Independent courses

What courses cadets can do at home? I’ve my classifcation training, and silver cyber, but I can’t find anything else (I’ve got spare time in the holidays and want to be produtive!) I’ve looked into the Space awards but I don’t know how I’d go about getting them now Ultilearns gone.

You can pay for Private Pilot Training and get up to your first solo, then wear the ‘C’ Wings :laughing:

That and learn an instrument up to the required grade for Blue, Bronze or Silver

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the rest of the iDEA award scheme, Band, go out on a walk and practice nav skills.

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Ask your staff to email you the self teach course for Space

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As @mprentice1 says, hit the hill skills. It’s area where a lack of practice is often telling, and the cadet who has really cracked into learning and consolidating those skills will be a huge help to their Sqn, and their leadership in the field will really stand out.

Practice your nav. Like really practice. Pacing cord (get a metre of cord, tie ten knots in it. Keep it in your hand and each time you move ten paces, pull one knot through your hand. When you get to the end, you’ve walked 100m. Learn about, and practice, taking bearings, and working out grid references.

Practice making a hot drink - simply go somewhere wild(ish), walk for two minutes, sit down and make a brew. Pack up, walk for two minutes and do it again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Once you’ve done it half a dozen times you’ll notice that it becomes second nature, and that the time it takes you to do it has halved.

Ask your Sqn if you could have a ration pack, or just the unwanted extras that are lying about, see if they’ve a gas cannister/burner you could use. See if there are other cadets who fancy joining you to do the same stuff - it makes the logistics easier/cheaper. You’ll also learn about planning, and management, fitting different priorities into the same activity so everyone gets what they want out of it.

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I don’t know how far you have gotten with Radios, but for the silver course you have to do a mandatory unit (VOP) and one additional unit out of Satellite Communications, Amateur Foundation Licence and the LAN module. Out of these you can do the Amateur Foundation Licence at home, you have to pay for an online assessment but it’s not that bad. This will earn you a private call sign and radio licence that you can show to your staff to have it accredited to you on portal.

Also as people said you can work your way through the space syllabus, if you do it know it will entitle you to the badges when they come out, so know is a good time to do them.

Depending on your age (you need to be currently in, not going in to, Year 12 in school or equivalent) in order to do the CyberFirst Advanced course, which as far as I am aware is a free five-day residential course where you learn about cyber security and it equates to Gold Cyber. If you can’t do it now, I think they also have Christmas and Easter courses as well.

You can also work through DofE of course, but I’m sure you know that one.

Finally, you could ash your staff if they could potentially send you the lesson files for things like first aid or leadership and just learn the curriculum, so that when you get on to a course of it you will be more confident about the subject matter, but this doesn’t matter too much as you should learn the syllabus regardless on the courses. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. :smile:

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Outdoor skills are definitely something that have declined in recent years across much of the cadet forces, which is a real shame as they open up so much of the countryside.

I’m definitely not going to recommend wild or stealth camping given its current, very confusing legal status, but it’s something many of us used to do as cadets. I’m not aware of any of my cadets who have tried it in recent years.

I taught navigation on land to a relatively experienced group recently, and still had to remind them of “along the corridor and up the stairs” as well as “move your body around the map”

Side note: our teaching materials in this area really do need updating. Magnetic variation hasn’t been “around 4°” for several years now.

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I think that on every Sqn I’ve been on there’s be a detached curriculum - stuff the kids do outside of cadets that improves/consolidates the stuff they do at cadets, and gives them skills we’d like to give them, but don’t have the time/admin freedom to do.

For me, the ‘hard skills’ - while incredibly useful to them and the Sqn, and enjoyable - were a means of developing the soft skills: understanding where different types of approach would work best in different scenarios, executing a 3 day hill trip for half a dozen where everyone got to do the things they particularly wanted to concentrate on.

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