Is this where we could align more strongly with civilian aviation rather than military?
From what I can see the single biggest fear is the loss of the £26,000,000 or however much from the RAF, but apart from CFAV remuneration and travel etc an awful lot of this seems to be swallowed up by administrators and infrastructure in terms of full time staff pay and buildings, so probably not used to its best advantage for cadets.
I would suspect there are lot more opportunities within the civilian aviation sphere than military across the spectrum, but we seem tied to military side for no other reason than the money we get and giving something for RAF retirees to faff around with and play the RAF game.
Looking at annual camps over the past 4/5 years be they blue or green, they seem to be more about visits and other things and seem to heading down a big kids PGL route and I suspect it will carry on getting more and more like this, so do we need to use military estate?. There are a few specialist camps now, but they could continue without any RAF input. The STEM could be better served by involving a broader spectrum within this area based out of universities in the summer holidays and just visits to aviation firms and RAF bases where the latter have something relevant to offer.
Some of us old gits look at these “strategies” that come out and see they haven’t changed hugely in over 20 years. From what I can sort of recall, the sort of things in these are in essence just re-treads with a bit of word changing and the reason is, everything is too long term. What is the point of a 5, 7 or 10 year plan/’vision’? Cadets toady won’t benefit from it and those in the timespan won’t either, as something else will come up and focus will be lost. As staff as we are not paid and or otherwise involved, we have little or no reason based on our couple of nights a week, to have any enthusiasm to implement these, when our real jobs might be going tits up or at the very least be demanding more of us, without the curved balls family life chucks into the mix.
Another reason many of the things stay the same and haven’t changed and or the things haven’t happened, is that the people putting it together do not have any influence or control over any of it actually happening, the only things they can do it fiddle around with rules and regulations, most of which seem to be adaptations of things that come down from on high or if not and ATC only rules they get too excited about it all and make them essentially unworkable. There is no point in putting anything that you cannot directly affect the delivery of, in the case of the ACMB given they can’t do anything without permission and or it being agreed by 22 Gp or even Air Command, they only bother with these things to make it look like they are relevant, which again puts a question mark against the whole HQAC structure. I’ve seen massive rationalisation of management in my working life across the company and other companies I deal with, yet the good old public sector seems to keep and expand on management structures. If we were a business we would only have 2 RCs overseeing North and South and maybe a third for the middle.
One of the repeating things is staff and cadet recruitment and retention. There reason for failure is they see the two as the same, when they aren’t. There is mention over the last 10 years wrt pressures on volunteer staff across the board and as yet there is little or nothing to address this. Comments from 2014 and 2007 mention the pressures CFAV experience from their work (called primary career in 2014, like the ATC is a secondary career) and private lives impact how much time they have for Air Cadets and negative influencers within the ATC such and T&C of being a CFAV and the admin burden of running a squadron means people don’t want to do it.
If these things are repeatedly mentioned as problems, then the collective failure of HQAC to address these and remove them says it all really.
I don’t see if I’m getting more than 2 emails a week from anyone other than the staff etc on the squadron, as a recognition of admin burden. Speaking to our Legion branch secretary, he said he looks at his Legion emails once a fortnight and has on average 3 emails in that time, which is all we should be getting.
The training while not overly onerous (unless you want to try and do loads of different things) is irritating when it mostly needs renewing and this has to be done at the weekend or can involve taking time off work, for many unpaid in all respects. The irony is that probably higher RAF command levels introduced the need for NGBs and more formal training and then if this is seen as creating problems
If they are going to have things like these strategies, the shelf life should be no more than 3 years to retain focus and keep it well within their scope and sphere of influence. The repeated attempts at admin reduction should be within their scope and influence, yet it seems not and I do wish the fallacy of things being electronic as a reduction in admin was kicked into the long grass, admin is admin regardless of it being on paper or on a screen. There seems to be an ‘oh well’ acceptance of delivery when it comes to these things. I’ve known many people take jobs ‘outside the business’ as they haven’t been up to scratch, but not from HQAC.