Ringing Forums

Here is a thought experiment, based on a recent invitation from a local tower for Elaine and I to join them to ring for a wedding. It was a half-hour drive each way, with twenty-minutes ringing each side of a half-hour ceremony. It was a pleasure to help-out; we enjoyed the ringing, and they kindly gave us fifty pounds...

By way of background, we have led groups seeking to improve their practical ringing at residential (and other) courses, we teach bell-handling as a favourite ringing activity, and also teaching-teachers to teach bell-handling; we do remedial style-clinics; we do lectures in ringing-theory and method learning, and there's ten years' experience of tower-captaincy (as well as the secretarial role, managing a successful rehanging project, teaching handbells and how they can help method-learning in tower) ...

With that collective CV we could apply to tutor ...

A Course in Band Development for (a hypothetical) struggling local band, which will benefit on successful completion with ...

• two or more competent teachers of bell-handling
• a collective commitment to one another and to lifelong (ringing) learning
• structured and predictable future practices ...
• ... aimed at continuing-improvement of Sunday ringing perfrormances
• ...

which would run for a term of ten weeks, two hours per session instead of the normal practice, with ten band members and two tutors, at a average cost-per-student of £10 per session (£1,000 in total).

To meet the wide ambition of Ringing2030, the CCCBR could project-manage the course design and aim for a hundred courses per Autumn-term for each of the three years leading to 2030. That would be worth paying an new employed project-manager to do ...

Discuss :-)

I think this is when it gets really hard because many ringers are already close to providing this service, simply by attending a weekly practice at an ‘extra’ tower where they bring the strength (and sometimes the structure) to enable that band to develop and practice in a way that would otherwise be impossible.
If this becomes a ‘course’ and people get paid for it (and the ringers pay £10 per week to attend) it changes the dynamic of the practice and might make others question why they are offering a very similar service for ‘free’ (or even donating £1 each week to the tower fund for giving their time and skills).
Many ringers would then have to decide that they couldn’t afford to join in, £10 a week is still quite a lot for many, unless the church or association were part funding it.
Ten weeks later the band are back to being on their own again and with a funding model like this it’s harder to ‘invite’ more experienced ringers to come along whenever they can because there is now an in built expectation that their support costs £50 a practice night.
I can see the intention, I can see that this could help some bands a lot but I also think that many people are offering very close to this service for free and people might pull away from offering their support for free if they see others earning cash in hand wedding style money for the same support.
Providing the structure of the course would be very useful, although as likely to be from ART as the CCCBR, but getting into paying people to provide the teaching vs volunteers providing their support at local practices could become difficult on a national / international scale.

To meet the wide ambition of Ringing2030, the CCCBR could project-manage the course design and aim for a hundred courses per Autumn-term for each of the three years leading to 2030. That would be worth paying an new employed project-manager to do .. — PeterScott

Oh no, more deja-vu. ART have already designed various teacher training courses. This includes producing modern accompanying textbooks and on-line material to help new teachers learn to teach well, and to help their students to learn to ring. ART employs three part time staff to deliver its modules and coordinate its volunteers at a national level, and there are over 40 ART teaching hubs across the UK and overseas teaching ringers, plus many hundreds of individual teachers using the Learning the Ropes scheme. The Mancroft and Cambridge Hubs each also employ a part time member of staff. ART is also delivering around 60 of its teacher training courses each year, attended by over 450 delegates. Therefore I don't see why we should not build on this success, rather than start afresh. It's all self financing too!

The elephant in the room is that there are some out there who are resistant to change, or are unaware of what has been achieved elsewhere, and this is slowing down progress. We have been aware of the current issues facing the exercise for well over three decades. We know what the solutions are, such as group teaching and paid tuition, as they have been discussed many times before, but we keep going round in circles. Just look at the Ringing Centres Committee (1992) Founders Grants and Founders Awards scheme (1994) Education Committee's proposed Instructors Guild (1997) Ringing Trends working group (2000) Network for Ringing Training (2001) Ringing Trends Committee (2004) Ringing Foundation (2007) ITTS and ART (2009) Wellesbourne Conference (2011) Change Ringing for the Future and Regional Forums (2012) CRAG (2016). Ringing 2030 needs to overcome this inertia in order to move forward, and do this in sufficient time so that fewer bands fall below critical mass.

If this becomes a ‘course’ and people get paid for it (and the ringers pay £10 per week to attend) it changes the dynamic of the practice and might make others question why they are offering a very similar service for ‘free’ — Lucy Chandhial

I think courses need to have a syllabus, to be for a fixed period and run completely separate to normal practices, then there won't be an issue.

Oh no, more deja-vu. ART have already designed various teacher training courses. This includes producing modern accompanying textbooks and on-line material to help new teachers learn to teach well, and to help their students to learn to ring. — Roger Booth

They have and very successfully too, but I think there's a gap above the current L5 that needs to be addressed.

Ringing 2030 needs to overcome this inertia in order to move forward, and do this in sufficient time so that fewer bands fall below critical mass. — Roger Booth

Things do seem to move incredibly slowly, and time is running out, as you say.

What is th effect of charging for weekly practices? In the past some have argued that we mustn't charge for tuition or the weekly practice night for fear it deters new blood; others have said that many people don't appreciate things that are free.
On the other hand virtually every other voluntary group makes a charge, be it the meal at a Rotary Club or a weekly subscription for Scouts, Guides, WI or a local history society. Would a weekly subscription strengthen our ranks?

In the past some have argued that we mustn't charge for tuition or the weekly practice night for fear it deters new blood; — Peter Sotheran

We charge to teach new ringers. So far, we have not had any problems. The fee goes into the tower fund. The learner gets 10 1:1 one-hour lessons plus a free first lesson to visit the bells, handle a rope, chime a bell etc and make sure they want to learn. They come to normal practices immediately.
We've had four recruits in the last 18 months. Nothing is free, let alone the use of specialist equipment such as church bells. In return they get taught by accredited ART techers (if that's relevant) and join the LTR scheme. (People love certificates). Important Note: we don't make a charge to raise money, but to add value to our offering. That is the key thing - adding value.

I think asking ringers to make a donation as part of a weekly practice, towards the future maintenance of the bells or tea and biscuits, etc is fairly normal and generally very inexpensive.
I think charging £5+ each week would start to exclude some people who enjoy ringing but could not afford to join two or more practices a week at that kind of cost.
But my main concern with the original suggestion of a course which costs £10 per week so that the leader(s) of the course get paid at wedding type rates is that you then have to define who is helping and who is learning and I think in many weekly practices there are people who join and by doing so bring strength and support to the band but do not expect to be paid to be there, but certainly wouldn’t want to pay to join in.
I regularly collect donations from ringers on outing, at district practices and for meetings with a prepared tea and I am very conscious that whilst some people happily offer more money and don’t want change for some others making the donation has an impact on their budget for the week. With a suggested donation it can be quietly handled that some people give less but once you start setting a charge it becomes harder for people to say that they would like to join in but can’t and you risk changing the demographics.
But this is just my view and I know towers and associations will try different things and see what they learn in the process and the majority of ringers can happily donate or pay more for ringing opportunities, especially when it is structured to benefit their level of skill and experience.

is needed for the "Employed Admin Assistant. Weekly hours of 16 to deal with enquires generated by recruitment hub" who will cost us £15,000 in 2030, which will be 41% of the total Council expenditure of £36,450.

It is, concurrently, both dominating and peripheral, and needs more justification and expanded detail before we commit to doubling our subscriptions for such a modest addition to available resources. — PeterScott

Ringing 2030 needs to overcome this inertia in order to move forward, and do this in sufficient time so that fewer bands fall below critical mass. — Roger Booth

These two quotes highlight the 'dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t' dilemma the CC has. Overcoming inertia requires brave leadership and decision making plus increased resource. More volunteers, doing more and being better directed is necessary but not sufficient. Funds need to be spent, albeit as wisely as possible. To be sustainable that means increased income.

To make best use of scarce volunteer resource, more routine tasks need to be taken away from them. Also, the CC role is rarely the only volunteer role that volunteers are doing. To avoid volunteer burnout, volunteers need to be nurtured and feel valued. Just because they are volunteers does not mean that standard HR hygiene factors can be ignored. And that means by all of us.

In my experience the effect of introducing people in assistant roles is that it initially slows progress. The effort of the existing knowledgeable people is diverted to defining work processes for the assistants and then training them up. Once assistants are trained, experience has to be gained in the level of supervision they need for different tasks. If assistant effort is to be shared then an understanding needs to evolve of how much support an individual volunteer can receive. Admin or any other type of Assistants are not short-term silver bullets, they are medium to long-term support infrastructure provision initiatives. So don’t expect quick payback and do expect mistakes to be made along the way. More detailed expenditure plans with supporting cost-benefit analysis are indeed needed. That in itself takes effort. Unless we are to wait till the limited volunteer Suitably Skilled and Qualified Personnel (SQEP) can do it, SQEP costing somewhat more than £100 per hour will be needed; never mind £15K a year. ‘Courage mes braves.’

There are no guarantees that any one specific measure will work; continuing to do the same things that sees ringing in increasingly more towers either endangered or extinct is guaranteed not to. “There is nothing that is more certain sign of insanity than to do the same thing over and over and expect the results to be different” ― Albert Einstein.

Paul Wotton, CCCBR Ringing 2030 Recruitment and Development Workgroup Lead (And yes, I too need to better direct my team. Always more to do!)

Overcoming inertia requires brave leadership and decision making plus increased resource. More volunteers, doing more and being better directed is necessary but not sufficient. Funds need to be spent, albeit as wisely as possible. To be sustainable that means increased income. — Paul Wotton

I think that the CCCBR is approaching this from entirely the wrong direction. The CCCBR itself cannot do much on the ground. It is motivated local groups of ringers that will have an impact, and the case for doing something to safeguard the future of ringing in each local area is compelling, in a way that increasing affiliation fees to the CCCBR is not. Today I took the Charmborough Ring to the Society of Cambridge Youths who are hiring it for the Cambridge Folk Festival. They have an excellent system in place to capture the contact details and follow up people who show interest. They also have an excellent teaching centre at St Clements, which is staffed by a part time administrator/teacher in Lynn Hughes. The £245k to set up the teaching centre and employ Lynn for the first two years was raised by the Society of Cambridge Youths.

There are other similar models such as the Birmingham School of Bell Ringing and the Mancroft Ringing Discovery Centre, so I am not advocating one particular model. However I would prefer to see the CCCBR focussing on encouraging many other local groups of ringers to set up their own initiatives, and to share good practice. We need several dozen of these initiatives spread round the country. The £40k that the CCCBR are currently agonising over is just a drop in the ocean of what is needed for Ringing 2030 to be successful, and will not in itself achieve very much. However, groups such as the Cambridge Youths have shown that they can raise large capital sums of money, and these projects can be self financing so that they can employ their own admin/teaching staff, in addition to volunteers, and hire mobile belfries too!.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/YLpwoUzBSSikjv2M/

However I would prefer to see the CCCBR focussing on encouraging many other local groups of ringers to set up their own initiatives, and to share good practice. — Roger Booth

I agree with this statement. My experience in my local area is that there are no towers really taking the initiative. Ringing is fragmented. At a ringing meeting last weekend I asked several ringers if they had heard of Ringing 2030 - no-one had! As an individual tower we have not heard of it either. I have taken a personal interest and decided to try and do something about it. I have been looking at my own tower and written a paper on where we are today, where we are likely to be in 10 years time and what options we might have. Its frightening! I hope to roll out some ideas to local district towers to encourage some critical thinking.

But my main concern with the original suggestion of a course which costs £10 per week so that the leader(s) of the course get paid at wedding type rates is that you then have to define who is helping and who is learning — Lucy Chandhial

We can't keep on doing what we have always done. The ringing population has decreased from an estimated 42,000 in 1988 to around 30,000 today. Unless we recruit, train and retain much faster than we have been doing over the past three decades, and at scale, the ringing population will continue to decline

We need to recruit and teach smarter, and we do need to charge for tuition to enable us to do this. Most new ringers expect to pay something. However, I hear the same reasons trotted out by many of the more experienced ringers about why it is difficult to change. The Birmingham School of Bellringing has been running successfully for over a decade and charges £5 per pupil for a 2 hour Saturday morning lesson. The Mancroft Ringing Discovery Centre has been running for over 5 years and also charges. Talking to the Cambridge Youths yesterday, it seems that the St Clements centre is experiencing a huge demand from new ringers in Cambridgeshire who cannot get the tuition and support that they need from their local band. The St Clements Centre charges £5 per hour per pupil for each group session, and £10 per hour for 1:1 tuition.

Perhaps the debate needs to change from being about why we are not able to do things like this, to be about why so many other groups are not doing things like this already, showing them what is possible and is working elsewhere, and helping them undertake similar projects.

it seems that the St Clements centre is experiencing a huge demand from new ringers in Cambridgeshire who cannot get the tuition and support that they need from their local band. — Roger Booth

I think that's common, and not just for new learners. I went to an all-levels 8-bell practice that was called within the archdeaconry with just a week's notice. 24 people turned up. The ringing covered Rounds to Cambridge so there's demand across the board.