Thought I’d make another topic about supervision ratios to avoid derailing the other thread
Where is 1:10 defined for during the day, let alone during the night?
A very good point. These are the types of things we should be trained to make decisions on in AVIP/CIC etc: it’s vitally important. To give another scenario I witnessed a few years ago, on a large Wing camp we had lots of cadets misbehaving in the evening resulting in one hospital trip and many needing to be dealt with there and then. Needless to say, our duty male, duty female and duty driver couldn’t handle it all by themselves, and all the other staff were in the bar!
There is no specific guidance about supervision ratios for organisations that are not in the education or early years sectors. We’ve put together some best practice guidance to help other organisations work out how many adults are needed to supervise children safely.
We recommend having at least two adults present when working with or supervising children and young people. We recommend the following adult to child ratios as the minimum numbers to help keep children safe:
Interesting, thanks. ACP237 explicitly excludes staff cadets from acting as staff within the 1:10 ratio, whereas the JSP ignores over-18s and ACTO10 isn’t explicit. In my experience, staff cadets have often been considered as staff within the ratios, or at least not in cadet side of the ratio, especially for low risk events.
The vast majority of our ACPs seem to be full of out of date things like this. It does annoy me to no end that an IBN will be released to change policy, but the relevant bit of policy isn’t updated. This is another example. The change to the roles O18s can play was almost certainly an IBN. But some policy hasn’t been updated to reflect they can now be used in the same way as CFAVs for some areas.
OK, real example from CCF summer station camp a few years ago (?2019) of how easily this can go wrong even at 1:10 ratios. I learned from this one…
Orienteering at a localish (30 min drive) permanent course. Around 50 cadets and (for illustrative purposes, though I can’t exactly remember how many) 5 staff. Drove cadets there in 4 x minibuses (mixture of school and MT ones) - total 68 seats for 55 persons inc drivers. Seems like plenty. TEST SNCO off duty for the evening. I’d driven one of the MT minibuses. (NB no requirement for qualifications to run orienteering in those days.)
Despite the briefing, one cadet decided to run, fell, and injured his arm - suspected break.
So now we need 2 staff (in order to comply with safeguarding policy) to take cadet to A&E for an X-Ray. If we took the MT minibus to A&E, that left 49 cadets, 3 staff and 3 minibuses - not enough seats (52 people in 51 seats).
Solution - BZ to the TEST SNCO for thinking of this. As I had FMT600, he drove to the orienteering course, gave me his car keys, then drove an MT minibus full of cadets back to station. Meanwhile 2 staff and the injured cadet went to A&E and had a happy couple of hours there. Less happy for the cadet: it was indeed broken, he was RTU…
The issue here wasn’t being short of staff: as I see it the 1:10 ratio exists so that in emergency, you are not worse than 1:20. (3 staff + 49 cadets for example is just over 1:16.) It was not having a separate safety vehicle.
On a separate point: it’s well known in CCF that we have far fewer CFAVs per cadet than the ATC. We are established at 1:20 and did not have adult NCOs or CIs.
Historically that’s not been a problem because generic activities could be carried out with staff ratios at our discretion (e.g. museum/airshow visit) and most specialised activities (shooting, fieldcraft) would be joint with Army section. And we could use civilian school staff for e.g. AT.
However, running these activities in isolation (as RAFAC appears to think we do) means we just don’t have anything like enough staff, and using ad hoc school staff is getting harder…
People seem to miss this. The 1:10 is for planning purposes. Once the poo hits the fan, ending up outside that ratio is not the end of the world. Otherwise you end up over planning/over thinking things. It’s 1:10, so 50 cadets 5 staff is fine. We don’t need to take 7 staff for 50 cadets just in case 2 staff need to go off to take a cadet to hospital. Ideally having more staff is better, but we don’t need to take it too far.
The JSP is contradictory.
It refers to “the following ratios are […] recommended” (3.2.3)
but then says that “these guidelines are minimum requirements only” (3.2.4)
Apologies if I am posting on the wrong thread. Picking up on rules be they for supervision , BPSS or other and the differences between CCF (RAF) and ATC units. From my limited experience the CCF unit quite often has an option to deliver an opportunity ( e.g. DofE) by simply entering the cadets as school pupils and operating within DofE rules thus by passing RAFAC constraints. The same could apply for AT activities operating under individual school insurance arrangements. While the RAFAC must ensure all activities carried out under its rules are as safe as it deems necessary one unintended consequence of the rebrigading of CCF units within the regional structure to more closely align the two cadet experiences may sometimes generate the opposite outcome.
The circles just tell you that the staff cadet ratio is within the 1:10 ‘tolerance’. It doesn’t indicate different ratios where they might apply e.g. for fieldcraft or for AT.
I thought ‘tolerance’ has an odd word too. It’s not a ‘requirement’ or ‘rule’, more of a ‘should’ I feel. This doesn’t provide a clear requirement.
It would be useful to have a statement in policy about ratios on and off Sqn, including staff cadets, and expicitly recognising that during the event, ratios might drop below the norm where staff are dealing with an emergency or specific issue with an individual cadet. In these circumstances, other activities should be adjusted to further reduce the risk (after a dynamic risk assessment).
I thought i was clever enough to see the difference for AT and Fieldcraft events and edits its parameters for those circles?
that said, a BEL walk has a ratio of 1:10 anyway so has little impact in changing the figures and only when drilling down into more “interesting” AT does the ratios change which i suspect the SMS system does not have the resolution to see so perhaps you are right
ACATI 022 para 4 indicates trekking ratios range from 1:10 (LEL terrain) to 1:6 in HML and ML(W) environments which SMS would not have the resolution to see based on the drop downs so i have corrected myself!
My worry with the current financial restrictions is that they will encourage more of this sort of ‘off-rolling’ activities - if there is no VA, transport or feeding support, why bother with the red tape?
And, personally, I hate operating at that ratio as it often dilutes the training and experiences for the participants! I’d much rather operate - even in BEL terrain - at 1:6 with an absolute peak of 1:8. But that’s going to be much more challenging to justify under CACE.
