All, bronze cyber is undergoing a MAJOR overhaul (after a ministerial statement).
All current Bronze instructors/assessors will lose their instructor status. New Trainers of Trainers will be attending courses in the next month in order to get new assessors on the ground.
Therefore soon the current bronze course will be superseded in the very near future. The good news is that the new course is externally accredited and will be valuable to our cadets!
Cadet courses planned in the meantime can continue. TtT shouldn’t as the time will be wasted.
i will argue that the existing course has been valuable to our Cadets but accept with accreditation the new course will have an added value of being part of a Nationally recognised system and structure
I am eager to see the syllabus of the re-built bronze (and other levels) as early as possible. I believe that “Cyber” is not structured in the best way possible and there is significant scope for improvement. I fear that governmental tinkering is unlikely to improve the situation.
Good news, indeed. Out of interest, would this mean that the training the trainers get, to deliver the course, would be accredited as well, or is that too much to ask?
Time for a bit of a bump and a slight expansion of the Topic to both Bronze and Silver Cyber.
So I’ve just read the updated ACTO71 and my understanding is that Bronze is now the NCSC CyberFirst Adventurer Course and to deliver this Staff need to go to QA.com for training. But until the changeover is complete people who could teach the old course can continue to do so. (with no specified end date for this).
The bit that is a suprise (a pleasant one) is that any Cadets who has a Bronze Badge can do all of their Silver Training online in their own time, they just have to do a Compulsory Online Course and 1 of 3 optional online courses(of which only 1 is currently available) and then we just upload the results onto a SharePoint SubSite who then send us all the Badges/Certificates. (No involvement of Wing or Region at all). It also says that the rules to sign up are 16 but that Cadets younger can do it as long as their parents create the accounts for them.
Am I reading this right as it seems too good to be true! @sss you appear to be our resident expert?
i can’t comment on the Silver but from what I have heard from our WRCO this (above) is correct.
the Govt are keen for kids to be “cyber security conscious” and so a national course has been designed. it is above the Bronze (entry) course we have and so will eventually replace it - arguably raising questions if the Bronze Cyber will mean anything as ANYONE can do it (ie not just RAFAC but Scouts, St Johns, Fire Cadets etc etc)
There was a block on teaching new instructors on Cyber (we had a course canx) as there is no point qualifying instructors on something which is defunct - or soon to be.
when this occurs no one seems to know but there is going to be/is already a entry level nationally recognised cyber security course which will be available for all to complete
i was trying to indicating that this otherwise RAFAC only syllabus is now becoming national (like the other schemes you have mentioned) and open to all
the difference here being Cyber was a RAFAC topic first…rather than an adopted national scheme
There has been what we now seem to call cyber being done in schools for a long time and from young ages.
So I’m not convinced it’s an Air Cadet thing first, school kids have had badges.
I find it bizarre that it doomed to be repeated ad infinitum in ‘hobby’ groups like us and others.
Two of our local schools have done heartstart as part of assemblies.
We might like to think we are first and doing it better in the conceited way Air Cadet people like to think.
This sounds good. The big sticking point could be getting people qualified through the single provider. Not being HQAC run could be good but I wonder about the cost /availability of the course
Do we have any more information on how we get qualified to run these courses? Or whether there is any online training being run at the moment to become a Bronze instructor?
Cyber First instructor courses are being run outside of the air cadets for other cadet forces but for some reason nothing arranged centrally through the air cadets.
Oh, wow. QA are actually awful - no care for the individuals on their courses, 100% care for profit. They literally employ sales staff to sell kids into apprenticeships for commission.
I wonder how much money this cost the corps.
So there are 2 routes to each badge, a pure RAFAC option (except for silver) of the CyberFirst, some schools are running CyberFirst, and the Gov MOD Direction on Cyber required us to change the syllabus to include this.
I think it is highly unlikely that there will be pure RAFAC CyberFirst courses, which is find as we have an alternate internal route.
I’m waiting to see the content for the 2 x 40 min modules for Bronze cyber, I just hope it’s not still the prezi!
All Cadets need to complete the Bronze iDEA to get any Cyber badge now though.
The new course is Sharepoint. It is 4 modules that can take up to 45 minutes to complete. This is still on Prezi.
Certainly the new presentation is up to date and better but I do prefer the CyberFirst Adventurers course and I think the cadets prefer it to as its all practical and very little theory.
The CyberFirst courses are fully funded by the MOD so it doesn’t come out of the Air Cadet fund except if a course gets cancelled then it gets charged back to HQAC. I think the last I heard for a Adventurer course to be profitable there needs to be 50 cadets on the course.
