‘A lot on their shoulders’ says fire chief as she shares how the direct entry scheme is shaping up

“It’s been a very long journey,” explains Chief Fire Officer Dawn Whittaker as she talks about the new scheme to bring new entrants into fire and rescue services at station manager level. For her it’s special, because this is part of a life journey that began over 20 years ago as she too entered the fire and rescue service after a career in retail management.

Based on what Dawn calls a ‘strident business case,’ she says that the direct entry scheme has support from local chiefs and at a national level with the National Fire Chiefs Council and the Home Office. With over 800 applications for just six posts, it demonstrates that coming in at a mid management level rather than entry level as a firefighter is hugely attractive.

“The creation of this scheme is driven by the fire and rescue service’s desire to enhance and augment leadership across the sector.”

While our conversation is about how the scheme is working out after its first few months, it has to be seen against wider problems that the fire and rescue service is facing.  There is a perfect storm of pension changes that have seen a lot of senior leaders retire from principal officer posts and a spotlight on culture that makes stepping up a less attractive proposition than ever before. As one senior fire leader said to me recently, who would want to be a chief now?

In November, six recruits started their three year development programme, and they have recently completed their first operationally focused module at the Fire Service College. Dawn says she is immensely proud of them. “My goodness, they are a bright bunch. They bring such energy with them.”

“It’s a big cultural change. There is a lot on their shoulders and I’m really conscious of that.”

She doesn’t say it explicitly, but underneath this positivity is the reality that there are the detractors, those that don’t agree that someone should be a station manager if they haven’t worked their way up from firefighter and ‘haven’t done their time.’

We talk about the recruitment process. “It was a deliberate choice to use a professional recruitment agency to find our station managers,” says Dawn. Reed won the tender for the work and recruited for the jobs which are at five different fire and rescue services: East Sussex, Staffordshire, Oxfordshire, Leicestershire and Avon.

Whittling down the 842 applications to a manageable number for the individual services to interview and select from was a big job and Dawn says that having Reed on board worked really well. She’s particularly pleased that there was gender parity in the applications that remained to the end of the process that saw three men and three women appointed. Leicestershire was so impressed with the cohort, the chief agreed to take two station managers on.

I wondered why they had gone to the trouble to create this bespoke entry process and not used an apprenticeship scheme instead. Dawn says it’s mostly because the leaders they want to fill this posts have substantial qualifications and experience that means that essentially have much of what is needed. “They are already managers in their own right.” What they don’t have, of course, is operational experience and getting that assessed and accredited is an important part of the development programme.

Midway through our chat, I ask Dawn what does success look like? “Well, that they stay until the end of the programme,” she laughs as she responds, but in all seriousness, if they can withstand the criticism that will come from social media as a minimum, they will be doing well. It’s interesting in our conversation that they are mostly referred to as a group or a cohort but not by name. Although Dawn does talk about one of the six recruits to illustrate the point about the benefits that come from diversity of thought and experience.

Danielle in Staffordshire is a recruitment and Organisational Development specialist. She’s already looked at the service’s processes, bringing in new ideas and generating what Dawn calls ‘discursive exploration.’ Dawn wants the service to appreciate difference more and to bring in the benefits of different mindsets to augment what is already there. “We need to modernise our thinking,” she asserts. Bringing in difference but making that the norm, it seems.

I’m impressed by the level of support that each recruit gets. They are employed by their respective fire and rescue service as station manager (development) and in some these are substantive posts, others are additional (or supernumerary in fire speak). They have a mentor within their own service and a mentor from another participating service as well as regular contact with the NFCC programme manager as part of a weekly cohort meet up. “They’ve got a broad wrap around support system,” as Dawn calls it. The cash to pay for the training comes from a Home Office pot that the NFCC distributes to its various programmes of work.

Our conversation leads to an inevitable discussion about how the scheme has landed with the Fire Brigades Union. Dawn tells me that union representatives have been involved from the start.  They contributed useful thinking in the early stages and while their position has ‘hardened’ since then, she remains committed to the engagement and dialogue that is a significant part of the NFCC’s approach. That hardening is clear in some of the social media response I’ve seen to the completion of the first module at the Fire Service College and I suspect will be a theme throughout the three years of the scheme.

We talk about how there should be more ‘noise’ about the recruits from a wider group of managers and not just Dawn supporting the concept on social media. Where are the advocates and allies for this scheme? She is diplomatic in her response about her peers and the pressures they are under, including, ironically, dealing with the cultural spotlight. Nevertheless she is firm that the sector overall needs to get better at strong leadership. “I want people to understand the rationale for the scheme, how it works and that it’s not the only way to become a station manager.”

Dawn shares with me that another chief has said to her ‘we need more people to see them,’ and that the recruits themselves are ‘desperate’ to tell their stories.  She says she agrees and that they need to do this in a ‘wise way’; it can’t take too long as it simply leaves a vacuum to be filled with disinformation and negativity.

The NFCC is already reviewing the programme to see if there will be a second cohort.

“My hope is that it will be a rolling programme and adopted as business usual but it depends on the individual services wanting to use it.”

She points out that none of the large metropolitan services participated in the first round but there’s no reason why they couldn’t in the future. It will be fascinating to see how the first cohort develops and we will be checking in with each service to see how it’s going over the next 12 months.

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