God I’d kill for a group of 15. My intakes are all 30+
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You cant keep them very long then…
1 intake a year at 30 cadets.
4 years equals 120 cadets.
How many you got?
I’ve got 50 but they stay for 4 plus years on average.
I’ve gone from 11 under my predecessor to 70 in 3 years. I could have 140 in 4 weeks time if I had the space. (Am actively Turning schools down!)
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Not saying that’s not successful.
But if you have intakes of 30 and only 70 cadets, they are only staying 2 years…
Wish I had the building space for more than 50.
Pffffff curse you RFCA.
Average Cadet lasts 18 months according to HQAC so we are beating the average by a decent margin.
I expect to lose 1/3 of each intake by 1st class. We aren’t even coming close to that level of turnover. (Lost 20 out of 90 on 3 years!)
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nice humblebrag!
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I am actively trying to get my OC to stop recruiting because we can’t cope with the numbers we have but he won’t listen.
My one victory has been to get him to move from a drip feeding system to monthly intakes but it’s becoming a massive headache. We just don’t have the space for them all!
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Run more parade night and/or spin off a DF?
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Difficult to get enough staff to turn up and do stuff on the nights we already do.
There are another two squadrons in close proximity to us (one of which used to be our DF) so that’s not really feasible. I don’t know why we’re so much more attractive than those squadrons, we don’t even actively recruit it’s all done by word of mouth and a bit of routine social media stuff.
But we’re drifting off topic.
Could you share cadets? Or are you just so good that they all only want to come to you?
We do sometimes send cadets their way but only if they can’t do our parade nights.
We probably offer the widest variety of activities but one of the other squadron’s is still pretty good. The third has had a rocky few years and is low on both staff and cadets with the inevitable knock on effects.
Having had the issue of “missing generations” I can understand the OC’s thinking, it can really hurt the Squadron if you miss out a layer of Cadets and can take years to recover. After 3 years I’m still dealing with this issue created by my predecessors. 
That being said I’ve made the decision to scale back, so our latest recruitment only did 1 school rather than the usual 2, it didn’t work and we still have them packed in to the rafters!
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How does that work for classification stuff? Do they just get put in with the previous month or do they start from scratch?
ps, thread split?
Wait Out.
Edit: topic split - continue discussions on how hard it is to have too popular a squadron and how to manage that woeful situaton 
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Someone swallowed a dictionary?
We have possibly got 2 new staff interested in joining and we have said it may take some time to get checks back etc
I just hope they don’t get bored waiting. Our Sqn has around 70+ on the books and on a good night we have up to 50 on a parade night and with our shoe box of a hut we have to often plan external activities for many of our cadets so the building isn’t over crowded.
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Can only dream of these numbers. We number no more than approx 10 cadets on an evening.
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It’s a colossal pain.
They slot in with the existing groups and then go through the cycle until they complete it.
Yes, with a but. As you all know the majority of your Staff come from your older Cadets. We are now at a phase where we have a large Squadron (70 Cadets) but with only 2 or 3 over the age of 16. This means that there is going to be a staff recruitment issue in a year or 2. Not a problem if we keep all the staff we have, but there will always be turnover.
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We are a large Sqn at 90 cadets. The Corps is not geared up for large units as the bigger you are the less you get. We still only get the same number of flying and gliding slots, camp places etc. This sort of thing should be based on average parade strength IMO.
The Sqn is growing, we have two recruit intakes of 25 each year and will always be running a waiting list. Thankfully we have a good age split between 12 and 19 with the NCO’s being used to run the Sqn. There is a trend where the average age is going down so its something we have to monitor and our building capacity has been set at 75 with no option to expand due to the size of our footprint. Essentially we rely on some cadets not turning up if the weather is bad! Bit of an odd situation really as the Corps wants you to build your Sqn’s but offer very little incentive and make it really hard to bring new staff in.
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