Don’t get too excited. Senior engagement on here will be fleeting at best. No real change will be forthcoming, and it’ll be forgotten about as quickly as it was thought to be a good idea to engage.
“Make the most of it!” I hear you cry, sorry, seen them all come and go; they just get worse. No evidence of any kind of positive change or fix for years.
Peps assessment is accurate and damning. Mike has tried to engage at top level and has been pushed back. This organisation will never learn.
Why am I here? You ask, I often ask myself the same thing. But just every now and then as a WSO, between the politics and nonesense, I get on a sqn, engage with cadets and actually enjoy myself.
Never anything to do with our structure, the embarrassment of the CoC, or the latest rubbish HQAC spews - but always engaging with the cadets is what makes it worthwhile.
@Cab get out your uniform, turn up at a sqn in jeans and t-shirt. Talk to cadets and staff as an unknown, realise the issues and help us. Please!
To be honest this is what I would expect. Yes come on here drain the swamp challenge the pre conceptions but at the end of the day the paid staff are there to be enablers & put the infrastructure in place so we volunteers can deliver.
Once the ship has stopped heeling violently from side to side then I would expect paid staff to sit back a little in here & lurk in the background whilst we chunter, quietly nudging things here & there every now & then.
Polo top & chinos please - we do have some standards to maintain
Any is better than none, and everyone has the right to defend themselves and their teams.
If no one with alternative perspectives or experiences ever came in, or if they were not accepted and welcomed (albeit they may be rightly challenged and debated) then we may as well be a private Subreddit echo chamber.
The forum is here to enable discussion, debate, and the sharing of knowledge and experience. We may be cynical, but that doesn’t mean we’re closed off to new (tangible) evidence and well structured logic that may generate dissonance between what we thought we knew or believed.
Reading some of the garbled comm, it is not just about assurance,its about the melodramatic effect of needing rhq to sweep up the mess should, in extreme circumstances, something goes wrong, appears we have enough broom but not enough operators.
Why don’t we just close this outdated organisation - we have lost most of the RAF links and the original reason for our existanceso let’s just cut our losses and be badged as AAC within the ACF !!
Nothing fleeting about my commitment to the Air Cadets and neither do I need to anonymously engage with those involved. I have always sought open and honest engagement and that is exactly what I get when I travel the UK and see what our fantastic organisation is achieving. I welcome frankness but this must come with recognition that emotion must not result in a lack of politeness and mutual respect. Nobody in RAFAC comes to work or comes to volunteer aiming to do a bad job. I see an organisation full of brilliant people doing their utmost under very difficult circumstances. Nothing I have seen in here is an unknown but neither are all the issues resolvable easily or quickly.
No lack of connection, in fact the exact opposite. We have more graduates than ever in our Cranwell and Halton parade squares who herald from the Air Cadets. Flying opportunities are, at last, increasing now we have done the hard work to resolve gliding airworthiness and addressed Tutor issues. New VGS have opened and synthetic training devices are proliferating. The digitalisation of RAFAC continues at pace with some aspects leading the parent Service. Education continues to modernise and we are seeking to more easily recognise this education in our recruitment. Of course there are resource challenges but this is not a failing organisation. Far from it.
The ongoing Air Traffic control issues at RAF Wittering still mean that 5AEF has done no AEF flying at weekends since they moved from Cambridge.
More VGS - only because a decent aircraft was taken out of service and Vigilant VGSs all closed.
Synthetic training - lets be honest, Flight Sims… a lot of cadets already have these at home… maybe better than those on Squadrons. Our Sqn CO is an airline captain, yet is not deemed to be capable of teaching a 12 year old to fly a circuit on a simulator.
Education… all classification exams are now ‘open book’ (read ‘Google’) and the BTEC is now worth only 1x GCSE wheras it used to be considered equal to 4 and not involving and further work by the cadets.
OK, so we give the RAF recruits whomight know the ranks, can iron their uniform and polish their shoes after 4 years… non-cadet recruits catch them up in week 2 of Basic training.
Just how much value are we adding ??
Open book to their notes (hence the Leading Notebooks, and the Senior ones starting to come out) and it’s down to the Sqns to manage. For us we don’t allow academics (studying or exams) at home, studying we may allow in exceptional circumstances but it’s a Sqn thing to do and it makes sure we prevent them rushing through the classification, and actually learning it not just doing it to pass the exam
Software developers, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, engineers, architects, etc are all using search engines, forums, manuals, guides, and information repositories.
I spend a not insignificant amount of time on the Autodesk forums working out solutions for work. Learning how to find answers is more important than learning how to cram information for an exam.
Except that being open book means you lost accreditation for the BTECs, because a key part of demonstrating theoretical knowledge is proving it’s in your head.
But they are working on re-acredidating the BTEC and other that can come in all forms, a lot of BTECs don’t have any exams and is coursework based. I wouldn’t be too suprised if we go towards that way, submitting workbooks for each subject/level and not having any exams.
