You could have someone sign up for the DofE at school and then join the RAFAC for their volunteering etc. so why penalise those who are already members.
The only think is they can’t be doing their volunteering at the same time as their skill - just being a cadet is sufficient for volunteering at Bronze level, but you can’t be doing a skill on parade nights etc.
What frustrates me is when the Wing DofE Officer marks presentations as complete (when they aren’t) which then signs off the section or award - seemingly from a stats side which demeans the award the cadet achieves.
[quote=“daws1159, post:20, topic:3057, full:true”]So you question people programming DofE as being against the Ethos and then limit what they can and can’t use to meet your view of what the Award should be surely that is against the Ethos too?
I encourage my cadets to go out and do things other than Cadet activities for their DofE but surely it’s only responsible to do as much to facilitate it as possible? We tend to get a few who choose not to advance beyond Bronze usually the lame or the lazy who don’t like doing expeditions.
Promotion isn’t something that all cadets are entitled to, you don’t just get promoted if you hang about long enough (at least you shouldn’t), therefore it doesn’t matter what an individual OC sets as their criteria as long as the approach is consistent & fair.[/quote]
To an extent yes. We have to run eDofE update nights as the cadets don’t do it at home, which is annoying, but the other bits that count towards DofE are all just part of the run of the mill being a cadet activities and shouldn’t need planning in. We run sports nights and some of what they do can be used for phys achievement, given it’s so vague now.
It’s wrong to label people as lame or lazy, just because they don’t want to do something which is personal, like the DofE is, although the ATC seems to like treating like a compulsory part of the ATC ‘training’. The problem with expeds like all things, if it doesn’t fit with their own lives, we should accept it. I’ve known cadets do one after the other and others who get stuck at the exped phase, as they’ve not been able to fit in with the few opportunities that arise. Also with expeds now, the need for registered, trained and qualified staff and the oxygen thieving TSAs sticking their oar in, to justify salaries and expenses, make them less and less easy to run. We’ve had the TSAs turn up at two DofE expeds and they have done nor contributed anything vaguely constructive, other than stick in a claim for expenses no doubt. It has been clear they have no idea about the DofE.
I don’t think there is any implication that promotion is an entitlement, which is what the tick list suggests, because if you tick the boxes, it comes down to personal reasons why not, which cannot be on a list anywhere.
Sorry you’ve lost me, do you mean they can’t use parade nights as a skill if they are already using it as their volunteering? Because huge amounts of Parade night training can be used as a Skill (Syllabus or Band for a start), we don’t tend to have many use simply being a cadet as volunteering, most either find their own or use other things we do.
I quite agree that Wing DofE Staff shouldn’t be going in and signing things off, they should only be either approving Awards (or not) once they have been signed off at a Squadron level.
No you split it, if it’s something like band or classes that’s skill, sports phys ach or being a cadet in terms of leading/helping etc volunteering. Using the same activity for two things, ie turning up to be in band could be volunteering and learning an instrument a skill, but it’s not actually requiring any more effort or initative on their part on one level of the award would be wrong.
Ah i see what you mean, I don’t programme them as “DofE skill nights” but the fact that they can be used for DofE is considered when they are planned in. (So the frequency and fur action for example are structured to ensure they are suitable for DofE.
I didn’t say they were Lazy because they don’t want to do DofE, they are the ones who don’t want to do anything, who are generally Lazy, all Squadrons have 1 or 2, in the same way most Squadrons have 1 or 2 who love and breath cadets plus 1 or 2 who don’t actually want to be there but parents bring them anyway.
We don’t find we have any problems getting cadets through the Expedition Section certainly not at Bronze, 14 year olds tend not to have the raging social lives that Gold candidates have, the qualification standards are minimum and an Exped fits into any weekend you fancy. (1 LLA or BELA and 1 Assessor hardly difficult). If we have any section that causes issues it’s getting Silver/Gold through their Volunteering.
Yeah that makes sense, we don’t seem to have any use just attending cadets as volunteering, most either use weekend stuff we run or in a lot of cases already volunteer elsewhere. (We seem to be in that sort of area). At my old unit lots used to is volunteering with the band, but that was an extra parade night.
One of the problems is plan it in and say this is what it will be, means those not interested can have homework etc, rather than attend, unless it is something more specialised like band for instance.
We do ‘scruffs nights’ which can be anything from hut cleaning to FMS to a ‘film night’, we know what’s happening and gets a better attendance than saying it’s clean up or FMS or leadership for instance.
Given a cadet can start at 12 and are not eligible for CWO position for 6 years. If they haven’t done a week long camp/course or what ever then I would be concerned to find the reason why not.
Limited spaces on camps is not an excuse, the
CW is meant to be the top cadet, so if you only pick deserving cadets to go to camp then surely the potential CWO should of been deserving of a place.
A CWO should be to the cadets “all knowing” someone to look up to, so they should know about basic cadet activities like annual camps, shooting days to give guidance to the younger cadets.
It would be easy to be a CWO in the modern era and not been to a camp or at most one, when they were too ‘young’ to fully appreciate it.
I look at the old camp photos I have and we had no less than 15 cadets from the sqn over 8 camp photos. Compare and constrast to even just a dozen or so years ago and that had reduced to 4/5 and total camp sizes of 30-40 spread over 7/8 sqns at most. As such the development that happened by attending 4/5 camps on the bounce is lost.
I currently have 3 NCOs who haven’t been to camp, due to family holidays conflicting with camps and they have no interest in the Wing camps that are run like a Yr6 residential.
I think you must be doing it wrong. We took 24 cadets away for an activity week of climbing walking mountain biking canoeing and more. It happens every year and is regularly filled.