Not happy my 13 year 's class old had recruitment presentation from armed forces today

You have me wrong Piscesmoon. I let my DCs do lots of adventurous activities, infact DS1 is away at camp with the cubs right now, where he will be building fires ,climbing trees etc. Plus I have never put a claim in for compensation in my life.

But this day is classed as a careers exhibition which DD will be attending with school.

The consent form states

The MoD does not have public liability insurance, and acts as its own insurer.

The MOD has no legal liability to deal with claims for injuries resulting from pure accident or "Act of God", Therefore you may wish to consider personal accident insurance.

I have an issue with sending my child on a careers exhibition, and having to consider paying for personal accident insurance.

If she is on an aerial ropeway and the branch of a tree the rope is attached to snaps, and she falls 100 feet and left permenantly brain damaged, is that classed as an act of God.

Surely if they are surgesting that you have personal accident insurance, they are aware that accidents are a possibility. Any other company has to have public liability.I undrestand that they look after their own for people in the Army, but I do fell that they should have it if they are inviting children to take part in any sort of activity.

Sadly it is a compensation culture and parents will sue. This is why schools ban conkers and ice slides etc. People have to accept that adventurous activities hold a risk-accidents happen. I would prefer that my DCs took acceptable risks than played safe and stayed at home.

Oh I dont mind her going for the day. Im sure she will have a great day, and wont be swayed to joim up.

Im more bothered about signing away my right to the people organising it wavering their right to liability insurance. its hard enough for soldiers returning from war to get compensation.

If, God forbid, anything happened to any of those children (which Im sure it wont) it would be near impossible to claim against the MoD.

You don't often get those opportunities from anywhere else teamcullen. Our local army base does days in half term and holidays for DCs and they are really good and free. Mine had a great time-and no they didn't want to join the army! Funnily enough they weren't recruiting 8 yr olds-I think it is community service. There are very few organisations that let DC do adventurous things.

DD(13) came home with a consent form yesterday to go to an all singing all dancing day out to the local army barracks where she will do paint balling, assault course, climbing tower, laser shooting, aerial ropeway, parachute jump traing tower and mini moter bikes.

Its classed as an army careers exhibition. Subtle or what!

The form is 3 pages long and has to be countersigned by somebody unrelated, to make sure you know that if your child has an accident the MoD will decide if you have a claim for compensation

DD(13) came home with a consent form yesterday to go to an all singing all dancing day out to the local army barracks where she will do paint balling, assault course, climbing tower, laser shooting, aerial ropeway, parachute jump traing tower and mini moter bikes.

Its classed as an army careers exhibition. Subtle or what!

The form is 3 pages long and has to be countersigned by somebody unrelated, to make sure you know that if your child has an accident the MoD will decide if you have a claim for compensation

Thanks for further info, turn.

No, I would not be very happy with the school aloowing the navy in as a marketing promotion.

It also annoys me that schools let Scripture Union in to push their wares.

I don't think I would go into teaching if I had known. I love it in the classroom-I just hate all that goes with it. When they are recruiting for teachers you can be sure they don't mention it!
I think when they give career presentations for doctors they concentrate on saving lives, they gloss over the fact that not all lives are saved and the doctor will be the one to tell the relatives.
Any presentation will concentrate on the positive-if anyone seriously wants to take it up they will then go into it more deeply.

I think that anyone would be glad of the military in a disaster-in a bad landslide, or something similar, the army would be the people digging them out- a disaster at sea and the helicopters would be there. If your close relative were a hostage you would most probably want someone i.e the army to rescue them. Most people seem to want the armed services there on one hand, but on the other they seem to be saying that they are not people they want to know. I have lived in quite a few military areas, and taught DCs from military families and they are all perfectly reasonable, friendly people!
I am pleased that my DSs didn't follow it up, and I expect that if they were wanting to do something on the front line then I would have tried to talk them out of it, BUT I don't object to them listening to a careers presentation -neither would I object to McDonalds doing one. I think that the best way would be to have lots of different people giving presentations and the DC chooses whether they want to go or not. The important part being that the DC chooses, and the parent doesn't tell them what to choose.

Yes, if people had been honest about the hours needed to teach well, I'm not sure I would have done my PGCE. If you are teaching AS, it's more like 2/3 hours prep for every hour of lesson time.

People perceive the Armed Forces as necessary it seems to me; but view them as remote and not real people. If people didn't join up to fight for Queen and Country; or for the other myriad of reasons they have, then we wouldn't have the Armed Forces, and that would be a great loss.

I think that a Forces presentation makes it blatantly obvious that they may kill or be killed, although many jobs within them are not going to be killing anyone. My DS was shown all the RAF planes at his presentation-if they are bombers I really don't think it needs someone to tell a 13 yr old that in war situations bombs will be dropped and people will die, they can work that out for themselves! It is also obvious that if you fly in an RAF plane in conflict the enemy will try to destroy you-if they succeed you will die.
They are not going to dwell on it-any job would concentrate on the positives. Young people can work these things out for themselves -they are not so thick as to need someone to spell it out. Some think it worth the risk-others don't.
They are giving a career presentation-they are not recruiting impressionable children.
(I can't see why Iggi would ban McDonalds from doing a presentation.)
I haven't been to any talks on teaching where they tell you that you may as well live at school because for every hour in the classroom you need an hour out of it!
People always go for the positives.
The army has always been a way of self improvement. I have discovered that my great xxx grandfather was an orphan in the very early part of the 19th century. He was a boy soldier at 14. He was cannon fodder, but he was lucky and worked his way steadily up the ranks (as far as you could in those days). He had time in Gibraltar and was stationed in Canada for about 5 yrs. He was able to retire and go onto another job with a pension and died well into his 80s. I don't think his prospects were good if he stayed at home-probably domestic service or general labourer. Yes-he ran a tremendous risk of being killed-but he wasn't and it gave him a much more interesting and profitable life. His wife moved around with him and they had 12 children. It is still a way out for people today.

You obviously haven't been to a Forces Presentation recently.

You obviously haven't been to a Forces Presentation recently.

I'll leave the thread - obviously people have firmly held opinions, and I won't make any headway. I just leave you with the thought - a careers presentation for nursing which didn't mention that you might come into contact with ill people and just emphasized the brilliant social life available to student nurses would eb considered a bit odd, wouldn't it!

The realities of Service life are made clear to recruits and the recruits know that they are joining a fighting unit.

Anyone who wanted to join the Forces thinking they were signing up to a youth club wouldn't get through intial interviews.

You don't think a person who signs up is aware of the very possible danger of the job?

I have never said that there is no need for the armed services. I think my opinion on that subject is completely irrelevant to this debate.

What I am saying repeatedly is that it is cynical and hypocritical to talk ONLY about the benefits of service life. The careers stuff talks about training and travel and sport. It does not talk about the fact that you nay be called upon to kill people, to die yourself or make decisions that may result in the deaths of innocent civilians. Of course a service career looks attractive to a young person - particularly one from a background with not much to look forward to. I just think they should approach it with open eyes. They are joining a fighting unit, not a youth club.

What cynical hypocrisy? Like any other employer, they look for a return of service after giving funding for a degree. The same could be said of any firm that offers funding - is that hypocrisy or good business practice?

My dh has been in the RN for 30 years Seeker, and afaik has not been involved in any 'hot' war up close; just the cold one.

In fact, the RN were so intent on getting him killed and letting him kill people that they sent him back to Uni whilst en route to the Falklands conflict so he could finish his degree.

The core function of the RN is to keep the sea lanes open Seeker, and they do this very well. I haven't heard of them killing anyone recently though at sea, have you? Alternatively, perhaps you'd like the piracy coming out of Somalia to flourish and spread.

King's Shilling, obviously - I'm not suggesting anyone is recruiting to the Klingon Imperial Guard!

The Services do offer opportunities for training and self development - they have to keep all those active young people busy and interested when they aren't needed to perform their core function of fighting and killing people.

It's the cynical hypocrisy I find hard to take - a degree is the modern equivalent of the KLing's Shilling.

Given the opportunities that the Forces provide; I'd love my son to join up. Like jcscot, I am intimately acquainted with the Forces; I am a Forces brat, so I have been around the RN for 43 years, and married to an RN Officer for 23 years.

There is honestly no agenda. The reason the RN goes into schools is to try change the way that they are perceived and to explain their role more fully - this is a case in point here. There is obviously huge misunderstanding and misinformation about what the RN actually do, and this is what they are trying to rectify.

Iggi999 I find it quite outrageous that your school can be so blatantly selective and restrictive about which careers presentations they allow in school. Have you consulted the parents for their opinions as to who is and isn't allowed to present career options in school?

How do you decide? McDonalds and Armed Forces - no. Abbattoir workers and Asda - yes? I wonder whether your prejudices as a school body are restricting the options open to your students.

I for one want my children exposed to a wide range of possible career choices so that they can make decisions (hopefully with discussion and support from their parents) based on as much awareness as possible.

And as an aside, I was in the RN for 7 years and my DH has been in for 18 and neither of us have killed anybody. There is more to the Armed Services than frontline combat. And more to the Forces than the Army.

This has been an interesting thread, with some excellent posts from jcscot and scarey teacher with whom I agree wholeheartedly.

Not much time to add my tuppenceworth, but being exRN and having an RN DH who is about to go to the middle east, I am very glad that that my son's school seems to be one with an open mind re the forces. In fact his teacher's DH is in Afgan at the moment.

Re the OP I would have no problem with a 13 year old having a career talk from anyone - be it the Army or McDonalds (perish the thought!!) It is all about balance.

No offence taken! This issue rears its head every so often as people, by and large, seem very uncomfortable with the idea of the Forces having any contact with school pupils at all. For those of us who serve and who are married to those who serve, it can seem that people are very blinkered when it comes to the Forces - they appreciate that they are a necessary part of public life but don't like hearing about what they do and assume that careers/information presentations must be glamourising war.

I suppose we then feel the need to try and give a more balanced and nuanced picture of Forces life as we live it, rather than as people imagine it to be.

As I said, you are being perfectly reasonable to be worried abput such a career for your child. I know I've said I would support and encourage my sons to follow their father into the Forces, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't worry about them being in harm's way.

Obviously, my perspective is going to be different - I have close contact with the Army and will, therefore, have a different slant on all it does and can offer.

Perhaps you could contact the school for more information about just how "isolated" and incident it was - maybe there are other presentations scheduled outside of careers week.

"Many young people CAN think through their decisions - my dh was 18 when he joined up, as was my db. Both have good salaries and a full, busy and intellectually challenging professional life. Both have got their Masters degrees whilst serving...and lastly, neither were poor with low aspirations; they weighed up what they wanted to do after A levels and went for it. Both were service kids and knew the downsides as well as the up of being in the Forces. I am immensely proud of them both."

Well said.

My husband made the decision to join up at the age of 15. He came from a sink estate with all the typical problems that carries - no encouragement to work hard at school from his parents, and expectation that his role in life was to get whatever job was available and contribute some money to the house. He say his elder brother and sisters trapped in low-paid jobs with few qualifications and decided that he wanted to get out of that place.

So, on paper at least, he was exactly the sort of "cannon fodder" of whom people have been so dismissive of on this thread. If the Forces were so keen on just recruiting anyone, he'd have been in a line regiment as soon as he'd completed basic training.

Instead, they talked to him, gave him aptitude tests and told him that they'd love to have him as a soldier, if that was what he wanted, but that he showed the potential to be an officer. They told him to go back to school, get A-levels, go to Uni and then come back and see them. Hardly a cynical recruitment drive - more of an example of how the Forces invests in talent and potential.

My husband went to Uni and left with a good degree and a postgradute masters and then went on to Sandhurst. He commissioned in 1999 and, ten years later, is now a senior major who'll get his first look at promotion to Lt Col in just over 18 mths.

That's pretty rapid promotion but, more than that, the Army has given him an opportunity he probably wouldn't have had otherwise and he's taken full advantage of it.

He's intelligent, capable, responsible and does a highly specialised job. He's physically fit, outgoing, well-rounded and confident - some of that is innate to him, some was undoubtedly bred into him by the Army.

He measures himself as man by the job he does and he takes great pride in doing that job efficiently and professionally.

So - how's that for a portrait of someone that a lot of people on this thread would have stereotyped as "...ignorant cannon fodder..." who ought to be protected from the big nasty old Armed Forces.

The Army was the making of him.

I, too, think that a lot of people have very strange ideas about how the Forces work and what type of people they attract. I don't think it's unreasonable at all to be worried by the thought of your child joining up - it's our nature to want to protect our children and keep them safe - but it is unreasonable to be so het up about a careers presentation.