After what you have pm’d me, I totally understand how you feel. Had a girlfriend who was a social work student some 20 years ago, what a load of bovine effluent they were fed, biased and well awful.
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i’ve had the same response.
two schools in the town and we couldn’t visit the one because of the Headteachers view.
It meant we were reliant on the Cadets spreading the word via their friends network which worked but was never as effective.
of course that was also the school which always said “no” to any time off school for camps or even using
This seems to be drifting somewhat into recruiting. Can we stick to training goals for the year?
Best training officer I came across was a taxi driver, ran an amazing programme, intelligent as hell. What we only later found out he had a very high security clearance as an RAF Thor missile technician.
Yes - I think that a successful squadron will produce large numbers, but you can’t try and make it work the other way around.
The workbook sounds good, would it be possible to share?
This idea was suggested at our 2nd or 3rd sector meeting and got a thumbs down from 5 of the 6 OCs. Our concerns were around having staff and cadets doing more than two nights a week as you would need all staff and cadets in the same place and the impact. Along with this cadets getting to the designated squadron given in our sector squadrons are between 30 and 55 minute drives from us and similar or further. The suggestion was then weekends and given we all do our things on weekends that wouldn’t work.
The one who said yes is a yes man of the first order and couldn’t understand what we were saying. Mind you he’s divorced and no kids at home and the ATC is his life.
So you turn kids away in February?..amazing
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I think I’ve said somewhere that we intake at the start of the year, allow drip feeding thereafter, and don’t push people back until the start of summer.
Works for us as a best of both worlds as we don’t enough resources over the summer or enough cadets to turn too many away too early. Our next step if we can get there would be an additional spring intake.
I turn kids away for 10 months of the year. And in the 2 months where we do take Cadets it’s only for a fortnight at a time.we are still at a place where we have had to scale back recruiting as we are out of space.
I think you have to go for the intake system and run with it or just take them as they turn up.
We do two a year and take kids in for 6 weeks after. After that we take a parents email address, they are told the date of the next intake, given some comics and lit. We email them 2-3 weeks beforehand.
If they come fine if they don’t fine.
The ones who you lose are those 2 or 3 years too young who are moving from Cubs to Scouts, as they do Scouts as we can’t take them until they are in Yr8 whch for a 10 year old is a light year away.
Absolutely.
For the 7 years or so I ran that particular unit, we’d have consistent intakes of between 10-20 cadets twice per year, depending on the amount of effort we put in in the run up to the date.
It had significant benefits in terms of streamlining the training programme, team cohesion, management of the recruitment process… blah blah.
Drip feed is crazy in my opinon.
I wholly agree but my OC does not see it that way unfortunately.
Managed to convince him to go to mini-intakes on a monthly basis which has improved things slightly but is still not ideal.
I love crazy 
But you still have cadets at different stages which makes the TP difficult.
As @redowling intakes make things so much better and less stressful.
Our problem is popular successful schools with kids from all over the borough and neighbouring boroughs, as I have found out on intakes where the parents ask is there a squadron closer to us and there invariably is, so we seem to recruit for other people. I might start charging a finders fee.
I’m the Training Officer, I know that it makes my life more difficult 