I attended Remembrance today in Bristol City Centre. I attended with my new SCC unit, but, as I’m still not fully transferred over, I was wearing my RAF No1s.
When we reach the centre, I decide I can’t really parade with the SCC, firstly I’d look a tool, and mess up the order of precedence. I also had the Wing Training Officer make a beeline for me, and I ended up being a supernumerary officer.
There were approximately 60 cadets on parade from at least three units, maybe more, but, before I rocked up, there were seven staff. Of which 4 of those were Wing Staff, (WCO, WWO, two WSOs)
That means that between (at least) three squadrons, they sent 60 cadets and only THREE staff members.
That’s bad right? I know people in my old wing had gotten out of the habit of doing cadet activities, but is this common?
I’ll admit to not parading with my Sqn today, but I was parading elsewhere in uniform as a wreath bearer for our parent station - due to a lack of regular serving personel available/willing to do it.
It’s hard to say on anecdotes.
Out place today had 4 uniformed CFAVs (five if you include me) on parade and three CIs on support for our 40ish cadets.
Our staff numbers have been pretty consistent over the years.
On the books we have 8 uniformed and non uniformed as well as 3 SIs…
So we actually have rather good staff numbers.
How’s morale? It’s hard to say. Our OC has been in a heated arguement with wing over risk assessments for today. I’m struggling to keep going as work is fragging me.
So it’s hard to say without getting a larger sample size.
We had all our uniformed staff (3 including myself) plus we had a WSO we invited as ours is their nearest parade. But no CIs willing to attend.
Not an issue with ratios as units were asked to limit numbers on parade this year. But even just after lock down we would have had 5 uniforms and at least 2 CIs prepared to help.
At my Sqn, I am the only staff member there that was a staff member since before Covid. Everyone else has joined since 2022 ish. I wasn’t actually at this unit pre-covid either, but transferred over shortly after we returned to parades.
So you could argue we lost 4 people with vast years of experience, but have gained back 4 new people to replace them, who are learning quickly.
At the parade I was responsible for there were 2 ATC Squadrons and I only saw 2 j informed members of staff. Their must’ve been some CI’s present or maybe even uniformed staff not in uniform or they were well out of ratio.
You might also want to include “gapping” where a CFAV is ill for a longer period time, or increased work commitments similarly prevent attendance. Impossible to predict but causes significant disruption & extra workload.
Also, it’s not the easiest to “mirror” a CFAV position - even with written TORs / protocols / ACPs to follow, as it slows down the experienced CFAV markedly, & some (a lot?) of the required information is not written down (or changes quickly). Even if this was a 9-5 job being mirrored, it would take a good while to be up to speed.
We had two uniformed CFAVs and 4 CIs for the 45 cadets we had on parade. Sea cadets had two uniformed CFAVs for similar number of cadets. And the ACF were not even in attendance?!
Bit like the police. They lost 20000 experienced officers, which have all allegedly been replaced but by completely inexperienced newcomers with the associated drop in performance. Hopefully we can retain all our new post COVID volunteers!
Whilst also still never mentioning that 50% of Police Staff were gotten rid of at the same time with the jobs either not being done or being done by Police Officers.
Its similar to our area however the ACF seem to parade as a Company rather than detachment so won’t go to the local town/village but you will find they take a few hundred to the major City parade or split across 2 or so
We had roughly 35 cadets and all our uniformed staff bar one CFAV who was taking 3 cadets flying and 1 AEF SI who couldn’t make it for other reasons. So in total we had 7 uniformed staff out plus one CI ready to help out. But we have a very high number of staff right now so maybe more of an outlier.