Some Highlights From The G4S Training Cente
I had arrived shortly before 9am on Thursday posing as an unemployed man seeking work as a security guard. With no checks or questions, I was whisked into a large lecture hall with 130 other people and a woman demanding to see my passport. ‘Passport, name, date of birth,’ she barked. I handed it over. I was now officially signed up to complete a course.
The hall in the University of East London was filled with lots of people in their late teens and early twenties who had been largely signed up straight from college and Jobcentres. These would make up the bulk of ‘perimeter security’, with the crucial job of guarding entrances, exits and borders of the events, making sure nothing was smuggled in.
The trainer who ran the course warned us not to fall asleep as we were ‘getting paid to attend’. Staggeringly, five people did doze off and had to be abruptly woken up; someone the previous week was caught doing his college homework.....Three boys aged 18 from the local sixth-form college slumped in the back row and were continually told off for not taking their baseball caps off and for spitting in the street outside during ‘smoke breaks’.
In an attempt to get people ‘switched on’, the class was told that some security staff had already been sacked – including one for committing a vile act in the aquatic centre.
It took the class around an hour to fill out the basic Security Industry Authority application form that asked only for name, age and address. It was made easier as the supervisor filled it out on a big screen with us line by line. One man, originally from East Africa, could hardly read or write English and had to be helped to fill out his form personally, but still managed to write his date of birth down so it made him six months old.
During the day, my name was read out from the list to complete the course’s 40-minute multiple choice exam. I asked a manager what the test was like. He quipped: ‘If you don’t pass it you’re a remedial as the questions are like: 'Is a security operator a) someone who carries out security duties at a licensed premises, b) a milkman or c) a pilot.’ I wished he was wrong – there were people on our course repeating it after failing the exam the week before.
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