Security governance in transition: The compartmentalising, crowding out and corralling of policing and security in Northern Ireland

The article suggests that while the report of the Independent Commission on Policing (ICP) provides a police reform blueprint for Northern Ireland and elsewhere, it can also be seen as an attempt to engage more elliptically with contemporary debates in security governance vis-a-vis the increasingly fragmented nature of late-modern policing and the role of the state. A decade into the reform process in Northern Ireland and in spite of the networked approach postulated by the ICP, the public police continue to enjoy a pre-eminent place and little evidence exists of any significant weakening of state steering and rowing of security. The discussion proposes a tentative typology explaining the continued colonization of security spaces by the State using constituent attendant processes of compartmentalizing, crowding out and corralling.

The level playing field: the impact of assessment practice on professional development

Context: The effects of assessment practice on students’ learning are unclear, particularly regarding professional development. Corralling in objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) is designed to reduce illicit passing of examination information. Candidates completing an examination are kept secluded until the next cohort of examinees has begun. We used the introduction of corralling as a context in which to explore social influences on examination misconduct, with the aims of improving understanding of the hidden effects of assessment, and evaluating the acceptability of corralling from the student perspective.

Methods: A questionnaire was administered to students corralled post-OSCE for the first time. Eleven semi-structured interviews were subsequently conducted. Questionnaire data were analysed for descriptive statistics and thematic analysis of interview transcripts was carried out.

Results: The questionnaire response rate was 95.4% (251/263). Before corralling, 80.9% (203/251) of students were aware of the sharing of information among peers and 78.5% (197/251) agreed that such misconduct was unprofessional. The majority were in favour of corralling (90.8%, 228/251). Four themes emerged from the semi-structured interviews: the student network versus the individual; assessment-driven culture; the deferring of professionalism, and the ‘level playing field’. Students saw interaction within the student network, on a background of assessment-driven culture, as the key driver in examination misconduct. Conforming to the rules of the social network was prioritised over individual agency, although the mismatch between the rules of the network and the dominant professional discourse caused some conflict for individuals. Deferred professionalism (described as the practice of taking on the norms of professional behaviour only when qualified) was a rationalisation used to minimise this conflict. Corralling provided a ‘level playing field’ in which the influences of the network were minimised.

Conclusions: Examination misconduct is thus a complex social construction with implications for individual learners in terms of professional development. Corralling is one mechanism for addressing misconduct that is acceptable to students, but assessment processes have important hidden effects which educators should acknowledge.