Then they deserve to be tarred and feathered
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Surely there is more important things to worry about, like activities, rather than kids in uniforms that donât fit them properly.
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What like a lack of Flying & Gliding?
Blasphemer!!!
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Well, while we are waiting to fix that we can put a little focus on things that are easier to fix.
Or we coulld just ignore the serious issues, bask in our CBE and pretend we have nothing important to worry about?
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We could stop chasing after RAF100 gigs and focus on our own priorities too.
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What is this RAF100 you speak of? It couldnât possibly apply to me as Iâm not in the RAF.
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Sadly I donât do Direct Access. I prefer to keep the crazies at arms length. 
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It might not be but having an illness or disability because of it is
Or option C - become a CI.
Since resigning, I get in from work and by and large go to cadets in what I wear to work. I go to events and donât get some over zealous type with delusions of grandeur, telling me I should do this and that. Pus I can eat all the pies I like 
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There is a more serious side to this.
Letâs assume that say 10% of uniformed staff fall into this criteria and are treated in such a way that they think âbetter things to do than thisâ, does CAC have that number of people sitting there ready to go and fill the spaces on squadrons and wings? In our Wing and I imagine the same across the country have only one uniformed member of staff, could we potentially loose them? On our squadron our staffing is critical me and another of the CIs would not pass muster against a size criteria, if either of us (given we are the only ones who regularly attend 2 nights a week and drag cadets around) were made to feel we should leave as we didnât fit some âAyranesqueâ ideal, the squadron would suffer massively.
No staff = no squadron = no need for people at HQAC.
In our area there are people involved in youth groups who are big and make the chap who was in that photo, look positively svelte. But they are not treated like lepers, a couple I know of run youth football teams that are the most successful in the area and apparently have parents crawling over themselves to get their kids in. They have had several taken onto youth squads of professional teams.
I wonder how many staff in the Corps do other things on a voluntary basis and IIRC CAC was involved with RAF Families which would have relied massively on volunteers. Persuading people to volunteer in any capacity is and always has been bloody hard work and then keeping them involved if you make too many demands or place criteria on them, as we see in the ATC, is even more difficult.
Well lets see what happens with this.Strange isnt it that whilst CAC has pushed us even further away from the RAF she still wants to enforce our role as the public face of the RAF.I personally have no problems with uniform standards but I well remember when I was first appointed as a WO and the then WCO stated he expected all his WOs to be well turned out especially on formal parades.I agreed and then naively said âwhere do i go to get my no.1 fittedâ.Oh he said you dont get one issued you have to scrounge or âacquireâ one. It took me many years to acquire the one I have now.
There does of late however appear to be an agenda to really hack off staff.First we had the commissioning shambles then the rebranding and the vile new rank slides and even worse the new pins which I received the other day.Then the insulting volunteers agreement.I always thought an agreement was something two parties discussed not this though its all diktat.
Im just getting into the run of another year running a sqn with all its fun and happy moments.This year though its different Im just not getting the buzz anymore.Oh yes the cadets are great kids and they make me smile and im proud of each and everyone of them. I am though finding it harder and harder to reconcile that with the quite awful way we as uniformed volunteers are being treat at present.
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Disgrace.
Aye. Use your own hard earned cash, which already covers personal bills, utilities and for your family not only petrol to the sqn and now they are expecting you to pick up the tab for their agenda?
What a crock of absolute, undiluted, bureaucratic turd. You want smart and military, you provide the kit.
Just become CIs. That will get the picture across. Tell them to poke it and just have CIs.
Sure, so long as you a CI that is actually worth the admin and delivers regularly for the cadets. The presence or absence of uniform is a very small factor in most of what we do.
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itâs always been like this. I would go to the sqn many a time out of uniform where Iâd got in from work late, or had something to do with the kids like parentâs evenings and it was easier to go as I was and it never affected what I was able to do. Which is why it makes a mystery of why HQAC so much of thing of it. Maybe, just maybe if uniformed HQAC staff had practical, first hand experience of what itâs like being volunteer staff in the ATC, they might actually be worth their salt and treat volunteers with respect for what they do.
Iâve never really understood why, aside from the admin types, we need these people at HQAC in the first place. Theyâve never seemed to do anything vaguely useful.
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The letter isnât saying we have to wear uniform every parade night, itâs just saying that if we do, it should fit, and be in a decent condition. It even acknowledges all of the things people have raised on here: the supply line is rubbish, No1s are prohibitively expensive etc.
This of itself is hardly controversial. Whatâs more sad in my experience is that this letter needs to exist at all. I will not dare stand in front of my cadets in uniform unless I can guarantee the standard is acceptable. I have, when running too late from work, gone in in smart civvies, rather than wear poor uniform.
As I said at the top. This letter is not new. (Heck, I bet if someone dug out a copy of the original version weâd see it hasnât changed at all.) Whatâs interesting to see is the way the backlash has changed.
Which I think demonstrates very clearly the damage that has been done to morale. Commandant Air Cadets is now seen by many as the enemy due to the ongoing debacle that is pretty much everything that has happened on her watch and this is just a sympton of that.
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There are times when you do think why bother.
As uniformed adults in the ATC we are in the same world as cadets.
In any other role CAC would be on borrowed time. Just as well theyâre not accountable to the general population of the ATC.
Speaking to WWOs etc is one of times when you can lose the will to live as commonsense doesnât exist in their bubble and some of the things they get excited about would evade the worst sufferers of OCD combined with Tourettes.
i too am surprised at the âpersonal attackâ that people seem to feel in comments above.
CAC is not commenting on the size (large or small) of CFAVs and asking/suggesting that they âsort their â â â â outâ and âfall into lineâ with the expectation of size - only that if you wear clothes have the common decency to wear some that fit.
No2 uniform is a suit; polished shoes, ironed trousers/skirt, a belt and a crisp ironed shirt (And in some cases a tie too) - no different to what many CFAVs wear to their employed work nor is it different to what the PM wears. weâd be embarrassed if the PM turned out in a suit which clearly didnât fit, I dare say the same for a fellow colleague at workâŚ
âŚnone of us would choose to attend work in the same state at that photos, so why does it make it acceptable to do it in the RAFAC???
(yes i acknowledge the challenges in getting uniform versus going to Next or M&S and buying a suitâŚbut that doesnât forgive the wearer for looking like a bag of poo)
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The problem is how much do you continue to kick people when morale as Daws said and we all recognise is down, before it starts to unravel. If the ATC was a workplace I feel certain by now there would have been some degree of action, work to rule or even strike and the senior management would have been on dodgy ground.
Personally from a lead perspective CAC is in a glass house and seems to love throwing stones and seems, as the re-launch of this indicates, picking on simple things that she probably feels she can do, rather than spending the 2 days (cumulative) she must work each week, getting into the difficult things. I think if she was PM, weâd have binned leaving the EU long before now.