New Programme Pilot Training with aeroplanes!

Yesterday I was down in Bristol & South Glos for their County Day on the new programme. I was doing UMA's, Skill Builders & Awards in the morning and Change Management for the new programme in the afternoon. As usual leaders from this county are on the ball and familiar with the basics of guiding. We started in the main auditorium for the overview new programme training which was cleverly done with a stand up if …. activity. I was amazed that such a huge proportion of those present had been leading for more than 10 years. The new programme bingo was an effective interactive method to present so much information but shame so many people called "bingo" at the same time!

We started earlier than I was expecting and it was a push to finish as there were so many questions, many I couldn't answer, which is never a good position to be in. Leaders were struggling to get to grips with the logistics of how the new programme will work. It would have been so much easier if I could have shown them a Skills Builder, or even just had a statement relating to how much time an average skill builder will take for brownies. Also the skill levels really need a different numbering system to the activities in the skills builders; and next time I will start off with a statement stating these are different things. We also need more detail about the recording tool as time was wasted in conjecture. I spent a lot of time scrolling backwards and forwards between the powerpoint slides describing the requirements.
 
Top constraints on the aeroplanes were in first place the cost which featured on 11 of the 16 planes. Second was lack of leaders/adults to run different activities at the same time and third was recording of both individual brownie progress and when anniversary badges are due to be awarded. We did discuss solutions and I think there will be some illegal copying occurring! They also liked my porridge pot idea of saving badges up and having a termly award ceremony to invite parents and raise the girls anticipation in order to celebrate achievements. There was one new issue that trainers had raised at the earlier pilot, which was the number of risk assessments required in a term in order to complete all the UMA's and skills builders which I had never thought of.

A few leaders are planning to start in January 2019 due to concerns that the availability of the new programme resources will be scarce because the demand will be so great on July 21st.

Additional resources I used included the Volunteer code of conduct, Participation on a plate, Girls Attitude Survey and I plugged the Region Swebots resource by showing the intermediate & advanced instructions for making a paper plane.

It was a pain having to move classrooms at lunch time but I had help to put the furniture back. I brought my own lap top but used my USB on their network which was fine but then I have to virus check the USB every time which is a nuisance.