The British Army is excellent at training new soldiers

I had an evening interviewing new recruits at Whittington Barracks yesterday. About eight months ago the Ministry of Defence instructed the Army Training Regiments throughout the UK to set up Independent Advisory Panels (IAP).

The idea of the panels is to look at how the Army trains and looks after new soldiers and make any recommendations as necessary.

I was asked to chair the IAP for ATR(Lichfield) at Whittington Barracks when it was set up earlier this year and it’s been a real privilege. The IAP at Whittington is made up of me and seven other people from the public and private sector.

Last night myself and another panel member Steve Mould, one of Staffordshire’s senior police officers, spent three hours with a couple of focus groups of six recruits, each one representing recruits at different stages of training.

The panel has interviewed over 70 recruits as well as base staff and recruits’ families since we started. It’s a two year programme but one thing we have decided already is that the Army is very good at training new soldiers.

I’d got a preconception, before I started all this, of what the recruits would be like bearing in mind some of the difficult backgrounds and circumstances they’ve come from. In fact almost all of them have been tremendous and last night’s were equally impressive.

They came from all over the UK and also several from South Africa and Canada. As usual they were all adamant that the Army looks after them very well but also, as usual, there was significant criticism of the food and the way it is organised. We’ve already asked the Commanding Officer to look at this issue and we expect some improvement very soon.

An interim report was produced by the panel a couple of months ago and we’ll be interviewing a lot more people over the coming months in order to publish a full report in March next year. I’m planning, with another panel member, to join recruits on a couple of excercises in this country and in Europe early next year to see what their experinces are like ‘off base’. Better get training quick!