I was afraid that might be the answer.
Are you in the mill skills hub teams group? Might be worth joining and making a post to discuss it!
I’m not, but I’m sure it’s nothing that hasn’t been raised already.
What points would you want to raise or changes would you want to make?
Currently, the IWT requirement for Bronze is a major blocker to cadets progressing beyond Blue. And the Blue syllabus on its own is not sufficient to allow cadets to participate in any meaningful fieldcraft activities (it’s just IET in green).
The most obvious change to me is to create a version of Bronze where the use of weapons is not required, or make it optional, rather than creating a separate course. This would make the training easier to deliver and more accessible to cadets and staff.
Another option could be to move some topics from Bronze to Blue (such as cam and concealment, movements in the field and patrolling), allowing cadets to participate in fieldcraft exercises locally, which typically wouldn’t involve weapons anyway.
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It’s designed to prepare them to go in to the field and be completed solely within a unit footprint or extended footprint. Adding the other items you mention would not be possible for about 85% of the org and would then mean the most accessible fieldcraft award becomes less accessible.
Weapons for Bronze is a contentious one, if you read ACP Vol 1 it does say that Bronze can be delivered without weapons but the assessment must be completed with weapons to maintain the assessment integrity.
The issue you have with having 2 different Bronze standards is that people then want to take Cadets on to a Silver training/exercise with Blank firing and have to factor in re-training those who have never used weapons and never blank fired which means wasting time for those who did complete the syllabus as intended.
Alternatively we remove weapons completely from Bronze and it adds time to Silver as you would have to cover off more of the basics. It also dulls down Bronze quite a bit reducing realism.
I appreciate your points, and I’m not suggesting my ideas are optimal solutions by any means, but as it is I don’t think the syllabus is fit for purpose.
I do agree that the (relative) ease of delivering Blue is a strength, but the requirements for Bronze mean that cadets will complete Blue and then sit for months or more waiting to complete IWT and then for a Bronze FT course to come around. And in the meantime they’ll likely have forgotten much of what they learned in Blue because they won’t have had opportunity to use it.
The requirement for weapons also locks out those who can’t complete IWT for physical or medical reasons.
As I said above, they can do Bronze without weapons…
They just don’t get the badge.
You can also do fieldcraft outside the PTS still, this is just the badge earning system.
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Does that still require a full FTI? If so, IWT is still a blocker.
So really the issue you mention above stems from the fact the instructor isn’t an FTI as they don’t have IWT?
Not at all, you’ve just made an assumption. My unit currently has no fieldcraft instructors. We rely on the availability of wing courses to get our cadets doing fieldcraft.
I think delivering Bronze without weapons would be the best option in most cases. This would open up Bronze skills and interesting consolidation exercises to many more cadets, without the requirement for IWT or the significant extra logistics of involving weapons (without going into any more details). Cadets can then build their experience before moving onto Silver, as a weekend’s Bronze course isn’t enough to get them ready for Silver.
However, delivering Bronze without weapons requires DDH approval. Asking the Reg Comdt about the details of a Bronze course seems far too high a barrier for this. If ACP16 Vol 1 could reduce the level of dispensation to use weapons e.g. to Wing level, that would open up fieldcraft to many, many more cadets and staff.
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So what’s the actual issue, if you are relying on Wing courses and there is an FTI at that level can they not attend those courses?
It’s not about making it easy, it’s about managing the risk that the DDH has signed up for when authorising the PTS which is why it’s at that level. This goes back to my point above where if you let the course happen without weapons then they need to understand why as it may mean more training is needed in the future prior to thoe Cadets attending a Silver course.
More training means more resources being deployed again which has a cost.
I thought it was fairly clear from my initial posts, I have cadets who can’t get on a bronze course because they can’t get on IWT.
The policy and syllabus also isn’t set up to enable meaningful fieldcraft activities to happen at a local level. Doing camp craft in a squadron car park is not meaningful fieldcraft training.
Surely it would just be moving resources further down the pipeline, i.e. from bronze to silver? If anything, that would reduce the resources required because not all cadets who complete bronze will progress to silver.
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Which DDH risk increases by removing weapons? As the requirement for use of weapons is stopping cadets getting involved in fieldcraft, it’s currently eliminating the DDH risk entirely, but that’s not the intention either.
Removing weapons from Bronze would reduce the resource demand - no service vehicles, no armoury demand, no ammunition. It could increase this for Silver slightly, but most cadets won’t go on to do Silver, as @Jimothy says, so fewer resources would be used overall.
And we really should be making things as easy as possible.
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We’ve answered that then, they can attend Bronze without IWT.
That’s the issue we’re seeing, almost everyone is trying to run through the syllabus in 6 months of summer or less and fieldcraft outside of the PTS has dissapeared as people are focused on badge delivery.
Part of the issue is the lack of joined up thinking between shooting and fieldcraft, some of the best implementations we’ve seen for the syllabus are where Wings or Regions provide an integrated timetable of events for Cadets to properly progress through the syllabus.
The split training level against the PTS. They authorised the PTS on the basis that cadets who turn up to a Silver event meet a set standard. If we then have Cadets turning up who don’t meet that set standard it increases risk and was not agreed.
We could remove weapons completely from Bronze and shift the whole thing sideways in to Silver but i’m sure I’d then be having the same discussion about weapons stopping people attaining Silver.
Theses are two very different topics & require very different mindsets
They don’t gell well together & it’s rare you find an instructor in one that’s interested in the other.
We are having several wing shoots for L98. Being cancelled due to lack of staff.
If bronze fieldcraft has been written with the intent that shooting will enable it then someone has made a poor assumption.
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