Terms of reference:
- Establish new, long-term sustainable sources of potential young ringers, from school age to age 30, enable young ringers to find somewhere to ring and find the support they need along their ringing journey.
- Nurture future leaders of the exercise and create a sustainable structure to support youth ringing.
Programme structure
There are 5 key projects that make up the programme of activity in this workgroup:
The projects
Young Ringers Hub – Tristan Lockheart
The Young Ringers Hub (YRH) is a “one stop shop” website for young ringers from school age to age 30. The YRH will include existing guidance and information, plus will host the outputs of the other projects. The objective of the website is to enable young ringers to find the information they need to find somewhere to ring and provide relevant guidance, wherever they are in their ringing journey. We will be working with the Recruitment & Development workstream to dovetail with their recruitment activities.
University Ringing – Adrian Sweeting and Tristan Lockheart
The University Ringing project will create templated resources to attract young people to ringing at university and keeping them ringing based on best practice from current and students and graduates. It will also create an updated and sustainable University Ringing website.
Youth Groups (Under 18) – Alena Wardle
This project is aimed at creating opportunities for youth groups to hear about ringing, learn to ring and creating resources to support young ringers and leaders.
This group is only just getting going, as it’s taken time to get the right people on board and work out how best to approach this challenge.
The project will focus on creating blueprints / templates for using with youth groups / schools and a possible badge scheme. We will also create stand alone guidance on how to entertain groups of young people visiting a tower. This guidance will be appropriate for all young people, including school and youth group visits and will include taster sessions and pathways into local towers or teaching hubs.
School lesson plans – Jason Hughes, Helen Allton, Neil Jones
The School Lesson Plans Project is a PR tool to raise awareness of ringing in schools. It will increase the visibility of ringing in schools, by integrating the lessons to the national curriculum, potentially delivering a sustainable pipeline of young ringers. The lesson plans will complement the national curriculum and support a school’s coverage of the teaching of British Values. The aim is that teachers will be able to deliver the lessons plans and use them instead of or supplementary to their planned lessons. We have split the project into 3 workstreams, each focussing on a key element of the project to enable the lesson plans to be developed, rolled out and sustained.
Supporting Young Ringers – Andrea Haynes, YCRA and Brooks Hayes
There are many school age to age 30 youth ringing organisations, but they are not joined up. The gaps between these organisations contribute to the loss of young ringers e.g. between school / university after university moving area, post RWNYC age etc. As a result, there is no clear pathway through ringing for young people.
The “Supporting Young Ringers” project is currently in the forming stage and the intention is to create a network of youth teams and also establish groups of 18-30 ringers to follow on from the youth teams, in conjunction with the YCRA. The broad principle is that this will be regionally based and include youth teams, universities and other young ringers in the region. The aim is to help with retention of ringers by making it easy for young people to find somewhere to ring, whether they be changing location or become “too old” for the youth team! It is also a good opportunity to get young people to take on leadership and mentoring roles in their region. Guidance will also be developed and hosted on the YRH, including what already developed by the YCRA.