We’re hosting a group of trainee police constables at our Mt Albert campus from today (Monday) as the New Zealand Police start delivering their training outside of the Police College in Porirua for the first time. Twenty police recruits will be based here for the next eight weeks as part of a strategy to make training more accessible to recruits in the top half of the North Island and, ultimately, increase the number of frontline officers.
The trainees and their teaching staff will be welcomed to Unitec with a powhiri on Monday morning. They’ll spend the first 8 weeks of their 19-week programme with us and will then move around a number of other Auckland locations for the remainder of the time.
Academic Leader of Police Studies, Vinesh Sima said: “The police are constantly looking for different ways of delivering training and we’re working with them on at least seven programmes at the moment. It made sense for them to come to us when they started thinking about offering training in Auckland and this is a great opportunity to learn from each other’s teaching methodologies.”
The classes have been embedded into our timetable and will be delivered all around campus. The recruits won’t be in uniform – so they may be hard to spot! However, if anyone is interested in finding out more about how the police approach training and seeing their methodology in action, please let Vinesh know.