Way back in nineteen somethng, I spent the best part of a year working towards gaining a Technical Teacher Training Certificate, writes Jonathan Mosse.
I mention this not out of any desire to boast, merely as a strong indicator that someone has recognised that merely owning a skill is no guarantee of the ability to share it with others in an effective manner.
Indeed, I was surrounded by a diverse collection of doctors, engineers, plumbers, nurses and stonemasons, to mention but a few: the one thing we had in common was the need to be able to meaningfully share what we knew, in a structured manner, so those we would train by sharing our skills, knowledge and experience could reap the full benefit.
At the risk of over-simplification, for an inland waterways transport enterprise to be successful, four raw ingredients need to be in place: the boats, cargo, wharves and crew. Right now, in the northeast of England, new flows are rapidly developing, much to the delight of canal and river transport enthusiasts.
Considerable hard work and not a little money have taken care of the first three items on the list but, in the area of manning the vessels, all is proving not to be plain sailing. With such a long lay-off from commercial waterway carrying in the area, many experienced crew and skippers have either retired or simply not renewed their tickets to operate once they have expired.
Others will have moved away and decided that carrying on the inland waterways had become a thing of the past and so retrained in other areas. To override such an investment in time, energy and probably money is not attractive, especially in the light of the undeniable facts that working a barge involves antisocial hours, time away from home, and the ability to thrive outside in all weathers!
If it’s an occupation now lacking attraction to those for whom it was once a way of life, it’s not hard to understand why the work has even less appeal to youngsters just leaving school, however generous the operators are with their terms, conditions, and pay scales.
Credibility, when promoting a career, can often lean heavily on its perceived structure both in terms of training and the opportunities likely to become progressively available in the future.
Although retired, there is still a significant tranche of highly skilled skippers in the northeast who will have acquired a lifetime’s experience ‘behind the wheel’ of a variety of inland waterways craft and have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the different waterways in all their different moods. What they lack, quite understandably, are the tools by which to share this knowledge in such a way that it is communicated to their students in a clear,
comprehensive and structured manner, so that meaningful learning actually takes place. Random transfer of knowledge is usually ineffective and sometimes plain, downright dangerous, which in turn implies a logical, formal training programme, together with a mechanism to monitor its progress throughout the entire period of its delivery.
There’s a very real danger here that I clamber aboard my own personal soap box as I have been in training for most of my life… as well as being comprehensively trained on more than one occasion! My very real concern is that a superb initiative will flounder through want of one relatively simple thing: a lack of trained crew and skippers.
Among other things, I’ve run a large land-based industries training programme for a good many years ranging across half of England, and while in the forestry department we employed our own trainers, I had no tree surgeons on my staff. The solution turned out to be simple: use local contractors who were at the top of their game and provide them with the training in how to share their not inconsiderable skills: in this instance, a five-day Agricultural Training Board instructional techniques skill delivery course. The outcome was a definite win-win situation. Not only did our students gain first-class, bang up-to-date knowledge, but it was delivered in an effective manner by leaders in the industry, which in turn gave us a significant credibility spin off.
So, what I’m advocating here is to tap into the vast pot of boat-handling skills that still exists in the northeast of this country, provide the wherewithal to enable effective sharing of this maritime gold dust, and construct the whole process in a manner where outcomes are constantly measured and monitored in a structured way.
