@PerArdua1991 can you please double line break your paragraphs, I find it almost impossible to read the wall of text.
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Well, I’ve just proof read my last missive without wearing my reading glasses,
in order to edit it,
but since you insist…
does that work for you? 
I think the problem is its only two three paragraphs…
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They’re 1980s paragraphs, Joe.
I’ll have to bring them into
the 21st century. 
There is a limit of course, but we do improve the social mobility and opportunities of the cadets. Check out the University of Northampton report into exactly that. The social impact is much more valuable than delivering some sort of pre-Phase 1 training that you seem to recall from the old days.
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When Israel (population <10 million) can call up 300,000 reservists while we struggle to recruit 30,000, ‘social impact’ is pretty insignificant.
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Israel has both male and female conscription with few exemptions plus annual duty periods for everybody.
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Yes, and we should start taking our defence seriously as well.
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We’re discussing classification exams, not forced conscription for a future war. Back on topic.
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These exams may seem easy (and from my understanding the BTEC’s have pulled out because of how easy to cheat on them) but with how much work is involved in current school work if I had to do written multichoice exams I doubt I would have time to revise properly and may have just not done it. Especially if they only happen twice a year.
I would hope they could happen more often now but I ask what is the material benefit to doing those type of exams over the current ones. Many cadets may feel a lot of stress over exams done in this manner and I don’t see why we should be putting extra stress on cadets. Especially at Senior/Master level when the topics can get quite in depth and as a cadet you are stuck learning whatever the staff feel like. If there was a larger change to a more self-study option for exams it could work out but I don’t see why this change would be worth making when the LEARN platform was just launched.
I don’t have any nostalgia for the old system as I went through the new one so that may be me seeing it all differently. I can’t see any reason here myself on why the old system would be any better. Now I am more than happy for an update to the content or the way they are done but I don’t see the previous system as one to revisit.
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You seem to be a person who may have an interest in maintaining RAF standards.
Therefore JSP101 style writing and paragraphing would help us here.
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Unfortunately, the person who led with the creation of these new modules has left the organisation, so it’s unlikely there’ll be any more material like this any time soon.
If there were a purpose to the exams, cadets might put the effort in.
I gather that RAFAC has cadets for an average of 18 months but potentially for four or five years (for those joining around 13 and leaving at 18 to join the regulars or reserves).
Imagine if there was no need for someone who’s ‘completed’ the cadet syllabus (and I’m thinking of a culmination more akin to JLs than a master cadet exam here) to complete Phase 1 training but instead, due to confidence in the cadet training system, they could just do the 5-day transfers and rejoiners course.
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We don’t have the instructors capable or in most cases interested in delivering Phase 1 training. That’s not why we volunteer and that certainly isn’t what the organisation is for. It’s not 1941 anymore.
That’s a very small group, most who leave at 18 do so to go to University.
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Daws, it’s not 1941 anymore, but the purpose for which the RAFAC has the Classification programme seems to be still stuck there: to train young people for either flying or technical trades in the RAF, which is a direct relation of the needs of defence of the UK.
I taught at my old squadron as a CI for several months in 1989, in between my Army and RAF service, and both the ATC training programmes and type of young person who takes part in them hadn’t changed when I rejoined the ACO as a CFAV in 2012. The circumstances certainly have, even since 2012: when I taught things like ‘current RAF air operations’ for ‘History of the RAF,’ we as a nation were still trying to get along with the Russians and Chinese.
I think the real question about the Classification programme isn’t whether old- or nu-skool subjects or teaching methods are best - I still use methods and training aids I had in 1989 to supplement more modern resources: in fact the 1st Class workbooks are a strangely retro introduction in a digital world; something that should have been introduced last century - it’s about the usefulness of the whole programme to the cadet’s time in the Air Cadets and their future career and job prospects. 
I think up to Leading is pretty much ‘Basic Training for Cadets,’ which anyone in a blue uniform should know or be able to do, or teach as a senior cadet or CFAV - after that we’re into more specialist knowledge, which is interesting for techie or aviation geek types, and the cadets seem to want to get on and do it. These days keen or intelligent cadets can rattle through it in about a year and a half without it distracting from their other cadet activities, but even in the old days of classroom learning and each classification taking several months to achieve, we never got bored with it as cadets or questioned what we were doing it for.
In fact, without the classification programme, we adults would have to find and organise other activities to fill all those vacant hours, particularly during the dark winter evenings: at least the lessons are already set up for us to teach.
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It would be a very tangible benefit if, after two to three years of progressive training (not cramming it into six weeks like Phase 1), cadets were exempt or at least fast streamed. It might even give them a reason to stay in longer than 18 months.
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Bob, the reason Israel conscripts its women into the IDF is for them to prance around in Tiktok videos, or so my 'phone tells me when I’m watching youknowwheretoob videos.
Mate, what are you arguing about? We’re discussing our classification system. Not the politics of the IDFs conscription system.
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Grounded, I read the University of Northampton’s study: like all good propaganda, it’s all true, and we in the RAFAC, both cadets and staff agree with the findings, which are also true facts, because we see it for ourselves every time we turn up.
Like a lot of academic papers, it’s there to prove the ‘Science of the Bleeding Obvious,’ something anyone with half a brain would either know already or be able to work out for themselves, but the bleeding obvious still needs to be based upon facts and data.
However, like propaganda, it ignores the true point: why do we in the UK need militarised cadet forces staffed by volunteers putting in countless hours in order to produce useful citizens? If we were a ‘Maggie Youth,’ as my father half-jokingly called us in the early 1980s, in other words given both practical and ideological training for mandatory labour and military service, then we’d be well suited for that purpose.
If we are here mainly for the good of young people and our society in general, then other northern European countries with near identical cultures and lifestyle as us seem to get by without a vast amount of organised volunteer organisations papering over the cracks in society in order to produce good citizens. They just pay the taxes or the money up front for their countries to provide the facilities. As we know, most of the Nordic countries have military conscription, so they don’t need cadet forces for a recruitment tool.
There are more organised volunteers in the UK than in any other country in the world: something to be proud of in one way as a positive aspect of the British character, but when we have volunteer run food banks, then that’s a sign that the volunteer spirit and resources are being misused, and we really need to sort out our political and economic systems from the ground up rather than the top down. As if… 
That was an out of sequence reply to Bob’s earlier post about military conscription in Israel, either number 66 or 67 in this topic.
Kind of wandering off topic… but the ATC Classification Programme was developed when Britain was in one of its rare phases of mandatory conscription, and was intended to train young men for war, so the direct link between the two is there.
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