This is the second part of a two part guide to the Police Leadership Commission. Part one covered what the Commission is and why it called the current promotion process broken. This part covers what it recommends changing, and what you should take from it as you prepare.
The same note applies. These are recommendations, not law. A reformed process is already being piloted in five forces, and the Commission's thinking feeds into a wider government programme of police reform, 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.
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 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, which more than three quarters of sergeants said they'd done before getting the substantive rank, 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 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.