The BBC Radio 4 File on 4 documentary about sham security training is already having ramifications – but will anything actually change, asks Mark Rowe.
One security trainer who’s recruiting is mentioning the documentary when doing (online) interviewing. Like so many recruiters, the man can tell in a few seconds if the person is not suitable, whether because of evasive answers or because the submitted CV doesn’t stand up. A trainer says that they used to be with one exam awarding body, but now they’re with another? Why is that?!
This recruiting security man, who uses the awarding organisation (AO in the training world jargon) Highfield says: “Highfield are the strictest, but the others ….” As the man adds, Highfield will do spot-checks on training as delivered. As we can put it bluntly, it will put boots inside doorways, to ask the equivalent of ‘hello, what have we here then?!’ if a training room has been booked to deliver some training, yet no-one is there. In a word, ghosting, a training provider agreeing that trainees don’t need to attend, and they pay to get their certificate so that they can then apply for a Security Industry Authority (SIA) badge, typically for door supervision.
The man like others says that he has reported cases to the SIA, and the reported-about person is still working. Thus for all the worthy words said in comment after the File on 4 documentary, the shortest comment was the most telling, by a trainer, Bob Betts: ‘No surprises.’ In other words, for years, ever since the SIA regime came in, in the mid-2000s, the security industry has known (if it has chosen not to remain ignorant) of shortcomings in training delivery; of sham training given.
BBC London did an expose similar to File on 4’s a dozen years ago. Nothing changed as a result because the SIA and the general regulator in England, Ofqual (short for Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation) played pass the parcel. So has everyone else (me included): they have left sham training in a file marked ‘too difficult’, ‘not today’, or ‘someone else’s problem’.
Opinions differ as to how widespread the sham training problem is. The trainer who’s recruiting says it’s few, and adds: “The industry is full of fine people.” The trouble is that no-one can say for sure. That means that even if the sham trainers are few, they taint everyone else. As with sham or outright fraudulent service wherever it’s given, when corners are cut, the service otherwise given is slapdash – the sham trainers are not well qualified, or diligent, or brilliant. If a sham trainer as File on 4 illustrated is letting a trainee do the SIA five or six day training in fewer days, the trainer will allow people to turn up late (which interrupts the training for everyone else).
The effects of sham training linger, and have been seen when, since 2021, those SIA-badged have been required to do top-up training to renew their licence. Trainers come across learners with SIA badges who do not have enough command of English to be able to go through conflict management training. How have they passed training to gain SIA licences in the first place? Again, that question has cropped up ever since SIA badging came in; without answer.
That guarding companies have SIA-badged officers fail their upskilling courses, leads to possibilities, none good. Either the guard firm accepts the officers can’t stay in work; which means an expense of recruiting others. Or ,the guard firm will query with the trainer why any or so many officers failed. That places the onus on the training provider either to relax their standards, to let trainees pass who ought not to, or to stand their ground and risk losing the work (and the guard firm can always find a training provider who will pass every officer). Or, as does happen, the officer who doesn’t pass will claim discrimination, which the training provider gets around by videoing the course.
This is not to deny that responsibility lies with the SIA; in a response on their website they describe the ‘behaviours captured in [the BBC] documentary are both shocking and disappointing’, and the SIA is investigating. Also on the SIA website under ‘report security staff or companies‘, the page explicitly states that you should not use it to ‘report problems with training or exams’, without offering a means of doing so. On a separate page that does go through how to report ‘training malpractice’, the SIA makes plain that it’ll pass the report to the exam awarding body or Ofqual and its equivalent if outside England.
Is anyone suggesting that the training centres named by File on 4, and those giving sham security training, are providing excellent other courses, in first aid, and other non-security fields such as social care, and nail-polishing, and so on? Presumably corner-cutting goes on there, and the country has a general problem with vocational training. Except that File on 4 will never investigate hairdressing training over security, because security is a public safety matter, sham training is a ‘security threat’, whereas the worst thing about poorly-trained hairdressers is that you get a bad haircut.
You can listen to the File on 4 documentary via the BBC website.
