Those FTRS’s won;t pay for themselves, if they don’t keep the revolution going, typical attitude of all mangers/adminstrators. If they stand still they have no justifiable job.
Also it shouldn’t have been difficult to gauge the demand of certain badges, they have mandated that all Cadets must do Heart Start at a very early phase, it shouldn’t been hard to realise that we needed 30,000 Heart Start Badges?!
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I don’t know about every level, but as far as I know there have been issues getting even blue badges. Given that the idea was essentially to have pretty much every cadet achieve most of the blue badges, you’d have thought that getting enough for one for every cadet (and every cadet expected to join before the next batch) would have been seen as the sensible amount to acquire.
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The blue d of e badge is basically an attendance badge
Ah, but once Wings and Regions have them in store, they’ll fall into traditional Supply pitfalls; they can’t give the badges out, someone might need them.
That’s utter rubbish I’m afraid.
My understanding is the Regions have largely had nothing to do with ordering badges and the Wings have been ordering what they need. I’ve certainly not seen any excessive ordering through the system but I have seen a lot of direct ordering as the HQAC supply is so lacking.
A badge in my eyes should be to mark a significant achievement and training / effort / skill demand on you to attain the “qualification”.
Hence I agree with @Gunner in that one badge to mark the end of significant training / skill effort, which is what we had until recently. Lord knows how we managed for so long.
@AlexCorbin The blue DofE badge is a stop gap to the real thing, but cadets can start the award if they are in the same school year as they turn 14, ie year 9 all but negates the use / validity of the blue DofE badge.
But there is nothing for the Year 8s to do …
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The Year 8s can be doing the basic training they need to be doing which they don’t need a badge for, except the 1st Class one We do exped prep as part of IET and basic ,map reading and a bit more anyway like we have done for as long as I can remember and we didn’t need a badge.
Getting away from a badge for everything and what was done in the past. The cadet has completed something and under Air Cadet rules that entitled him/her to a badge it is therefore only right that the cadet having completed his/her end of the agreement that Air Cadets complete their end by supplying said cadet with the correct badge free of charge. To often we see it from our end and not from the cadets in that they have made progression in a subject or rank and for some that may be their first achievement in life. No cadet should have to buy a badge
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In some respects should we really be that surprised that badges aren’t supplied and the implication is that “we” buy them.
HQAC has for the last dozen or so years passed a lot of costs onto squadrons, which if they didn’t pay the Air Cadets as we know it wouldn’t operate, because it was too expensive for tHQAC to even start to consider paying, and then started ejecting teddies and threatening all sorts when squadrons were slow to get to grips with the “new way”. I recall some interesting CO conferences around this time.
A year or so ago we had the debacle of adult rank slides, where if you want more you have to pay for them, rather than get them supplied and now the new “training” badges is the latest manifestation of this financial buck passing by HQAC. You sit and wonder what next.
As for looking back, @Gunner makes a remark about Blair’s almost assertion that what had happened before “New Labour” hadn’t happened. The one thing that history shows is that you ignore history at your peril.
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Initial order ratio:
1 Gold : 10 Silver : 100 bronze : 1000 Blue
FTRS Salary pls.
Can = Yes
Should = No, but probably will end up doing so due to supply issues :’(
up to you really but I would inform who awards badges beforehand, wing does take a while to allocate badges. so buying them from cadet direct shouldn’t be an issue as long as you have achieved it