Police Online Assessment 2026: Interview, Written and Briefing Exercises Explained

Section 1 · How Police Selection Works in 2026

One national process, then your force’s own interview

The journey to a conditional offer runs in a set order. You apply to your chosen force, which checks your eligibility. You complete a sift, either your force’s own or the national one. You then sit the College of Policing online assessment process, the successor to the old in-person assessment centre, with three exercises taken online on the Tazio platform. Pass that and almost every force invites you to its own in-force final interview. After the interview come the fitness test, a medical, references and vetting.

The online assessment is the same wherever you apply, which is good news: prepare for it once and your preparation travels with you. The College publishes its candidate guidance openly, and this page follows it. You can read the original on the College of Policing website.

Throughout all of it you are assessed against the Competency and Values Framework at Level 1, the practitioner standard. Not against legal knowledge, and not against policing experience, because you are not expected to have any.

Section 2 · The Entry Routes in Brief

There are several routes into the rank of constable. The Police Constable Entry Programme (PCEP) is the non-degree route most forces now advertise. The Police Constable Degree Apprenticeship (PCDA) is a three year apprenticeship that earns a degree while you serve. The Degree Holder Entry Programme (DHEP) is a two year route for graduates, and some universities offer a pre-join degree in professional policing.

Here is the part that matters for this guide: whichever route you choose, the selection process is broadly the same. The online assessment and the final interview do not get easier or harder by route, so the preparation below applies to all of them. We compare every current route side by side, including the detective routes and Police Now, in our police entry routes guide.

Section 3 · The Sift

Before the online assessment you complete a sift, which screens your suitability to progress. Depending on the force this is either an in-force exercise or the national sift. The national sift is made up of two parts, a situational judgement test and a behavioural styles questionnaire, both built around the behaviours in the CVF. It is completed online, and your force tells you which version applies and when. If you are unsure what your force uses, its recruitment team will confirm the exact stages.

Section 4 · The Competency-Based Interview

Five questions, one minute to think, five minutes to answer

The interview is the heart of the online assessment. You are asked five questions about how you have dealt with situations in the past. Each question appears on screen with prompts to consider, and a pre-recorded assessor reads it to you. You then get one minute of thinking time, followed by five minutes to record your answer. There are no re-records and no pauses, and the whole exercise takes around 40 minutes.

Your examples can come from anywhere in your life. The College says so explicitly: work and personal life both count. Retail, hospitality, university, the military, caring for family, volunteering. The assessors are not looking for policing stories, they are looking for evidence of the behaviours below in whatever life you have actually lived.

This exercise is marked against five CVF areas: three values (courage, public service, and respect and empathy) and two competencies (we take ownership, and we are innovative and open-minded).

The College recommends structuring answers with STAR: the situation in brief, the task you faced, the actions you personally took, and the result. Most of your five minutes should live in the actions, told as “I” rather than “we”, because the assessor can only credit what you did.

One rule to take seriously: no prepared notes or scripts, in this or any exercise. The College warns that evidence of a script can mean an automatic fail. The candidates who pass comfortably are not the ones who memorised answers. They are the ones who practised speaking their real examples out loud until the structure came naturally.

Section 5 · The Written Exercise

You are the constable. Your sergeant needs this now.

In the written exercise you take on the role of a police constable and complete an urgent written task for your line manager. You are given four items of information, perhaps witness accounts, a report, a map or an email from a resident, and you build your response using only what is in front of you. Inventing extra facts is specifically ruled out.

The task should take around 40 minutes, though the system allows up to two hours, so there is no need to rush. Two reassurances from the College’s own guidance: spelling and grammar are not assessed, because not every candidate has access to a spell checker, and no legal knowledge is required.

What the assessors mark:

• Respect and empathy
• We analyse critically
• We support and inspire
• We collaborate

In practice that means: read everything before you write, identify the issues and who is affected, recommend actions you can justify from the material, weigh the risks, and think about how the community is reassured. Candidates who simply summarise the documents score poorly against candidates who reason from them.

Section 6 · The Briefing Exercise

A live scenario that escalates twice

The briefing exercise is the one candidates tend to fear most, mainly because they have never done anything like it. You take the role of a constable dealing with a community issue. You get preparation material and around ten untimed minutes to read it. Then the exercise runs in three parts, and in each part you answer four questions out loud: the question is read to you on video, you get up to a minute to think, then three minutes to speak your answer.

The twist is that parts two and three each bring new information, and the situation escalates. Your plan from part one gets tested against developments you did not see coming. The assessors are not looking for the single correct answer, and the College says no policing knowledge is needed. They are listening for whether you identify the real issues, explain your reasoning calmly, consider risk and impact on people, and adapt when the picture changes.

What the assessors mark:

• Public service
• We are emotionally aware
• We take ownership
• We are innovative and open-minded

The whole exercise takes about an hour. Like the interview, it is spoken, one take, no script. Fluency under a timer is a skill, and it is built the same way as any other skill: by doing it repeatedly before the day it counts.

Section 7 · CVF Level 1, Explained for Applicants

Every stage above marks you against the same thing: the Competency and Values Framework at Level 1, the practitioner standard. Level 1 does not expect leadership of teams or strategic thinking. It expects honest, concrete evidence of how you behave, and that can come from any part of your life. A shift where you calmed an angry customer can evidence respect and empathy just as well as any policing story could.

We break down all three values and six competencies, in plain English and with everyday examples you can use, in our full CVF Level 1 guide. The College’s original framework is published here.

Section 8 · The In-Force Final Interview

The stage most guides forget about

Passing the online assessment does not finish the job. Nearly every force in England and Wales then runs its own final interview, and we have reviewed the published recruitment guidance of all 43 forces to map how it works.

The common shape: a panel of usually two people, somewhere between 20 and 45 minutes, asking past-focused questions against the CVF at Level 1, with follow-up probes into your answers. Almost every force adds motivation questions too. Why policing, why this force, what do you know about the area you would serve. Some forces, Derbyshire among them, also ask future-focused questions that set a fictional scenario and ask what you would do.

The variations are worth knowing. Thames Valley gives candidates the questions with half an hour to prepare on the day. Wiltshire runs its final interview online. Several forces publish their own guidance, including Derbyshire’s interview preparation guide and Leicestershire’s interview guidance, and Dyfed-Powys has published the marking guide its assessors use. If your force publishes a guide, read every word of it, because it is telling you exactly how to score.

Two pieces of preparation carry this stage. First, your CVF examples, sharpened by the online assessment, do double duty here. Second, research the force: its values and the issues its area actually deals with. Our force pages are a good starting point. The panel notices the difference between a candidate who wants to be a police officer and a candidate who wants to be one of their police officers.

Section 9 · How to Prepare, and the Resit Rules

You get two attempts a year. Treat the first one as the one that counts.

The College’s resit policy is blunt. If you fail the online assessment you wait at least three months to resit, you repeat every exercise, and you are limited to two attempts in any 12 month period. A failed attempt does not just sting, it can push your application back the best part of a year once force timetables are taken into account.

Preparation that actually makes a difference looks like this. Map your life for CVF Level 1 evidence and pick your strongest examples before the day. Learn the STAR structure until you can hold it without notes, because notes are banned. Then practise the real format out loud, against the real timings, enough times that a one-take, five-minute spoken answer feels normal rather than terrifying.

Section 10 · Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

This guide is drawn from the College of Policing’s online assessment process candidate guide, the College’s Competency and Values Framework, the official Join the Police guidance, and the published recruitment pages of the 43 territorial forces of England and Wales. Formats and rules change: always check your force’s current guidance and the College’s own pages before you sit any stage.

Published 2026-07-14 · Last updated 2026-07-14