served, and evidence over assertion.
How to prepare for where promotion is heading
Start from capability. For your target rank, work out how you'd lead through the pressures your force actually faces, and build a bank of real examples that show judgement and delivery rather than presence. Get comfortable evidencing your own actions in the first person, because the whole thrust of the reform is showing demonstrated leadership rather than asserting it. Practise reflecting on what you did and what you'd do differently, because that reflective thinking about what comes next is exactly what the new model is built to reward.
If you've just passed the NPPF Step Two exam, what the promotion board asks next picks up where the results leave off.
If your force uses the CVF, the behaviours it assesses already map closely onto the Commission's definition, so preparing against the CVF 2024 is preparing for the direction the report sets. If you're heading for the Met, its own reform story sits alongside this one in A New Met for London.
State6 is built for exactly the shift the Commission describes: preparing you to demonstrate leadership capability, marked the way a board marks it. You practise questions calibrated to your rank, get an honest review of where your answers score and where they lose marks, and can sit a full voiced Mock Board out loud. Whether you're going for sergeant, inspector or chief inspector, the work is the same: evidence the leader you already are, clearly enough for a panel to score it. For another piece of the force context panels expect, read what HMICFRS grades mean for your board, and for the full picture of the process, see the complete guide to UK police promotion boards.