PCA issues

Paul wrote

I understand that the current position is that a pca can be conducted delivering an adult one to one, if that is primarily the type of work the candidate does. There, the outcome of controlling groups cannot be achieved. I think there should be an additional wording, saying something like. If (the above) is the case then an ITO can exercise their discretion.

Greg wrote

In my understanding the original decision was that we cannot distinguish between instructor who only want to train adults and those who wish to train all levels. As training children is harder than training adults, then the PCA should be done on children. I have done this a number of times, i.e. forced people who state that they only wish to train adults to do at least one PCA with children at Level 2. What happens if the person decides in a year or so that they want to train children.

Phillippa wrote

Interesting debate. Perhaps training individual adults is easier than training groups of children, Greg, but the industry is growing and is now much wider than delivering Bikeability to groups of Years 5 & 6 as its mainstay. What about lorry driver training where instructors are working with 20 grown ups, for instance? Group management skills are critical there. I increasingly get trainee NSIs who aren't interested in working with children at all - and infact, I had one who only wanted to do his NSI so that he could deliver his company's bus driver cycle training. Now that there are openings emerging with, for instance, Safe Urban Driving in London, do we want to be so exclusive in how we conduct PCAs? I do think an element of flexibility is key to growth - and flexibility needn't mean diluting quality

I think Paul is right and this is what we had originally agreed. PCAs can be done on 1:1 sessions if that is all the instructor will be doing. It was a bit of a fudge but now less so since all schemes should have internal QA/mentoring which gives an added level of support should that person begin to deliver schools training through such a scheme. The logistics of forcing someone who isn't involved in group training to find a group for the PCA may well prevent someone from bothering to get any PCA which is the worst outcome.

David, thanks for transferring my email to this forum

Greg makes the point that delivering to children is more difficult than delivering to adults. This may be true in some cases but not in all. How you 'control' and adult or group of adults may be different to how you 'control' a group of school children.

We need to have a workforce who can deliver effectively to anyone who wants to improve their cycling.

Increasingly local authorities are funding adult training and we need to have instructors who want and are able to do this.

It seems to me that it should be possible to PCA based on what the instructor normally delivers which in some cases may make an outcome not applicable. If the scheme then wished the instructor to work in a different areas the scheme could provide the mentoring to ensure that person had the necessary skills.