Government have released cadet statistics for 2022/23
Community cadets up 14%, staff numbers down 1%
Likely to be more interesting nuggets in the full report but those are the headlines
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/mod-sponsored-cadet-forces-statistics-2023/mod-sponsored-cadet-forces-1-april-2023
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12% fewer CFAV in the ATC since Apr 19.
4% fewer cadets.
I can’t imagine that is going to get better for staffing locally or nationally.
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Crazy to think statistically every 1 in 8 ATC CFAVs have left the organisation.
I’d bet another 1 in those 8 is also on the brink of pulling the pin.
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How much of that though is due to a tidying up of people who had actually left years before?
There’s also the question of how many of those remaining have cut down their commitment? In terms of “person hours” reduction I’d put good money on the reduction being more serious
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We are really not doing very well on gender, are we?
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Have we ever done very well on Gender???
Its a rhetorical question by the way.
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Compared to 10 years ago it not looking good
2070 less cadets
2530 less staff. Scary almost 1 in 4 staff less.
the only positive is there are more female cadets than 10 years ago by 420. The only figure to go up Now 29% of all cadets.
At the rate of closures and amalgamations, I’m surprised it’s not far far more.
This is the biggest issue. We are continuing to take on more cadets with significantly less staff. Not a sustainable place to be.
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That’s not the statistic.
The statistic is that there has been a net reduction in CFAVs by 12%…
This means despite people joining we are down 12%.
Of the people who started the 2022/23 year as a CFAV at least 1 in 8 left. In al likly hood 1 in 6 is more likly.
This means you are loosing a lot of corporate memory & experience that would help develop the joining staff & help enable them to stay for longer.
These are good stats but we need to delve deeper rather than net numbers if we are going to address route causes.
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Would be interesting to see, over the last 10 years:
Community cadet numbers plotted against eligible population
Cadet numbers vs other youth organisations and, say, sports clubs
Is there a swing away from participating in Military sponsored organisations, participation more broadly or are there simply fewer young people in the age group?
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Since all the data comes from SMS for us I would love to see the distribution of years experience for CFAV. Still does not tell the whole story but would be interesting
(I have a CFAV who came with the buildings but does not neccessarily deliver much other than taking cadets to activities and making up numbers where required, plus their niche activity for a handful of cadets - but we all have one of those somewhere 
Over)
It would be great to have a stat of number of new CFAV joining each org.
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That sounds like delivering lots as a volunteer. We could do with someone like that. We’re always struggling for staff for transport and to cover activities. Don’t take them for granted.
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Either email the report writers asking if it can be included next year or alternatively but a FOI request in.
Or ask on the VoV portal - I’m sure RCs would want that stat as well.
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What I’m taking from this report is that community cadet numbers are dropping whilst CCF numbers are increasing.
Given CCF unit members are all from the same school, thus more likely to be of a similar background than a community unit, what does this mean for community mixing and what could the potential future ramifications of this be?
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Think a lot is down to this
I do wonder. And in our part of the world we’ve seen a fair few families leave post Brexit (though again only anecdotally they were typically around year 5-6 than cadet age, possibly due to the demographics of migration from the EU, possibly because it’s less easy to move once kids are in secondary education).
I think the biggest thing is people do not know what the cadets do.
People understand scouting just but cadets confuse them & our ways of working means that it’s quite hard for people to understand.
To give an example I’ve just stumbled across this
https://taskmastereducation.com/
A fab idea for a scheme but it’s something all cadets forces do. We need to shout about it promote ourselves more.
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