Sounds like my cadet days. We didn’t have diverse training programmes or activities every / every other weekend. We did 2 nights a week that consisted of drill and classifications practically every night, with ranges and maybe some other things on an ad hoc basis and we still turned up and there are still a number of us kicking around in the Corps today. I don’t ever remember seeing or even hearing about a training programme, even into my early years as staff, given that it would have had to have been typed or handwritten. We did 2 nights, but we didn’t have the distractions associated with modern life (other than TV) or pressure from school. Homework was done mostly at the weekend and I remember spending Saturdays in the local reference library … no internet for looking things up. It seems like a much simpler and easier time and I don’t think that the ATC took over the lives of staff, or not in our squadron.
Look at the organisation today and I’d lay money in every single Wing there will be people filling their time doing things as they feel the cadets need to be doing something and ignoring the cadets’ or their need to rest and have time relaxing. One sad story is a lady from the Scouts I know who has recently stopped doing it, as she did lots with Scouts and Guides and her father ‘got’ dementia and she hadn’t really spent the time with him (work and hobby) and now he doesn’t know her properly and she is determined to spend more time with her mum and dad who lives 20 or so miles away and her family, as she lost sight of the important things. Some will say the cadets want to do things so they do things to appease the cadets, tbh when I was a teenager I didn’t need the ATC organising my life, I had plenty of things I could be doing, like going around with my mates. I think in many ways squadrons interpret the message from HQAC as you need to do lots and lots, squadrons then compare themselves to other squadrons (or more correctly Wing compare one squadron with other squadrons) and feel they have to do more and this then snowballs.
There has been a lot of discussion about recruitment and retention of staff and you have to wonder if at any point the people running the Corps have taken a step back to look at the Corps and wonder if the demands incited on staff to do more things, is why recruitment and retention of staff (except from within) is so bloody difficult. As a sqn cdr you are almost forced into insisting that staff do courses and then keep on keeping on at them as there is an insistence that people “develop”.
Personally I think 2 nights can be a bit of a bind. At our Sqn we tend to get over hurdles by having training days on Saturdays/Sundays. I would prefer to go to a one night a week scenario with a sqn trg day every 4-6 weeks.
I don’t really get what point you are trying to make here?
It’s no longer the 1970’s and you won’t retain cadets by just doing Air Recce and Drill, nor would you retain any staff as they would get just as board and go eslewhere.
Now the question of whether we should be customer driven (do what the cadets want) is a difficult one.
We have training aims and need to meet them which takes up a lot of our time as a unit, what we do with the rest of the time is a balancing act between what the staff what to run and what the cadets want to do. (Afterall their is no point in planning a weekend activity if no one is going to show up).
We do need variety, but we need to the consistency. And maybe do with teaching kids that sometimes you just have to get on with the boring stuff before all the fun.
That’s an important life skill.
But yea, you can’t fall into the trap of just slogging through the syllabus.
Not having been there (I imagine) in the 70s you wouldn’t really understand it, having more social freedom (for want of a phrase), we didn’t need to have our time planned to nth degree or activities every weekend, which is where the Corps seems to have ended up.
We were like generations before us, imo, a lot more independent and having children now in their late 20s/early 30s I remember from the time they were 7/8 on, we made them go out and not come back until later, which confused some of their friend’s parents, which confused us as they were a similar age to us.
We cannot be a customer driven organisation, as there isn’t the staffing, funding or infrastructure and HQAC would fold within a month as the model for the Corps isn’t designed for the customer. We are a take it or leave it organisation and the youngsters stay or leave for many reasons and a major one is the mates they make. If you have a group who all get on, then they tend to stay, when they don’t get on they leave, regardless of what a squadron might lay on and then there is education and employment which affect staying in. We must have all had the fall out of leavers when for any number of teenager reasons they suddenly don’t get on and leave and not always related to the squadron. We have ‘customers’ who might expect to go flying or gliding and they don’t get it and I’ve lost cadets because of this, but there are out of our control. If we were a business we’d have been stuffed by trading standards if at any place in our advertising/promo it says anywhere cadets will fly at least once each year and they didn’t. I imagine in a few weeks we’ll have the almost annual story of a Christmas themed experience that isn’t.
The problem is do too much, staff get burnt out and without staff you can’t do anything. I can categorically say that not doing much in the Corps ever means I get bored. If people haven’t got areas of interest outside the organisation and are relying on the Corps to fulfil their lives, it doesn’t say much for the people staffing it.