I think I only skim read this before and didn’t digest it properly.
I’ve been there. Full-time, front-line youth work, within the past few years and absolutely loved it. But the money was poor and I was struggling to pay my bills.
Moving to a different line of work, in a traditionally office-based role, led to an instant 50% pay increase. I now indirectly support young people with significant learning differences, but don’t get to do any significant front-line work. I still really enjoy what I do, but it’s not the same as working directly with the people we support.
If youth work paid anything close to what I’m on now, I’d be back there tomorrow. But I quite like having a roof over my head, a warm home and food in my belly.
I first went out to Nijmegen with my son in 2018 - he was 13 and too young for the Wing Civvy team - but, he had committed to the training and excelled - frankly, he impressed the nuts off of me and his mother…
He was very disappointed to be told that despite doing all the training, he would be too young… Until the suggestion was made of him being able to do it, if he had a “chaperone”… After which, one of our lad’s mate’s - another couple of months younger yet, also wanted to go… I was prepared to go as chaperone for our son - but in order to keep everything above board - despite knowing the kid’s family since he was born - the only way to get it past the Head Sheds was for me to go staff…
The two lads entered the regulation distance for their age group - meaning they were eligible for “just” 4x 30k… but because my age meant I should have walked 50k to get my medal - I opted to go as a Companion - and walked the 4x 30k and make it easier for the boys instead.
Ultimately, it boils down to age of participants - and more importantly the age of the staff walking with them.
Wasn’t sure if this was the best thread to post this in, but I can’t remember which one we were using to talk about the pauses as there’s so many of them.
Do we need a pause on posting about pauses so we can reprofile?
Anyhow, message received that all national music camps in March & April are off. Just to add to the list.
This in itself triggered an FOI Request - Shooting Proposals which ironically will extend the “pause” to allow for re-profiling due to the staff time this takes.
It wont really. Majority of the legwork for FOIs is managed by staff within Air Command, AFAIK? They can deal with all the email searching and redacting.
