The ACF are trying the standardise costs across the board, and in my opinion it is a bad thing. They have to lower costs to cater for the poorest areas, which essentially means that detachments in more affluent areas get worse off. Subs, for example, we have to charge 50p per night. This is a royal PITA as it means instead of charging a nice easy £10 per term, we now have to charge £6 or £6.50, which means we need to keep large amounts of change in the detachment as a float. I did actually stop charging subs for a few years, but we were told we had to charge it.
As for an expansion, if they are serious about this there needs to be a big investment in infrastructure, mainly buildings. Many detachments can’t cater for massive increases in numbers.
Yes, we have no method of collecting subs electronically. There’s a further complication in that we do not have our own bank accounts. Our bank account is run by the coy, and the staff officer is in charge of allocating money to various places. This makes bank transfers impossible to keep track of at that scale.
And more staff training!
CIs have to learn to be adjutants and training officers on the job . So some really dont know what to do. Leading to staff looking stupid when parents ask about things.
Uniform staff do get some more training, as they should attend CIC. But from everything I’ve heard, it’s a good course over all, but didn’t exactly prepare you or teach you how to be a youth leader.
CIC teaches you how not to look a prat whilst wearing the RAF’s uniform. All the rest was waffle and filler content to be honest.
My cohort found the safeguarding session raised more questions than answers, and like you say there was literally nothing else preparing us to be youth leaders, or to take on those established (non-OC) roles.
Throw in the fact that it felt a lot more aligned to the SNCO role than officers, so overall it did feel like a slight waste of a week’s leave…
As long as there is enough staff to fill these positions and the staff are experienced to do so without supervision.
The RAFAC has traditionally been very poor at a national level in providing training in specific roles or using the platforms to carry out our administration or training. As @Scrounger recently posted regarding the use of older versions of the AV Med forms for AEF, but this will relate to TG forms, RA forms, F1771s, the list goes on. This is a failure on the individuals admin but it is also a failure in the organisation to ensure that the need for the changes are publicised and a firm from date is insisted on, not just from now on.
Many units do not have proper printing facilities, With the need for HM Gov to go green, most of the printing in the RAFAC has been passed from a HQ function (public funds) to a volunteer function (non-public funds) and is hidden. As a result units will have a store of forms and not print off when needed.
As I’ve said elsewhere, RAFAC needs to digitise its own processes and remove printing in order to progress its own sustainability agenda: rather than take on additional printing to cheat the RAF’s sustainability goals.
