Ringing Forums

Philip Gorrod (RW p1188/16Dec2022) proposes a new strategy for retaining new recruits including:

Get them to pay money! (up front) … the first two sessions [are] free and without obligation, after that I will require payment of a sum of money: currently ... £100...We should … be more selective and weed out those unlikely to make the grade at an early stage, and use the time saved to bring on the ones we keep.

This is just one of a good collection of issues in the article and here are a few of my thoughts that it provoked.

Aptitude ... An experienced teacher can usually tell within the first five minutes if [their new learner] is going to struggle, or if they are a complete natural.

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Yes, quite so. Personally, as in my Forum biography, I learned to handle a bell in a single two-hour session. Of the hundred or more learners whom I have taught over these fifty years, one stands out as My Magic Learner who was also competent after a single evening, and continued to ring for about thirty years. That was a good return-on-investment in the terms Philip describes.

The others are somewhere between My Magic Learner and those who have taken a year to learn to handle their bell, then given up because it is all to hard. I always make a prediction after a first learning session, and share it with the learner to help explain what it is they are letting themselves in for.

As a tutor, I do bell-handling not out of duty-to-Ringing, or habit, but because it is my all-time-favourite ringing activity. I am always tweaking my standard script and exercises to the individual progress, strengths and weaknesses of each learner, and aim that each tweak becomes an addition to the toolkit that will help the-next-time.

The Hundred Pounds
When I learned to ring, and uprating for the inflation over the last fifty-odd years, I had, in the world, £2,240 and an application for funding for another year at University but no agreement thereto, ten weeks paid accommodation, needing to arrange somewhere new after that, no job, an application for Supplementary Benefit, which was then limited to twelve weeks for single men, after which there was nothing. Spending £100 in advance of the Grant-application decision would have been foolhardy for a potential new pastime with no possible economic benefit, however much I wanted to impress … (let’s not go there).

More relevant to Philip’s charges is the current economic activity and deprivation indexes from the Office of National Statistics in East Sussex which shows the area has 19 smaller neighbourhoods within the 20% most income-deprived neighbourhoods in England.

There is a fair chance of the new learner, in these runaway-inflationary times, having to choose between heating, meals and ringing, and maybe wishing not to admit to their colleagues in the choir that they have had to make the choice.

The money does not get added to [Philp’s personal funds, who doesn’t] need or want £100 for teaching people to ring

and that may make it even harder for those struggling to find the money. That includes families of teenagers, who are the best prospects as long-term ringers, but also have the additional possible calls on time enthusiasm and money from sports equipment, musical instruments, clothes, phones, computers, catch-up-tutoring: and these expensive teenagers can only assess the competing demands when they have had-a-good-go, and maybe only then if they find some mutually-compatible teenager doing the same activities.

For me, it is one of the delights of ringing that it is outside the normal constraints of real-life-money and affordability: it’s all about skill and enthusiasm and not what you can buy-to-help. As a tutor, I want them to enjoy the experience enough to bring along the whole family to become addicted, however much extra teaching that needs: that’s just how ringing works. ...