How to swap the siren for a staffroom

Esther Leach talks to a former detective chief inspector who has hung up his truncheon to teach police how to deal with death as coroner's officers.

Death has always been a big part of Denis Clark's life as a senior police officer, and it figures in his new teaching career.

The 44-year-old ex-detective chief inspector heads what he believes is a unique academic course for coroner's officers at the Centre for Police Research and Education at Teesside University.

Some larger police forces have their own in-house training, but coroner's officers are often left to develop their skills on the job with very little formal instruction.

Clark became one of the close- knit teaching team at the centre last June after 20 years in the Metropolitan Police. He has a law degree, gained during a career break, and is a fully qualified solicitor.

He says he understands the nervousness of some of his students as they begin the two-week course in Middlesbrough, especially those who have not written an essay since they left school at 15 or who have never set foot in a university before.

"I left school without any qualifications," Clark says. "So, much of what the students may be feeling I have known myself.

"I enjoy teaching, I have a significant teaching input in this course, particularly around tutorial support. My experience has been, sadly, around a lot of death and I know these people deal with death day in, day out. I can feel the tension among them when they are talking about these very distress-ing circumstances and also worrying about their assessment."

Clark makes a point of contacting all the students before they arrive on the course, to discuss its content and where they feel they need particular attention. And he gives them preparatory reading.

Two weeks is never long enough, he says, but it is adequate for this particular level of study and to gain a certificate in professional development. The course is made up of a combination of lectures and group work.

"The lecturers need to be inspirational and visiting speakers tend not to give talks in the traditional way, but favour group work," Clark says.

"The students get a couple of days on how they can manage their own stress and how they would deal with relatives who are invariably angry and upset. Their skills are tested time and again.

"Psychologists and a pathologist have an input, but the emphasis is on making sure officers know the law and the procedures surrounding death. We spend two or three days of discussion on the law, which is a big part of the work of coroner's officers, and then the students are given a practical problem," Clark says.

"Most of these problems are taken from real incidents and they tend to be areas of controversy. They might be asked, for example, how they would deal with identification procedures, or what are the human rights issues in a situation where there are a large number of casualties. I may be thinking of the sinking of the Marchioness on the River Thames, when 51 people died in 1989.

"The course is made up of actual events, I don't just dream them up. We had a presentation on the Beverley Allitt investigation, which clearly demonstrated the value of their expertise," Clark says.

Allitt, a nurse, was jailed in 1993 after killing four children in her care at a Lincolnshire hospital. She suffered from Munchhausen's syndrome by proxy, a condition that causes a carer or parent to attack the children they are looking after in an attempt to gain attention.

"There is a lot of preparation, reading, looking at media reports and at how families have reacted to them and the issues arising out of them," Clark says. "We look at how differently students might deal with them, we talk about alternative approaches and how effective they might be."

Clark says that he hopes the students take away a much greater awareness of the skills they need in their work and a deeper understanding of their role in the context of other areas of the criminal justice process, such as murder investigations and accidents that might lead to prosecution or a public inquiry.

The centre, which is part of the university's school of social sciences, opened four years ago and has a range of courses for law enforcers and people who work with them.

During its first year, 36 officers went through intelligence gathering and police informant courses and last year there were 501 officers on various short courses, including dealing with difficult hate crimes and crimes against ethnic minorities and homosexuals. The coroner's officers course is one of the newest.

"What we deal with is a niche market for our very short courses. We are not into mass training activities," says Colin Dunnighan, another former detective inspector who founded the centre and is its director. "We don't produce off-the-shelf products for anyone. What we do is work up courses in partnership with the agencies who want them."

Dunnighan says the majority of students surprise themselves by enjoying the return to education and by achieving "first-class, publishable pieces of work". The work, he says, usually comes from the people who have not been in formal education for 15 or 20 years.

"They become involved and immersed in their academic work and they like it, they enjoy the discovery process. To some extent, it is not unlike the investigative role of police officers, it is still about having to solve a problem and using different strategies to do it," he adds.

He and his team have learnt quickly that working in small groups is vital to success.

"Many of our courses have eight to ten students and we do this purposely because it gives everyone an opportunity to get involved, allows everyone to speak and to think about the issues.

"We like to encourage deep learning, learning that stays with people, we hope, for a long time after they leave us," he says.