Any legs in this? Might want to go and review training plans for next 8 weeks
Christmas Shutdown 17 Dec to 10 Jan? That was always pretty standard for us.
Looking at this year’s calendar, the 17th would be the last night and the 10th the first night back.
But I’d be surprised if there’s a mandatory shutdown for Sqns… My guess would be that somewhere along the line, someone has gotten the wrong end of the stick around the normal Civil Service christmas closure period.
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Those are the dates we’d decided on ourselves anyway. Nbd
Ive seen official comms, sqns needs to justify via CoC to the Cmdt on why they need to hold a routine activity in that time period.
Good lord.
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Yeah we’ve had that message too.
Our last night is the 16th anyway and cadets won’t be back until the 10th.
Yeah I’m in the final shielding window… So won’t really impact me apart from time to get my admin in order
So after a year shut down they think that a whole month shut for Christmas is a good idea?
If it were my decision I would be looking at 20th as the last night and reopening on the 6th Jan. (which is longer than a normal year, but would be the cost of the extra bank holidays.)
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These are normally the sort of dates we look at.
My only feedback is it apparently doesn’t apply to VGS… So in theory there’s now no Sqn staff to facilitate that due to a mandatory shut down.
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We certainly weren’t planning on shutting for a month!
Has this got anything to do with the CS needing to use up left over holiday?
It’s standard sort of stand down over Christmas for MOD from what I’ve seen.
We normally close for that period as we’re on an ARC and the army don’t was us there in that period.
The thing that these sort of arbitrary shutdowns don’t take into account is the mental health aspect.
While some Staff and Cadets are more than happy to have a month off, for some Cadets is the bright spark in a bleak existence.
I’m thinking especially of those cadets that are unknown to the organisation suffering abuse or who live with domestic violence. For them taking away Cadets for a month can have a huge impact.
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We just give them the school holidays plus a day or two either end. We don’t need to make a big deal out of this.
If you have a parade night, crack on. You don’t need permission for that, it’s not going through SMS.
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I’m pretty sure in some Regions it still is as part of the post Covid stuff.
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This is part of the Air TLB mandated no “routine” activity. We happen to fall into it because of our position in the RAF.
It is based around the fact the military and civil servants are burnt out, they don’t want people coming back in to mountains of emails because they’ve taken the recommended longer Christmas holidays.
This will mean the permanent staff won’t be available. How Wings choose to manage that with the Squadrons will be a local decision.
Very few people would stop courses etc, the beginning week is standard and the vast majority of squadron will shut down then, its only an additional week in January.
Different sqns do different things - such as my first week will be a staff evening, followed by an NCO evening. Then the week of the 10th everyone else back in.
We shut from 09 Dec (last one 2021) to 06 Jan (1st one 2022), which is a normal thing for us as it allows staff to have a proper break and cadets to do any school things before any Christmas hols. A clear week before Christmas is just nice. Allows for visits to relatives or meeting up somewhere and staff go out for work dos and schools do some sort of “play”. Our school does and is running more performances with smaller audiences allay concerns.
Yep, we’re still having to put every parade night on SMS 
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why?
and words
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No; that would around Easter. Their leave period is 1May to 30 April.