Cadets also needs to be a space where young people can learn to fail the right way.
Try something new, it doesn’t quite work, we fail at it. BUT, unlike elsewhere, we can then have a discussion about why it didn’t work, what we can change for next time and then try again.
School can very much be a “if you fail, you fail” place. Cadets shouldn’t be.
The path to success is lined with failures
The problem, that I can see, that as far as I see, the core activities in Air Cadets should be things like AT and Flying/Gliding.
Even before ACLC being cancelled, in my humble opinion, various bits of ACLC were getting bumped off because of the change in H+S regulations. Which, I do get, but to someone like myself it would appear it’s becoming increasingly difficult to give that sense of adventure while not conflicting with those regulations. Some of the activities do inherently carry some risk.
As for the flying, opportunities have gotten fewer and fewer in my region. While the particular AEF I use has probably been hit worse than most (unserviceability and the fact that well… it is on a Coastline, therefore wind and therefore out of limits on safety grounds) it’s really, really not engaging to be confined to classrooms. CCFs suffer particularly from this because they have to balance going out in school time, and they can’t usually rely on taking many days out of school to go do AT. Staffing is not plentiful in holidays and so we rely a lot on the support of HQ and our TEST regions. A lot of our “camps” and “activities” are reliant on the support of HQ, and if nothing else, ACLC is a brilliant asset to our unit when we get someone on it.
Hah, yes, we do certainly suffer from having kids who don’t want to be there, but that’s more a issue of how Schools manage them, rather than a Cadets Issue. At least in my experience.
On the bright side at least it is being flagged as a problem. That would certainly be my fear.