Facebook closed to under 16s

Adult Staff Execs
1

A news report has suggested that the EU is looking to make it a requirement for parents to grant access to social media for U16s and it could come into place very quickly.

Given the number of the units that use social media and our own Cmdt is well known for abusing her thumbs on social media, what impact would this have on the Corps. One of my CWC does a Facebook page for the squadron, but it’s only for PR and not communicating.

Personally I think it would be a good move as it would protect youngesters and force parents to maybe take a lot more interest in what their kids do. I have had 2 cadets who have been subjected to bullying via Facebook and one of our youngest daughter’s friends (although well over 16) was harassed on social media by an ex-boyfriend and it only stopped when she went to the Police.

2

But how many parents will just given permission and let their little darling get on with it…

Don’t think it will affect ACO business at all.

3

How do you police a rule like that.

4

I don’t think it could be policed, unless by parents. It would end up like many of the online age restrictions, click here if you are over x, unless tagged to a parent’s email address and they were alerted to everything they did.

I know several squadrons locally who seem to depend almost completely on social media to communicate with staff, cadets, parents etc and if it came to pass and parents said no, they might struggle for a while. Talking to friends schools seem to use it a lot.

5

Doesn’t Facebook already have a minimum age requirement of 12/13? I may be wrong. Social Media is an excellent tool for PR. It’s a more eco-friendly way of showing parents what their kids get up to instead of handing out monthly newsletters and so on so forth.

6

Facebook does have a minimum age, but is probably a hollow requirement.
When people speak about social media the PR side is limited to people looking for it and it plays to a very, very niche audience. Keeping parents in touch is good, but when my kids were just leaving school the school website was just being developed and we used that and speaking to friends and neighbours the schools increasingly use websites and most have ‘locked’ areas for parents and pupils. Which have letters, information, an ability for parents to check up on attendance and increasingly pay for things. Not many schools use social media as a primary communication source. It seems that many schools do bulk texting for things.
Many COs say they get frustrated as cadets use facebook to almost decide whether they will turn up or not, based on what’s on the programme, if they publish their programme.

I’m not sure, however good it would be, that it would happen as the online marketing / advertisers would lose out on targeting a naïve audience. I also feel social media companies need to hook teenagers when they are too young to really understand things. When I use email I’m able to ignore advertising but I know my kids have been swayed by some adverts.

7

If the cadets don’t turn up when they know what they’ll be doing, that’s a sign of a poor training programme in my opinion.

The cadets should see the programme and want to do the activities. If there are activities that the cadets see as less ‘fun’ (usually classification training or drill & uniform) then it needs to be sold to them so they want to do it.

8

Nope, too difficult for the EU…

9

We kind of saw this coming and anyway the new age limits meant we had cadets under13 and therefore not able to use Facebook. We have now moved the communication to cadets aspect to our own social media (squadron media? I just invented that!) that runs on the squadron website. It does not have all the bells, whistles and lights that FB has, but it is limited to cadets and staff that are registered and logged in to the site and all messages are recorded so is much more secure.

The FB page is still there and gets used by the cadets, but the official stuff goes through the website.

10

It would have been a stupid idea anyway. It isn’t like the current age limits are stuck to. I’m sure I have seen a 5 year old dog on Facebook…

I doubt very much that there would be any drop in any kind of cyber bullying.

I rely on Facebook quite heavily for communicating with cadets and parents. Being ACF, we aren’t actually allowed our own detachment websites or facebook pages, we can only have closed groups. It was a shame we had to close our page as I thought it was quite well run and was good for advertising locally. These days only counties can have Facebook pages, apart from the national one.

There are other forms of communication of course, but apart from actually talking to them in person (difficult with one parade night a week), Facebook is the one that reaches the most people.

11

Reading Talon’s comments it makes you wonder how the Corps got by in the not so very old days.

My cadet squadron didn’t have a phone. Many cadets didn’t have phones in their homes, we didn’t get a home phone until I was 16, mum and dad didn’t see the point.

I know what happened as cadets we turned up at the squadron (as did staff) and were told things that we wrote down in notebooks and read notices pinned to noticeboards. BUT the over-riding thing was we attended the squadron regardless of what we were doing we didn’t pick and choose, we couldn’t. All activities were announced with massive lead times by comparison to today.
When I started work we had meetings and you took notes.

As a society we have become, in a very short space of time, for business/work and social (which is everything not linked to work) almost unable to function without some online gimmick and mobile office masquerading as a telephone. I use a wall calendar and paper diary and have various scraps of paper.

For all those squadrons that have built a reliance on online communication and putting a warts and all picture out there, close them down for 6 months and see what happens. I know this would be difficult but it could be quite a cathartic exercise and probably get back to what the ATC and being a member of it is about, for staff and caets and parents.

12

I do look back occaisionally at books from that era too. Rickets were common as well as miners lung. But they were good times weren’t they… ;-p

13

Seems this has both pros and cons.

Cons- Communications between teens are interrupted

Pros-
Stops gang meetups and spam content

14

Facebook is a good tool, instant notifications if a squadron has to close for unexpected reason etc.

However, I am currently revamping the squadron website to provide a lot more useful info for parents and cadets, and making it more accessible. The idea is that the daily business of the squadron can partly move online, training program and activity info, absence notifications etc. I have a set up that allows the cadets to see the next two nights training program via the home page and also very basic details of forthcoming activities (also helps recruitment as people see what we are really doing - not just the blue sky ACO website). Cadets and PARENTS can then log in and see more of the training program (approx 3 months worth), view all the activities and download joining instructions, warning orders, application forms, kit lists, TG21s etc. Parents and cadets also get a email when a new activity is added or when a message is added to the website - this was a key thing my last committee wanted as it meant parents had a much better idea of what was going on, and also cadets couldn’t loose the letters.

This kind of interactive website is much better for cadets than the dozens which replicate the same stuff - Ranks, Classifications, generic ACO bumf - if people want that, link to the ACO website.

If you are interested in seeing more of the site, drop me a message

1 Like
15

Ah, the good old days when the 3822 had the signed permission by parents to allow the cadet to do more or less anything. No abundance of TG forms or F Med whatever paperwork.

No Bader to slow down or restrict the type of activities. Can you imagine the number of heart attacks up the chain of command if a sqn planned a “jail break” event? Have passport, get as far as you can, as quick as you can, on your own initiative, using any form of transport! Not unusual in the good old days…

16

as a cadet, the Sqn next to us had two of there people get to Berlin. i think they were about 17, but they got to Berlin and back… i think there was a camp at Brize in the late 80’s where a cadet managed to get to Ascension.

i don’t know the details, but i doubt the OC felt the need to consult with HQAC over the matter, in the same way that our OC never felt the need to submit 90 pages of rubbish to take 20 cadets for a 30km hike through the cotswolds on a sunday morning.

17

[quote=“juliet_mike, post:14, topic:2047, full:true”]
Facebook is a good tool, instant notifications if a squadron has to close for unexpected reason etc.

However, I am currently revamping the squadron website to provide a lot more useful info for parents and cadets, and making it more accessible. The idea is that the daily business of the squadron can partly move online, training program and activity info, absence notifications etc. I have a set up that allows the cadets to see the next two nights training program via the home page and also very basic details of forthcoming activities (also helps recruitment as people see what we are really doing - not just the blue sky ACO website). Cadets and PARENTS can then log in and see more of the training program (approx 3 months worth), view all the activities and download joining instructions, warning orders, application forms, kit lists, TG21s etc. Parents and cadets also get a email when a new activity is added or when a message is added to the website - this was a key thing my last committee wanted as it meant parents had a much better idea of what was going on, and also cadets couldn’t loose the letters.

This kind of interactive website is much better for cadets than the dozens which replicate the same stuff - Ranks, Classifications, generic ACO bumf - if people want that, link to the ACO website.[/quote]

At which point do you become a virtual group?
If you take it to extremis; cadets do learning and exams online and can find out all about what’s going on and what they can be doing, without getting off their sofa. How long before we become a virtual orgnisation? At our RBL meetings the Secretary has spoken about people joining online and never attending a branch, which seems all well and good, until you need people on the ground to collect and do welfare stuff.

The website idea mirrors what many schools do but it doesn’t replace the school. What can happen and seems to on some squadrons, this excess of information online is used to decide whether little Johnny or Janey can be bothered to attend. I was on a camping weekend last summer and several of the cadets from one squadron hadn’t been at the squadron for weeks until the night before the weekend. Their parents had paid for it by BACS, downloaded the forms and kit list and they just turned up. The OC was not a happy bunny, but as I said to them, you created and allowed this to happen.

How often and for what reason to squadrons close unexpectedly? If it happens more than once in a cadet’s time in the Corps then you’d need to be questioning staff as failing ‘acts of God’ or break-ins, staff non-attendance is the only reason, but then you only need 2 staff to open. In 40 years in the Corps (9 as a cadet) I never attended as a cadet found the squadron unexpectedly closed (even in the harshest winters) and as staff found it unexpectedly shut once (but that was 22 years ago) after we were broken into. But everyone understood and accepted it. But we were open the next night.

Being in an organisation like the ATC is to me all about the social interaction. It’s gettng kids to expand their personal (face to face) social iteractions / horizons beyond their school or road or even town. I had more mates from the ATC over a much wider spread of the district and beyond than many of the people I went to school with.

18

As we do actually run a website that does much of what you speak (sign-up on line, download forms) I can say we don’t have any of those sort of problems, well, not so far. Cadets sign-up for activities, but that doesn’t mean they are automatically selected, that is up to the staff. Since the downloading of forms (TG21s, that sort of thing) is easy and quick, there is no reason why cadets cannot get them in early and with many of our activities submission of forms is a requirement before the cadet is eligible for selection, usually 10 days before. That, of course, does mean attendance at a parade.

What the site does give us is very fast and secure two way communication with the cadets when the unexpected happens, which is not always bad. We have been offered AEF for a PM slot on the day and the ability to contact the cadets very quickly on their mobile devices meant we could accept it. Form Med 1s were downloaded and signed by parents and cadets arrived on time. We got 4 cadets flown in what would otherwise have been wasted slots.

The technology is here and the cadets wander around on a Saturday with it in their hands. If we choose not to use it properly then we become luddites.

19

Is the suggestion that cadets and parents are ‘hooked’ on an air cadet online presence and looking at / repsonding to it almost constantly, they must have something better to do surely? You must have an alert system that they link to an email or phone, as I can’t think how you would manage last minute notifications.

The AEF example must mean you live quite close to the AEF and most importantly had staff available to take the cadets before putting it out there. If our AEF was operational (no prize for guessing which one I mean) they could offer any number of last minute places, but with a 1½ hour drive one way, we wouldn’t be in a position to take advantage of it.

20

The website has a forum/noticeboard section that sends out an email to everyone on the site when something is posted. Because it is our website and there is no commercial reason to get people to log on just to see if they need to read the message, the entire message is included in the email. Everyone with a smart phone (everyone) gets the notification very quickly.

The system will also produce an Admin Order and a list of cadets with a next of kin contact number for the staff member.

We are about 40 minutes from the AEF and about the same from the VGS (if GIC ever starts again). The joy of the system is that the staff member taking them can post the message. As it happens, as well as the website, I also deal with all AEF/GIC for the squadron and being old and in receipt money without work, I can almost always be the staff member.

If you think my OC is lucky to have me, perhaps you can tell him!