Sure, but how many spots are actually available? The things everybody else is mentioning don’t happen, and you can’t place the blame on the ATC just because you’re in a fit of nostalgia.
Moaning about what we used to have or do is pointless and a complete waste of time.
Coming here and saying “oh, we used to have so much more fun” is a meaningless statement, especially so when it can’t be in any way proven. If the cadets we have now didn’t have fun and didn’t enjoy it, they wouldn’t be here. And we’ve got 40-odd thousand, so we’re not exactly doing badly.
Could we be better? Sure. But that happens by looking forwards, not backwards.
I’m not sure that’s the best way of looking at things. I know a lot of cadets between 17-19 who don’t really enjoy it and just stay for things like IACE and ACPS. Admittedly, the reasons they don’t enjoy it vary and aren’t always the organisation’s fault. The enjoyment someone gets from the organisation can vary largely depending what unit they are on. In my eyes we have two separate elements to the ATC - parade nights and weekend/week long activities. Someone could really enjoy one but not the other and stay solely for that reason, and that can be a lot of non-enjoyment. Also bear in mind a fair chunk of CCF(RAF) are made to participate. It’s much more complex than saying “if they didn’t enjoy it they’d leave”.
However, I do agree that we have to look forward and make the best of what we’ve got.
True - most of this is not directly the ATCs own fault:
Reduction in RAF size - less opportunities
Child Protection legislation - cadets supervised by DBS staff - no more dumping cadets to work on sections etc
H&S legislation - we used to use common sense but now everything has to be approved/auditable - are we really any safer than before? Would need to see the stats on that
Societal changes - having to bubble wrap cadets when in the past parents were happy for them to have adventure - kids fell off bikes and out of trees all the time then - now they just suffer RSI from the XBox
Tell them what we used to do and they all say ‘Can we do that?’ to which the answer is if i tried I wouuld not be here very long…
So, Let’s compare something that we are fully in control of. What about DofE?
In the last 10 years, the number of DofE awards has dwindled in my wing. My local secondary school manages to get more pupils through the award than my wing does. How has that happened?
When was a cadet, pretty much everyone in my squadron would get a Bronze award, most NCOs would have Silver, and anyone over 18 would have a Gold award. Somewhere, we have lost our way.
Sounds like a local issue. My unit has tripled it’s DofE output over the last few years, we get more than almost the entire rest of the Wing put together.
That’s not to say it’s perfect. There are hurdles to jump through, and we have different standards to schools - I know some in our area just walk the kids through their expeds, barely assess them, and make them pay colossal amounts for the privilege.
It is entirely unit/sector dependant…look at 7OS they are on par with a production line when it comes to D of E and they are literally in silo by themselves with zero help from wing in that field apart from processing awards.
i am not saying i want to do away with H&S, i recognise it has it place, but it has driven me away from shooting.
in my 20+ years in the organisation i have never heard of a Cadet or CFAV (or even a regular) getting shot whilst on either 25m barrack range or 600m open range. yet the constant flip flop of what paperwork was required, the requirement that X was put in place weeks prior to the event, and A, B and C has to be aligned became a frustration as i feel no safer for it - what annoys me is the changes in shooting over the last 20 years are not in reaction to things that have gone wrong and need addressing (ie learning by others mistakes to stop them happening again) they are simply changes for changes sake - and accept in the most part these were changes made by the MOD/Army and for the regulars were just part of the course, but in the world of the CFAV a nuisance.
i am sure there are other examples in other activities we do. I am not saying we dont need suitable Risk Assessments (what we need more importantly is to apply these RAs) but additional or changing paperwork/admin processes which have no benefit…?? that has increased imo
I agree with you in the most part @steve679. I think the problem is we have had drift from genuine ALARP principles to people thinking that means “no risk at all”, which is why we had people banning the use of bungee cords in field craft. The likelihood of injury is pretty small, but obviously you could get hurt if you mess around with them. The logical control is not to remove something like that altogether, it has to be to use them in a more controlled way - maybe by teaching correct use and explaining hazards and risks.
It is the same with lots of things. The risk of your boiler exploding is pretty small, but the harm is high. It isn’t proportional to therefore say we will never use a boiler again, but would be to have regular maintenance and accept that there is a very small possibility things might go wrong inbetween.
At some point along the way lots of people in influential places have lost perspective of proportionality and the idea that being alive carries certain risks. Some of those are important for us to develop as humans and some aren’t, and we need to be able to learn which is which and bring those that are clearly little benefit with maximum harm back down to reasonable levels.
absolutely agree and the phrase ALARP hits the nail on the head of the issue.
there used to be a time when you could decide to open the range and give 2, 4 or even 6 Cadets a chance to shoot (depending on the level of training you wanted to go to) on a parade night on that same night
likewise for a day walk could be agreed with a week’s notice as the DofE group needed more practical map reading skills.
it doesn’t matter if it is a full bore shooting competition, or “have a go with an air rifle” or a days walk in the local woods or a expedition through the lake district - the smallest, formally easy tasks are now treated as seriously as those at the other end of the scale (certainly in terms of the admin prep) with no appreciation for the limited risk or potential as pEp has so elegantly highlighted
I don’t think this is true. The admin is absolutely scaleable - the admin for a week long multi activity camp is always going to be significantly greater than an evening at a crag. That doesn’t necessarily mean you can do no planning however - there still needs to be some!
And if you can’t get an evening’s activity such as some basic map reading through in a week, there’s something wrong.
and this comes from Wings/WSO’s doing things their own way. I’ve been in Wings that you could easily phone the WATTO and ask him to take a look at a Bader SMS for a day walk at the weekend as the weather was looking good and the DofE Team needed to top up Nav Training and it would be signed off that night, happy days. I’ve also been in Wings that unless you give at least 4 weeks notice of an AT event it wouldn’t even be considered and you’d get a snotty email in return for daring to ask at ‘short notice’.
yes i accept the admin for a longer event is more than a 8 hour day walking event
however an walk in the local area starting from and ending at the Squadron HQ held on a parade evening, situated in the Home Counties is treated as equally risky as a day walk in the Lake District, in that a RA needs to be completed, admin order explaining the reasons and justification for the event, plus the controls in place and then submitted with sufficient time so that the OC and then WATTO can check it over, and then approve the event.
likewise and evening of air rifle shooting with two cadets requires the same forms, and planning sheets (from the RCO point of view at least) as a full day’s shooting at 600m, again with the appropriate notices given to the Wing Shooting Officer
the only difference between the two is the level of qualification held - although in the case of the RCO it is the same initial qualification as RCO with the bolted on LR (whereas ML is a much more indepth and separate qual in comparison to BEL), Both require the same paperwork tick boxes on an SMS application, in the AT example despite holding a NGB.
as identified by @emz there is also (i suspect local) ruling on the notice period prior to events.
gone is the chance to be spontaneous about the training we offer, and by spontaneous i don’t mean changing the plan on the night, but as far in advance as two weeks or even a month in advance.
Certainly our Wing Shooting officer requests Shooting applications to be “complete” for his appraisal no less than two weeks in advance and even then is known to use the full period of time to consider the event.
One of the reasons we did more in the old days was the lack of admin for the sake of admin on a parade night or for a day walk People have mentioned going to the range on a parade night on spec… Even longer AT or activities could be block booked for locations, so you’d just contact the campsite, pull out some maps and go if the weather looked good. Just because we did it this way didn’t mean it wasn’t planned or wasn’t safe. It was a supremely flexible way of working.
We live in a climate of control for the sake of control.
I do wonder if anyone has ever done a time study on how much time an OC who is effective in their role spends doing admin. I often think some of our staffing issues are likely down to losing staff to admin on a parade night.
When I was first an OC I could happily teach lessons still or supervise a project if needed as realistically there wasn’t that much admin that needed to be done every parade night. Now I get the feeling that unless you are doing admin outside of the core hours you would be sat at the desk constantly, hence the unit loses that member of staff.
Why would you not need / want to risk assess an activity? You mean to tell me to couldn’t pull out a risk assessment that needs only a basic few changes to make it relevant to the event?
And an admin order for that kind of thing is a one - pager at most to describe the basic arrangements. A 5 min task at most, even less if it’s a repeat of a previous event where you can change an existing doc.