Metropolitan Police Promotion Board Preparation
If you’re preparing for a Sergeant, Inspector or Chief Inspector board at Metropolitan Police, your panel already knows your force’s inspection picture. Here’s what that means for you, and how State6 builds it into your preparation.
Metropolitan Police HMICFRS snapshot
Most recent PEEL inspection: 2023-25 PEEL inspection
The Metropolitan Police faces serious concerns following the 2023-25 PEEL inspection, graded inadequate for both investigating crime and managing offenders, and requiring improvement across five further areas including leadership, workforce, and responding to the public.
PEEL grades
- Workforce: Requires improvement
- Leadership: Requires improvement
- Police powers: Adequate
- Preventing crime: Requires improvement
- Managing offenders: Inadequate
- Investigating crime: Inadequate
- Responding to public: Requires improvement
- Protecting vulnerable: Requires improvement
Causes of concern
- Investigating crime
- Managing offenders and suspects
Areas for improvement
- The force doesn't always record the ethnicity of the people stopped and searched by its officers
- The force needs to make sure its data is accurate and robust enough to understand the reasons for the disproportionate use of force
- The force's systems, management processes and training need to support consistent, effective problem-solving
- The force needs to minimise the time that neighbourhood officers are diverted away from their main duties to cover excess demand in response teams
- The force needs to improve how it involves the community in local decision‑making
- The force needs to attend calls for service in line with its published attendance times
Plus 15 more areas identified in the full inspection. Inside State6, each is mapped to the Met Success Profile areas it affects, so you know exactly what to evidence.
The Met runs its own process
The Metropolitan Police board is no longer the College of Policing Competency and Values Framework test the other 42 forces sit. The CVF still underpins the criteria, but it’s no longer the test itself. The Met now runs a future-focused interview that assesses your potential to perform at the next rank, scored from 1 to 4 against its own Success Profile. Prepare as if it’s a standard CVF board and you’re ready for the wrong process.
State6 is built on the Met’s actual published criteria, so you prepare for the real thing:
- Future-focused questions on the Met Success Profile areas: Integrity, Leads Inclusively, Being Resilient, Planning and Prioritising, and Drives Engagement.
- An AI review that scores your written answer on the Met’s 1 to 4 potential model.
- A spoken AI mock board that runs the Met way and debriefs you on your potential.
- Force Intelligence pairing the Met’s HMICFRS findings with the New Met for London reform plan.
Most other promotion preparation, free or paid, is still built around the CVF. For the full picture, read our guide to Met police promotion in 2026.
Recent inspection activity
Inspections published since the last full PEEL assessment. These are often the most current picture of Metropolitan Police, and the areas your panel is most likely to be conscious of right now.
Custody inspection · 7 August 2025
Report on an inspection visit to police custody suites in the Metropolitan Police Service
No formal grades or ratings are assigned in this report; instead, a cause of concern, one recommendation, and 20 areas for improvement are identified.
What this means for your board
A promotion board at Metropolitan Police isn’t only assessing whether you can lead a team. It’s assessing whether you understand the force you’re asking to lead in, and where your leadership fits its priorities. Officers who connect their examples to what Metropolitan Police is actually focused on stand out. Officers who stay inside their own team don’t.
You don’t do this by quoting the inspection report. You do it by letting your force’s priorities shape the decisions in your answers. If you want the full method, read our guide on what HMICFRS grades mean for your promotion board, or compare every force’s PEEL grades side by side.
How State6 prepares you for Metropolitan Police
You don’t have to research any of this yourself. The Met’s real picture, its inspection findings and its New Met for London reform plan, is built into State6, and every question and AI review is set on the Met’s own future-focused model and its 1 to 4 potential scale. You prepare for the board you’ll actually sit, on the criteria you’ll actually be judged against.
That includes a spoken AI mock board run the Met way, where you answer out loud while the panel probes and debriefs you on your potential from 1 to 4.
Prepare for your Metropolitan Police board
Practice questions, AI board reviews and your force’s inspection picture, all in one place. Try it free first: one AI Board Review, ten practice questions and fifteen coaching rounds, no card needed.
Get started with State6 →State6 is an independent preparation platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Metropolitan Police, the College of Policing or HMICFRS. Inspection findings are summarised from the publicly available HMICFRS PEEL reports.
HMICFRS inspection data: Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.