Leading Inclusive Teams evaluation

The College of Policing have developed a package of interventions, called Leading Inclusive Teams (LIT), to support forces in their journey towards creating more inclusive, respectful and equitable environments for all.

LIT is underpinned by behavioural science and aims to create policing cultures in which inclusivity is the norm and racism and sexism are not tolerated. The College are piloting LIT in three police forces from January to July 2025. The College will evaluate the pilot delivery to determine if LIT has led to change in both culture and behaviour, and to help inform a potential national rollout of this intervention.

The evaluation has been designed by the Open Innovation Team and will be delivered by the College. It will consist of an impact, implementation and process, and cost evaluation. The overall aims of the evaluation are:

• impact evaluation: assess the impact of LIT on the attitudes and behaviours of police officers and staff and how that varies by key characteristics
• implementation and process evaluation: understand delivery of LIT, the experiences of those involved and perceptions of impact on targeted behaviours and behavioural influences
• cost evaluation: estimate the cost of delivering LIT

Impact evaluation

The research questions to be addressed through the impact evaluation are:

1. What is the impact of LIT on supervisors' actions, attitudes and self-efficacy in relation to sexism and racism? How does this vary by key characteristics of the supervisors’ gender, ethnicity and tenure?
2. What is the impact of LIT on police constables' (or staff with equivalent responsibilities) perception of the effectiveness of their supervisor in responding to sexism and racism? How does this vary by key characteristics of the police constables’ gender, ethnicity and tenure?
3. How does the impact of LIT on supervisors' actions, attitudes and self-efficacy in relation to sexism and racism vary by key characteristics of the police constables (or staff with equivalent responsibilities) supervised – gender, ethnicity and tenure?
4. Does the impact of LIT vary depending on if the intervention was delivered as intended?

Implementation and process evaluation

The key research questions to be addressed through the implementation and process evaluation are:

1. What are police forces’ experiences of the first phase of LIT delivery? What challenges have they faced?
2. What could be improved and what extra support would be useful internally or from the College?
3. What were the range of experiences of supervisors in relation to the experiential training, reflective forums, pulse checks and communications?
4. What is the perception of impact of LIT on the target behaviours in the theory of change? How does this vary by force and by stakeholder?
5. Were there any unexpected or unintended positive or negative effects of LIT as a whole or individual components?

Cost evaluation

The research questions to be addressed through the cost evaluation are:

1. What was the cost of delivering LIT for each force?
2. What was the per supervisor cost of delivering LIT for each force?

LIT primarily aims to change the behaviour of supervisors, to give them the capability, opportunity and motivation to address sexism and racism when they become aware of this within their teams. The ambition is that this will then facilitate changes in the culture of their teams through a lack of acceptance of these behaviours.

Three police forces in England and Wales.

To be able to determine if LIT has an impact, around 144 inspectors and 576 supervisors will be needed across the three forces.

Police sergeants or police staff with equivalent levels of responsibility (supervisors).

The intervention package consists of the following interventions.

• Pulse check: a quick measure of culture (survey) completed by police constables (or staff with equivalent responsibilities) every two weeks to facilitate supervisors acting on their feedback promptly.
• Experiential training: two-day training for supervisors which includes realistic scenarios, requiring them to practice, demonstrate and receive constructive feedback on their ability to recognise and prevent sexism and racism.
• Reflective forums: facilitated one hour sessions where supervisors share experiences of sexism and racism and how they have managed these.
• Communications tactics: effective and targeted communications underpinned by behavioural science, to motivate supervisors to want to be part of a collective effort to tackle sexism and racism in policing.

Impact evaluation

The impact evaluation design will be a cluster randomised control trial (RCT), involving three police forces. The impact of LIT on supervisors who participate in it (the intervention group) will be compared with a comparable group of supervisors who do not (the control group).

To ensure that the two groups are as similar as possible, inspectors eligible for LIT will be randomly allocated (randomised) into either the intervention or control group. If they are allocated to the intervention group, then all supervisors in their unit will receive the LIT intervention (training, reflective forums, pulse checks and communications).

The police constables (or staff with equivalent responsibilities) who report to the supervisors in the intervention group will be required to complete the pulse check. Their supervisor will be asked to review these results and commit to taking actions. If they are allocated to the control group, then they will not receive any of the LIT intervention components.

Implementation and process evaluation

The implementation and process evaluation will take a mixed-methods approach. This will broadly involve triangulating data from the following sources:

• interviews with relevant force representatives
• administrative and monitoring data
• observations of experiential training

• endline survey data
• professional standards (complaints data) where available

A formative review point will be included to bring together early findings on forces’ experience and engagement with LIT. If issues are identified, adjustments to the intervention delivery support and/or evaluation activities can be made.

Cost evaluation

The cost evaluation will be an estimate of the cost of delivering LIT from the perspective of police forces.

This will include additional pre-requisite, start-up and ongoing implementation costs of delivering LIT on top of business-as-usual costs. Collection of information from forces on whether they anticipate that these costs would be different from those in a scaled-up version of LIT will also be attempted.

• Primary outcome: supervisors taking action in response to sexism and racism.
• Secondary outcome 1: supervisors' attitudes towards sexism and racism.
• Secondary outcome 2: supervisors’ perceptions of their self-efficacy in dealing with sexism and racism among their teams.
• Secondary outcome 3: police constables’ perceptions of the effectiveness of their supervisors in responding to sexism and racism.