During a staff meeting it came out that we have staff with survival skills and bushcraft who are willing to give a talk to Cadets when we go on a camping trip. Is there a definitive list of topics we can or cant teach or is there a case of seeking forgiveness afterwards rather than permission. Many years ago I once taught preparing a rabbit to cook and no one complained but as VRT I refused to do it again when asked. nI’m sure its on a banned list somewhere.
Any thoughts?
This is one of those weird ones where if it’s not listed in ACP 300 or ACTO 10, then you need to make it into something that fits.
Could you make it fit under the AT Expeditions and Expedition Training section, for example? That’s probably the closest section I can think of.
There are a few companies that run formal training for bushcraft instructors. Some of these are properly accredited too. The AT head on me would think you’d need someone with just a qual to deliver what you’re actually looking to do. Otherwise you’ll have to stick prety close to the normal exped/DofE type stuff.
This has been explored before, and in short the words bushcraft and survival raise red flags, and the things from that sphere that you can realistically do are not really worth the hassle.
Personally, I’d say don’t ■■■■■■ about with making rabbit fur gloves (your RHQ will literally die..) and making drinking water out of each others wee - concentrate on the survival stuff that your cadets can actually use:
how do I get an aircrafts attention? How can I talk to an aircraft using arm signals? What information do I need to broadcast to get help to us? How can I make a rudimentary shelter from the stuff we carry? How do I use my nav skills to get the party into a more sheltered location? What equipment/foodstuffs should we carry as our survival gear for if it all goes wrong?
Don’t think ‘what skills do we need to survive in a post-apocolyptic dystopia’, think ‘we’re doing Ten Tors, it snowed instead of rained, and one of the cadets has twisted their ankle - how do we make ourselves more comfortable for the next 12-24 hours?’.
I am pretty sure (and I’m sure it came up in a previous thread) that survival was taught as part of DofE training; we might even have the old material on the squadron.
it is clearly taught in Scouts (there is a Survival badge) and they run instructor courses.
In my mind the easiest way would be to run it as an externally provided activity through an approved instructor or bushcraft school but I don’t know if our system would approve even that?
We’ve definitely never had someone come down with a load of rabbits and taught cadets how to prepare and cook them 
Not delivered with a survival slant tbf.
It’s been discussed a few times over the years. Used to be something we did quite a bit of but I did more of it with the Scouts than I ever did with the Cadets.
It was broached for a Wing camp local to me not long back and the TSA shut it down due to it not being a SERE instructor. It was reduced to very basic camp craft style items like starting fires, erecting shelters out of availabile materials etc.
Thank you one and all for this. You gave me the answers that I thought would be the current thinking. I think I can organise a lesson based on emergencies rather than anything else as a what-if situation. I’m sure useful camp gadgets would also be a safe bet.