Police Constable Entry Routes: Less is More

Last month, a number of UK police forces shared their plans to focus on the Police Constable Entry Programme (PCEP) as their sole route into joining the police as a new recruit. 

As recruiters will know, there are four ways to join the service: the PCEP, the PCDA, the DHEP and the PPD. According to the College of Policing, 66 per cent of all new recruits are now trained via the PCEP route. Interestingly, our data on user behaviour almost exactly mirrors this figure. The PCEP vacancies on All Police Jobs account for around two thirds of our new recruits traffic and applications.

However, given the news that some forces are concentrating on the PCEP, we decided to take a closer look to see if narrowing the routes into policing impacted interest in the role overall.

We analysed the different “new recruit” vacancies listed on All Police Jobs over the last five years and compared these with the number of total clicks those jobs received. 

As can be seen from the data below, in 2020 there were 158 listings for new recruit positions, covering the four pathways. The total number of clicks was close to 90,000. Fast forward to 2022, and that number had risen to 412 vacancies, again spread across the four pathways which attracted 70,000 clicks in total. Forward again to 2026, and there have only been 153 different new recruit vacancies listed, and clicks have jumped back up to nearly 120,000

It would seem that the more individual new recruit job listings there are to choose from, the less likely potential candidates are to click on any of them!

Too much choice (and possibly too many acronyms!) appears to cause candidates to give up at the first hurdle, and that a simpler system of one or maybe two alternative routes into policing would be more effective.

Of course, there are always other factors at play, such as the general employment market and the perception of policing as a career, but the dozen forces that are reverting to a single PCEP recruitment model may have made a good call. As the saying goes, less is more!

Access to years of police recruitment data allows us to identify trends in police recruitment to support our partnering police forces. If you are already a subscribing force, you can request your police recruitment data report at any time, or if you would like to subscribe to All Police Jobs to access your data and enjoy the many other subscriber benefits, please contact us at richard@chestnutmedia.co.uk.

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