Alerts

NGO safety and security training project

Alert n=19190

A notice that a study had been commissioned into whether security training changes what staff do, and a short statement of the question it was set up to answer.

Security training is the most widely delivered security measure in the sector. Almost every organisation runs it, most staff attend something, and the volume of money and time spent on it is large. What was not known was whether any of it changed behaviour. The project announced here was commissioned to look at that question directly, by examining training as it was actually delivered rather than as it was described in course outlines.

The question

Not whether staff enjoyed a course, and not whether they could repeat a principle afterwards. The question was whether the arrangements around them changed: whether procedures taught on a course were used in the field, whether a briefing happened before a deployment, whether a communications tree was tested, and whether a concern raised after the course was acted on.

The framing mattered because it moved the measure of success away from the participant and onto the organisation. A course that produces informed individuals inside an organisation that has decided nothing has not made anyone safer.

Why it was worth doing

Three reasons were given at the time. Training budgets were being committed on the assumption that training works, without evidence either way. Providers were proliferating, drawn from commercial security, from former military backgrounds and from within the sector, with no shared standard and no way for a buyer to tell them apart. And the staff carrying the most sustained exposure, national staff, were the least likely to be trained at all, which suggested that the existing provision was being allocated by something other than risk.

The findings and the resulting guidance are held in the library entry for the project, which is linked below.