Ringing Forums

ah I understand now

There are quite a few territorial associations which are taking a long hard look at their purpose or structure. Carlisle DG has had a major reststructuring and others are thinking about it or doing it as well. The St Martin's Guild did it a while ago and no longer has the 'traditional' form of ringing meeting described above.

Do you think there should be national SG training specifically for ringers, transferrable between a towers? — John de Overa

Yes

Would that be led by the CofE or the CCCBR? — John de Overa

We are trying to steer them towards accepting that we lead on it, or at least have a major role in designing the course, maybe working with one of their trusted safeguarding audit partners like Thirtyone:eight

I was about to post this on the thread about contact with church authorities but it is more relevant to this discussion, because it is about the appointment of Tower Captains by incumbents and PCCs, and the quesiton of Leadership safeguarding training.

Imagine the scenario where someone comes along to a tower or towers which do not have many or any ringers, offers to teach a few including youngsters, is charismatic and credible, does not go through any formal appointment process or check because for the incumbent and PCC there isn't really a way of doing it (and they've been duped anyway), and establishes a base, even under the nose of the local association who can do nothing about it.

For the formal approval process for a tower captain to work, it would actually need the incumbent/PCC to go to the local association and say "is this a fit and proper person to be our tower captain", because the association would almost certainly know. But how many associations would be prepared to make such a ruling?

Doing the Leadership training would probably not prevent the individual from establishing their base, although refusal to do it would be a red flag. Having all ringers do Basic Awareness training however could alert more ringers to such an issue, especially if that Basic Awareness training was specifically tailored to understand the ringing environment.

I think that is pretty much 'ringing's' position on this. If you had been in the same 1h 40m conference call with two Diocesan Safeguarding Advisers that I was on on Friday, you would see ringing from a different point of view and you would have thrown your hands up in despair. And that was 1h 40m almost entirely caused by the antics on one individual who could ruin ringing for everyone. We are working on it though and there was a very bright light at the end of the tunnel of that call which could be very helpful to us.

Thanks - I am glad it is enjoyed

To put this into perspective, I think it probably takes about 6 hours to write this, on and off, including the final polishing on Sunday evening/Monday morning before getting it to Will for Friday's RW. He knows it is coming so is lenient on my deadline. Sometimes late on a Monday night I will get a "is there a blog coming" nervous email! There is a slight different print version to web version. I write aout 1050 words and then spend a lot of time editing it down to exactly 1000.

Then I put the web version onto the CC website myself using the content management system, find a picture to upload, creating each link, making sure they open in new windows. When it is previewed and tested I put it live. Then I post it to the Forums and send to email lists. This is not done by a workgroup or secretary - it is just me. Now I add a summary so that some people can decide whether to read it or not.

So yes I could not look at adding descriptions on the links, or I could put in fewer links!

Michael Church said to be about a year ago "you've created a rod for your own back with this blog". Maybe so, however it does seem to be a useful way of conveying information.

As I am going to say in my next blog which will be published shortly, I met someone last week who, along with her husband has been helping out running the Sunday School at her church, basically because her child goes there and she doesn't want to have to go to the service! She and her husband asked to do Leadership training and offered a course that takes four days in all, so they said they wouldn't do it. Now they cannot take the Sunday School without having another observer present and the liklihood is they will stop doing it.

I don't say all that detail in my blog because it's in the public domain, but she was telling me this as part of a discussion on how the church is having this problem with all sorts of different volunteer groups and there would have to be a reassessment of expectations of the volunteer community is going to withdraw. She works for an organisation connected with the Church so has keen interest.

The Winchester Diocese has introduced a three hour Zoom course that is specifically aimed at people like bellringers who are not churchgoers, but who need something a bit above Basic and Foundation training. This seems like a very good way to go.

I know enough about legal contracts never to offer 'best' endeavours for anything! Sometimes I might agree to 'all reasonable'.

Not much in here to disagree with but coming back on a couple of points. On the last one, one thing we sought to do was demonstrate statistically that ringing has proportionately far fewer safeguarding cases than the clergy themselves! It is almost certainly true but the statistics were complicated and uncertain so we didn't make the point lest it got picked apart. We made a general point rather than trying to prove it.

I wouldn't say their model is 'broken' necessarily, it's just that the model they are comfortable with for other church activities, where an activity is led by a leader, people are known, and most are local to the church and Diocese, doesn't work for us. We will talk to the RSCM because there will be parallels there, and other groups that use churches other than for worship.

We just nearly had the issue when organising some open days for the Jubilee for the Churches Conservation Trust. Their safeguardig person asked who the CC safeguarding lead was for the events and we said ringers were just volunteers working locally. It had potential to get quite complicated because we have to be volunteers in order to be covered by the church's public liability insurance.

On whether they liked the booklet, it is well written and well produced. Ringers and some clergy who have seen it think it is excellent. It was the content they didn't like and particularly our flowchart that explained who needed to do what sort of training. This was one response from a DSO:

"Sorry if this sounds over critical – I appreciate that what you have set out in your pamphlet is reflecting the NST advice – but when I am of the view that advice / change of direction is wrong – and state here why I think this is wrong – and when as a diocese we are of the view that all Tower Captains should be required to do the leadership training it creates a problem with ringers who for one reason or another object to safeguarding or being told what they need to do."

You won't be surprised to know that the CC Safeguarding Officers (and some Trustees) are doing a lot of work in this and have been for about a year. Part of the problem is that the responsibility for implementing the safeguarding regime has been delegated down to Dioceses which are then not consistent with each other. This has been well demonstrated by the different approaches taken by Dioceses over the need for different levels of safeguarding training by Tower Captains. The CofE's safeguarding lead was persuaded that all tower captains did not need to do Leadership and this has become the policy, however some Dioceses published more stringent requirements before this was agreed. Instances are now arising of PCCs saying that visiting ringers need to show Safeguarding training certificates.

What is also difficult, as identified in this thread, is the concept of 'visiting ringers'. This has been quite hard for DSOs to grasp. We have written a booklet to explain the special nature of ringing to Dioceses which we hope will help DSOs and individual PCCs to understand how ringing 'works'. This booklet is currently being discussed with a small selection of DSOs, however despite the booklet having been reviewed by ringers and the Clerical Guild and considered to be excellent, the DSOs who have reviewed it didn't like it at all!

The question of visiting ringers is particularly difficult because the church cannot fit visiting ringers into their model of bellringers as church volunteers. However getting ringers out of the 'volunteer' model then has implications for insurance, health and safety and a whole host of other things. We are intending to contact some other groups who might be similar and see if they are treated differently.

The bad experiences of a small number of DSOs who have been exposed to the more dififcult cases involving bellringers have not made this any easier.

That's a very good point, reflecting a change in the Church to which we are adapting. When 'clusters' or ringers who join forces to ring at different towers in a benefice for instance is discussed, the problems seems to be persuading ringers to go and ring at the tower which has the service in that particular week, as opposed to having a week off when the service is elsewhere!

At one of my local towers, Edgbaston, the vicar is not particularly bothered if the bells ring for a service or not. He knows they don't have much effect on attendance. But he knows that whenever the bells ring people in their gardens are reminded the church is there and often remark to him how much they like to hear them.

I haven't seen that report. However it I were to guess what the statistics that I quote in my blog were in 1914 compared with 1988 they woud be as follows:

1988 - 87% of tower captains were male
1914 - none

1988 - 58/42 male female split
1914 - tricky one. I am going 90/10

1988 - 62% of tower rang on the average Sunday
1914 - 85%

1988 - 41,000 bellringers
1914 - far few towers. About the same?
I've no idea really how many ringers per tower there were.

1988 - 25% of Tower Captains under 40
1914 - 50%

1988 - 49% of ringers generally under 40
1914 - 60%

I have the full 100 pages in a couple of pdfs, which I will send to you. It contains all those Ringing World articles.

Nearer 20p than 25p per year

On a related note, whereas in the past Central Council committees might have met face to face on a regular basis, with travel expenses being a significant part of committee budgets, since I have been President I think there has only been one. There doesn't seem to be a lot to be gained from dragging people around the country to meet face to face compared with the benefit to individuals of retaining more of their personal time. So we are saving money and enabling volunteers to be more efficient.

Yesterday though I went from Birmingham to Wells on CC business (an eight hour round trip), and was able to calculate the marginal cost of getting there and back compared with the CC expenses policy. I made a small loss.

The possibility of a survey was discussed on another thread a month or so ago. Needs serious consideration and it is going to get picked up in some current CC discussions.

On overall numbers, a proposal is being put to the CC meeting in September to move CC affiliation fees to being based on the number of members rather than the number of Reps. Under the current Rules associations have justified their number of Representatives based on declared membership numbers, and whilst it's very unlikely that numbers are exaggerated just to get an extra Rep, there has been no motivation either to be absolutely certain the number is right. Moving to a model which has a direct link between number of members and cost (albeit not a particularly high cost) is likely to lead to much tighter scrutiny by societies of how many members they actually have.

The total number of members declared by societies for the purposes of numbers of CC Reps is about 35,000. There will be a little duplication of course, but not that much.

Thanks I'll sort

If we tried to do a print version of this, how would you deal with the links to video content? Would you still point the reader to video content so they can watch, maybe with a specific accompanying website, or would the book have to function entirely as offline content? You'll appreciate having read it now that it benefits from this video content, but there is probably still valuable content without it.

I visited a tower last night and they were comparing wedding money in the pub. I reported £20 as being fairly standard but this was more than they were charging.

The more interesting discussion point however was how long to ring for. The ring for 15 minutes afterwards based on what they think the attendees expect/value - ringing as the couple emerge from the church, accompaniment as all other guests emerge, some ringing while they are milling around in churchyard, but then no need to accompany all of the photo taking with bells. The effect has worn off by then.

They also said how one of their relatives had thought that change ringing was when the bells had gone wrong, and that only rounds was 'right'. That was an interesting one!

good point, hence how with closed handstroke lead ringing you need to push the handstrokes so positively to keep the backstrokes up and stop the ringing accelerating away.

We have a winner.