What’s happening with the new SIPP police promotion process? SIPP is the College of Policing’s new Sergeant and Inspector Promotion and Progression (SIPP) scheme, set to replace the NPPF… or is it?
It’s a fair question, but you may not have heard much about SIPP. That’s probably because there’s been a distinct lack of communication or progress reports of any substance published by the College. So not much in terms of transparency, openness or updates. And yet, SIPP is a subject of significant interest to aspiring leaders, especially officers looking to progress their career and who want to know more.
Make no bones about it: SIPP is a seismic change to police promotion and leadership selection, creating a far more academic and complex process for forces and candidates alike. If these changes are all new to you, my prior blogs on the subject and up-to-date SIPP FAQs will bring you up to speed!
In this blog, I introduce my latest free podcast and video where I discuss the question I posed in passing 18 months ago: Is SIPP doomed to succeed? There’s massive sunk costs in the scheme and great political will to ‘make it happen’, so it would be surprising if it didn’t proceed; the question is more ‘when’ not ‘if’. Watch below or read on for more insights…
“Hello Steve, I passed the Inspector board in the end! thanks for your time on the telephone & the additional links. The [Inspector] toolkit helped me think differently about the process & adjust my approach to my evidence. Many thanks.” – Mark
Continuous Uncertainty for Promotion?
Formal testing of SIPP is underway in three of the nine originally declared pilot forces (Avon and Somerset, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire), with Northants and Northumbria due to follow soon from late 2025. Formal assessment of the pilot is scheduled for April 2026.
Although it’s a “pilot”, it’s clear the College are heavily invested. SIPP impacts the future of all officers, many of whom are concerned. But unfortunately, there’s not much in the way of tangible information available for officers, even for those in the pilot forces.
Meaningful disclosures have only taken place in response to sporadic FOI requests (which forms the basis and bulk of the blogs and SIPP FAQs I’ve put together for officers). However, the College even here have not yet published all SIPP FOI disclosures made on their website.
That said, many officers may be thankful in the here-and-now that their force has not halted promotion full stop for the time being. I recently learned for example a sizeable force has suspended all promotions in the Federated ranks until further notice. This delay causes great uncertainty for career-minded cops. Not least because it eats into the five-year exam eligibility limit, for those who have passed their SIPP/NPPF exam. Other forces are also reviewing their proportion of supervisory posts and spans of control.
Questions to Rank Success have included “Should I go for promotion now or wait for SIPP to be implemented?” My response is always, “Don’t wait, go for it!” The goal posts will always change, there is no guarantee SIPP will be rolled out, and you wouldn’t want to put your career on hold awaiting another iteration of any process.
Further questions will be updated on the Rank Success SIPP FAQ page as they arise, but I encourage anyone with questions to direct these to your force HR department or exams officer. And of course, please get in touch if you receive meaningful answers, I’d be keen to learn and keep the FAQs updated on behalf of all officers.
The SIPP Legal Exam
If you have been monitoring developments, you’ll be aware there has been much uncertainty in relation to the legal exam. This was identified as a barrier as part of the fundamental rationale for SIPP, especially for minority ethnic candidates.
However, the first SIPP candidates have now sat the SIPP legal exam in late 2024 and early 2025. These individuals are now qualified for five years to pursue the next steps, e.g. competency-based promotion assessment and interview boards.
The SIPP exams have been conducted for officers in Avon and Somerset and Lincolnshire. The overall pass rate is the same (around 70%) as officers in those exact same forces achieved under the NPPF exam prior to 2025.
So the “barrier” of the legal exam appears to remain exactly the same so far.
SIPP Promotion Application
What’s the SIPP application form like? Well, it’s a HUGE undertaking, with 500 words against each of the CVF competencies and values. So 4,500 words total, akin to an academic journal article or thesis! This could be a huge ‘barrier’, given forces are starting to recognise a lack of reading and writing skills among officers.
This is clearly an intensive challenge, no small undertaking for anyone, let alone for busier-than-ever operational cops. Given the College’s aim to simplify and remove barriers to promotion identified within the NPPF, this mother of all applications creates a barrier which simply didn’t exist before.
I say this having been personally commissioned to interpret, explain and apply the CVF for force assessors, learning and development staff and trainers. I also work regularly and intensively with aspiring individual officers to get applications and evidence to the level and rank being assessed. Many successful officers simply use Rank Success example evidence toolkits to know what good looks like for various word limits.
Aside from written examples, the whole application process in itself could be seen as a test to assess you. In this blog from the Rank Success archives, I allude to some issues associated with promotion applications, an opportunity many new candidates underestimate or fail to exploit.
A promotion application is a test of your written communication. It’s also a valuable opportunity presented to set yourself apart from your competitors. Having been phased out in some forces as part of the postcode lottery of promotion, SIPP brings it back with a vengeance.
This may go some way to explaining why all candidates in one pilot force were reportedly unsuccessful with their first offering of SIPP promotion applications. This new, 100% effective barrier was logistically overcome in that process by permitting anyone who applied to go through to interview anyway… poof, barrier removed!
It will be interesting to see how this element develops as Northamptonshire and Northumbria adopt (parts of) the SIPP process later this year.
Postcode Lottery of Promotion Continues…
“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
The last decade or so has seen various promotion frameworks designed, delivered and implemented in policing, including the Policing Professional Framework (PPF), the CVF (2016) and the new CVF (2024) implemented across most forces in 2025. That’s without including the Metropolitan Leadership Framework (MLF) and the Metropolitan Performance Framework (MPF).
A lot of work producing promotion frameworks for aspiring individuals to provide evidence against. I encourage my customers to consider the following when it comes to promotion processes and competency frameworks: ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’
And here we are again with SIPP set to replace NPPF, coming with much of the same rationale as when NPPF replaced OSPRE a decade ago. A cynical observer might genuinely ask, how many more times in the next decade will the criteria for promotion selection change?
Even within the SIPP trials, forces are implementing it differently, for different ranks and for different times. Sometimes the exam remains at the front end, sometimes pushed back. Forces vary in how they provide the university-degree-style leadership learning modules, and how much support line managers get (they are central to the new scheme). Not to mention the variation in the assessment time taken to get promoted under SIPP, which ranks do the assessing, and local competitive processes. Testing the validity/reliability of such variable trials will therefore be no mean feat!
The Future of the College…
In the end, the whole reason SIPP is being introduced is to improve the way the next generation of leaders are selected and supported. The College is the central responsible body for the quality and standards of police leadership at all levels. But they themselves have come in for some stern criticism and scrutiny in recent years.
“The College of Policing has been living on borrowed time from the outset. It has never earned the trust or affection of frontline officers.” – Rory Geoghegan
For example, Rory’s hard-hitting article questions whether the College is fit for the future, asking if we are witnessing its ‘agonal breaths’, and estimating it has around four years left before it is ‘culled’. Even the College’s review of itself in 2022 found it “lacks credibility” among the officers and staff it is there to serve.
“We are seen as too remote and as serving only policing leaders and academics… In essence, there is concern about our usefulness to all in policing.” – College of Policing, Fundamental Review 2022
It’s certainly strong language to assert that the College is failing to adapt and is out of touch with the needs of police officers, leading to a wider sense of crisis and ineffective leadership within UK policing.
Former Police Scotland Superintendent Martin Gallagher goes further, citing a more fundamental issue at the heart of policing’s most senior leadership and proposes more operational based experience as part of future solutions. I recommend you read his ‘Commanding Issues’ article in full.
“An unfortunately growing number of senior officers have very little tangible successful operational experience, particularly at street level, and use networks and politicking to get on.” – Martin Gallagher
Is Seeking Support a ‘Violation’ of Integrity?
The College’s solution to improving promotion and leadership appears to be an intellectual landgrab on support, even going so far as dissuading candidates from obtaining assistance elsewhere. For example, consider the following declaration all SIPP candidates are required to sign before submitting their national application form evidence and examples:
“Candidate Declaration: By signing this declaration, I declare that all responses submitted are a true record of my own work. I have not copied or plagiarised any part of it from any other source. I have not used any unauthorised assistance in its preparation. I understand that any violation of these rules regarding integrity may result in failing the assessment and notification to my forces’ professional standards department.” – College of Policing
What is “unauthorised assistance” exactly? Well, that’s not defined in the form, nor are any “authorised sources” outside the College specified. Maybe you shouldn’t even be reading this blog! 😉
So “violating” this unclear yet strict “rule” may lead to an “integrity” issue worthy of PSD investigation. Yikes. Officers already feel under increasingly (undue) punitive scrutiny in their jobs, as identified in the latest wellbeing survey (and extensive social media / anecdotal intelligence). I’ve not seen such a directive elsewhere in private or public organisations overtly prohibiting people from seeking assistance on their leadership CPD.
If you’re interested, here’s the rest of that declaration, which comes across as equally adversarial…
“By signing this declaration, I also agree that I am ready to submit my assessment and that any factors that would impact on my decision to submit my assessment and should have been apparent to me at the time of signing this document cannot be used later to support a challenge to the fairness of the assessment.”
I respectfully suggest a more supportive declaration aligned with organisational values would be a better and less insular approach.
Is SIPP Doomed to Succeed?
“All people want to know is, what is happening? What does the future look like, and does it include me? Am I going to be part of this?”
I mention the above in my video when emphasising the importance of communicating change. The lack of communication and transparency on the specifics this SIPP scheme means people like me must piece together the jigsaw and share the progress.
Years of effort and a great deal of money and resources are sunk into SIPP, so there will clearly be some form of expectation concerning return on investment (ROI). Most big national changes like this get pushed through in policing not on evidence, but on sheer political will alone and the reticence to U-turn on such sunk costs. Hence, I use the term “doomed to succeed”.
Nine pilot forces (as published at the time) were originally due to take part in SIPP trials, but six withdrew shortly afterwards. No reasons were shared publicly. Was this an early vote of no confidence in the SIPP proposals? There are currently now five forces named in trials: Two have done the exam, one is using other elements of the scheme, and two are yet to commence.
The aim of SIPP is to make things simpler and remove barriers, with what the College describe as a “standardised, reliable and fair process”. But it doesn’t seem to be travelling in that direction just yet, given the complexity, variation, and things like the application ‘thesis’. Is SIPP doomed to succeed? We should find out in mid-2026, after the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) get to hear the findings from pilot forces and the College’s internal review of its scheme; assuming it gets published.
Is SIPP simply replacing barriers identified in the NPPF with new or different ones? It seems SIPP has the same process elements as the NPPF (exam, application, selection, post-promotion assessment), plus a heap more academia and ongoing assessments. On my SIPP FAQs page, I’ve explicitly proposed ways the evidence of ‘SIPP vs NPPF’ could be objectively assessed, considering fairness, simplicity, diversity and the other core objectives of SIPP.
The College plan to assess SIPP formally from April 2026, with a view to making final recommendations to and approval from the NPCC to roll out nationally in 2027. But given the small pilot to date, with some forces not yet starting theirs, the more extensive time SIPP physically takes to promote someone, 2028 looks more likely.
In the interim, standby for some pilot force or College themselves releasing short promotional videos, featuring anecdotes from successful candidates who have just been through the SIPP process, singing its praises loud enough to doom it to succeed. Interesting times…
I hope you’ve found this update and discussion on SIPP helpful. As always, let me know if you have any views on the scheme. I’d be particularly interested if you are currently undergoing SIPP or are working on it, and have any positive, negative or interesting observations. I’d be happy to publish here, anonymously if you’d like. I’m always willing to share my platform with diverse perspectives on policing!
Kind Regards, Steve
Seeking police promotion? Want a MASSIVE head start right now with the best and best value support going? Hit the ground running with your personal digital promotion toolkit, and/or my market-leading Police Promotion Masterclass and CVF explainers. There’s nothing else like it to effectively prepare you for success in your leadership aspirations. You can also contact me to arrange more personal coaching support. Or try my podcast for your ongoing police leadership CPD covering a range of fascinating subjects.
