UKH

Hiya, 

I am looking at gaining some leadership training. I want to take people out in both moorland (peaks) and mountains (Snowdonia etc.) I was wondering how much overlap there is between the hill and moorland leader and the mountain leader training. It seems like the mountain leader covers everything in the hill and moorland training but I thought I would ask here to see if anyone has experience of both training paths. 

Cheers,

Dave

Hill and Moorland doesn't cover any use of ropes as far as I know.  What do the two syllabuses say?

HML (used to be WGL) is just a subset of ML I believe, i.e. ML would be considered superior and cover anything you'd need for HML.

Well over the summer my daughter who is enrolled on the HML course was told that several scrambles in Snowdonia were not valid. It has to be walking on moors etc., and of course trainers will be able to charge twice. Any shoelace tying courses been invented yet?

No need to pay twice if you go for the right qualification in the first place.

If you're talking about scrambles not being valid for HML logbook it's a long standing policy that the experience logged needs to be on the kind of terrain the award will be used in.

Just do the ML not HML.

Actually yes, pretty sure the Climbing Wall Assistant course mentions helping and instructor get the group kitted up with shoes.

You can do ML training and then decide if you want to go on to ML assessment or HML assessment. No need to do HML training if you've done your ML training.

ML costs more and is a six day training course. HML is three days so costs less.

So a UIAA mountain guide wouldn’t qualify for HML?

Not unless they also hold: Shoelace Tying (Summer)

Not sure what you mean by this. If someone presented alpine routes as logbook experience for HML they'd be rejected but I'm pretty sure a UIAA guide could use their qualification on moorland terrain without having to sit the HML.

Don't joke, I had a lady in my group this summer teach me a new way to tie laces and it works very well indeed! 

OK what about this. With all the various quaiis from camping leader to winter leader being proffered, my understanding is that it would not be necessary to hold any of them to supervise a DofE gold expedition which covers all quali. requirements on all terrains in all seasons up to international mountain leader and I hadn’t noticed kids and young people dying regularly, so how is this allowed, or would it not be political etiquette to criticise the DofE award which precedes the plethora of outdoor quails and has been providing wonderful experience for young people for decades and they even manage to put up a tent unaided  and feed themselves.

I've read that a couple of times now and I don't really understand what you mean. You seem to be suggesting some sort of political agenda that I just don't see.

I can tell you that in the local authority I work for one would not be allowed to supervise a DofE Gold expedition without a Summer ML award (or something in excess of it). I don't know if that's the case for all bodies that deliver DofE but I know it is a pretty common requirement. 

DofE don't accredit supervisors and I don't think they stipulate they must have a certain level of award. That's because this isn't their responsibility, it's the responsibility of the organisation delivering the award like the school, local authority, Scouts etc.

The DofE don't stipulate qualifications, but the recommend NGB awards for ease of transfer.

But I can tell you that it's hard to get even volunteering posts without a shoelace-tying qualification. You see adverts for bronze exped staff in terrifyingly mountainous areas such as the New Forest, insisting on ML.

It's definitely becoming a barrier for would be volunteers. My local authority used to offer an in-house course (2 days training, 2 days assessment) specifically designed for Bronze supervision. They've ditched that and now require an ML for all levels of DofE. Plenty of staff were up for the short course but the ML is a huge ask for anyone who isn't a keen, regular hill walker and expensive for organisations to fund. The requirement for an ML at all levels has killed DofE in some schools and forced it to be scaled back in others.

That is bizarre, as it is basically exactly what the Lowland Leader qualification is for!

Does it include camping? That might be a reason for not accepting for DofE.

That is a separate module which can be added to any of the three now.

That's in shoelace-tying territory AFAIC. But then I've been camping since I was about 5.

And I spent most of my childhood ruining around in similar terrain, with mates. Plus the added hazard of military pyrotechnics...

And that’s my whole point. There shouldn’t be any qualis below at the very least summer M.L. In my mind if you can’t achieve this you’re not fit to lead in the hills, but it’s all to do with money and the outdoor industry training. If you look at some of the minimum requirements for all sorts of courses you would conclude they shouldn’t be let out. I’ve witnessed some awful practices and was once lectured by an instructor because I said his client wasn’t wearing a harness correctly. My climbing partner agreed and pointed out he’d been a guide for 30 years and the harness was wrong. Also makes you wonder how none, or very few of the UK,s top climbers and mountaineers ever went on a course  and yet they still succeeded. I well remember Alan (Richard) McArdy only semi jokingly saying to me you shouldn’t be allowed to be a guide unless you could solo E3. A bit extreme, should be E2! As a postscript, today I came across two DofE groups navigating on their own across the Kinder plateau and they were definitely in the right direction. Surely this is irresponsible and potentially dangerous?

There's a lot of that, certainly. I saw an advert for an outdoor instructor training outfit that offered a ten week course that would lead to instructor qualifications in ten different activities, including climbing. I did wonder how TF you could learn to be a climbing instructor in a week...

The trouble is, these qualifications largely came about due to tragedies with children and inexperienced staff. The qualifications are a way of assessing baseline experience, like a driving licence. It means experience alone isn't accepted for these roles, even volunteering. I did ten years supervising DofE with a school that was prepared to just accept my experience. A management/academy trust change seemed to have brought in an entirely new regime, and I've not heard from them since. And I can't find new volunteering opportunities locally. I might have to bite the bullet and join the paper bandwagon in order to volunteer my time and experience.

In the meantime, I spent this idle period collating my various notes into an aide memoire for DofE expeditions, covering planning, instruction and operation. That currently runs to 336 pages...

Why should someone who's not confident on steep ground not be able to get a lesser qualification that tests their navigation skills etc to allow them to lead somewhere like Dartmoor where there isn't any steep ground?

This is to me somewhat elitist.

I'm not sure what the relevance of harnesses is to ML.  There are some very arrogant instructors out there (I've certainly encountered a couple), but that's true in most professions in some form.

I would love to volunteer with kids / DoE / scouts / girl guiding and help to pass on some of the enjoyment of camping, walking & climbing. But I don't have any qualifications - other than getting lost, cold & wet often. I can't justify taking the time to do an ML now (I should have done it when I was younger & had no children) so I guess it will have to wait until I retire.

Time and cost.

Scouting has its own levels of qualification required for many adventurous activities. Hillwalking is split into 'terrain' ratings as follows:-

Terrain Zero describes terrain which meets one of the following criteria:

Meets all the following criteria:

is below 500 metres above sea level, and

is within 30 minutes travelling time from a road which can take an ordinary road-going ambulance or a building which is occupied (such as a farm) or another means of summoning help (such as a telephone box), and

has no steep slopes or rocky terrain, where a slip may result in a fall (routes or areas where the average person would need to regularly use their hands at least for balance if not for actual progress. This does not stop people from using their hands as an aid to confidence.)

                        or

ii. is a road, or path adjacent to a road, on which you would expect to see traffic.

Terrain One describes terrain which meets all of the following criteria:

Meets any of the following criteria:

is below 800 metres but more than 500 metres above sea level, or

is more than 30 minutes but less than three hours travelling time from a road which can take an ordinary road-going ambulance or a building which is occupied (such as a farm) or another means of calling help (such as a telephone box).

and

has no steep slopes or rocky terrain (as per terrain 0)

and

Is not a road, or path adjacent to a road, on which you would expect to see traffic.

and
Is not Terrain Two

Terrain Two describes terrain which meets all of the following criteria:

Meets any of the following criteria:

is over 800 metres above sea level, or

lies more than three hours travelling time from a road which can take an ordinary road-going ambulance or a building which is occupied (such as a farm) or another means of calling help (such as a telephone box), or

has steep slopes or rocky terrain, where a slip may result in a fall (routes or areas where the average person would need to regularly use their hands at least for balance if not for actual progress). This excludes the planned use of ropes but ropes may be used to give confidence, or in an emergency situation. This also excludes climbing activities. 

and

Is not a road, or path adjacent to a road, on which you would expect to see traffic.

Terrain 0 requires no qualifications

Terrain 1 requires Moorland leader or a scouting terrain 1 course which is a 2 day affair plus experience.

Terrain 2 requires the relevant ML ticket for the expected conditions plus a 1st aider in the group.

Climbing has it's own tickets depending on where you go. Single pitch non-tidal cragging is SPA territory. Climbing walls is less, multipitch is more.

Scrambling requires either terrain 2 permit or climbing permit plus relevant knowledge.

There is no training for camping other than the 'nights away' permit which is a supervisory thing designed for fixed camps and you can teach kids camping skills without it. There's a lightweight camping add-on to the terrain permits.

If you're genuinely interested in passing on your knowledge speak to your local district HQ. There are many groups who have leaders who don't have the relevant tickets and who would appreciate a 'freelance' instructor/teacher/supervisor to help them do the things they can't do.  Like you I've never been bothered to do my ML because I couldn't justify spending all my holidays for 2 years going walking in UK mountains, but my terrain 1 has been really useful. Now that scouts tops out at 14.5yrs old instead of 15.5 I find they're often not really up to doing anything physically harder than Dartmoor or the New forest, thus terrain 1 is all I need. Explorers would be a different kettle of fish.

I think Toerag's point got lost in the length of his very good post.

The main thing is scouting has a mechanism to allow you to climb / walk / camp with only the skill level of the NGB awards not necessarily the qualification.

Apart from the oldest section (Explorers) it's rare to need permits. I think many groups would love a volunteer who can teach how to properly pitch a tent, how to navigate, how to climb. But it's not easy teaching kids.

Growing up I never went camping or hiking, as we lived on a farm and outdoors was just for field sports or dog walking etc. So as a teenager there was a whole new world opened up to me the first time I went camping and I kind of wanted to share that experience, i.e. something adventurous for children who aren't necessary good at sport or whatever. 

Whilst you would still need to do the training and the assessment, or just the assessment if you can persuade the instructor you're experienced enough, your 40 QMDs don't have to be new ones. If you've got enough experience to lead people in the mountains then you've got enough for the ML, you just need to write up at least 40 days in a logbook. So you don't need to spend all of your holidays getting new days in, you just spend two enjoyable weeks with an instructor.

At a cost of 'just' ~£2500 in leave. Not to mention the course and assessment costs.

Course and assessment totalled £700 when I did them a couple of years ago. Obviously how you spend your free time is your business but presumably you enjoy spending it in the mountains. If it's a requirement for voluntary work you want to do but you can't make time for a course how do you have time for the volunteering? I sacrificed some time that could have been spent working to do it, but then again my time is apparently worth less than half of yours. I've more than made back the opportunity cost doing some really pleasant work in beautiful places - I can get paid to go for a nice walk and chat to people.

I did it partly so I could start getting outdoor work and partly because I think there's always something more to learn. The MT qualifications are interesting because you're learning how to instruct from instructors, so you're watching to see how they manage the group and teach nav etc and then thinking about how you can apply that yourself. There wasn't anything in the syllabus that I didn't know beforehand but I still learned loads of subtle things about working with groups that I'd never considered before.

If you intend to volunteer with a specific organisation they may cover costs. We have parent volunteers who do DofE supervision and the cost of their training was paid.

My ex-wife was a Guide leader in the 1980s. The Guide Association decreed that anyone taking girls above the 1000' contour would need an ML.  One of the nearby groups based in the Peak District pointed out that would mean cancelling church parades.  I'm glad these organisations now take a more nuanced approach.

This weekend I'm taking 21 kids for a camp in the woods. Den making, navigation, looking for fungi, brewing tea on a pocket wood burner. Pizzas in a wood fired pizza oven, hot chocolate around a camp fire.

It's a great hobby, scouting.

https://www.mountain-training.org/help/faqs/exemption-from-training

Candidates applying for exemption to training need to persuade a Technical Officer in the national area they are going to be assessed in, not the instructor (course provider) running the assessment.

Fair enough. I didn't look into it because I was keen to see how it was taught, find out if I had any blind spots and get an idea what the general expected level of competence was. Like I said above, despite not learning any concrete new skills on the training it still felt like a week well spent.

My point was that for anyone competent enough to be taking kids out in the hills the logbook side of the qualification isn't (or shouldn't be) onerous or time consuming at all, other than having to deal with dlog. 40 QMDs isn't a high bar at all.

I've just come to this thread. I'm ten years retired now, but in my role as a schools and youth adviser in outdoor education I had to drill down into this topic lots, including, in the 90's, sitting on committees that advised government on adventure activity licensing following the Lyme Bay tragedy. Things will have moved on since I retired, including the introduction of quite a few additional qualifications, but I suspect the underlying principles remain the same. 

Going back further I also have a relevant personal anecdote. I turned up at Glenmore Lodge for my Winter ML assessment in 1978. The Director of Assessment (and Head of Centre) at that time was Fred Harper. I was called in before the start of the course and advised that my logbook was "a bit thin" (say that in a Scottish accent to get the full effect!). I was surprised, as I had been accepted for assessment on the basis of the experience in the logbook, but it seemed the problem was that while I had listed quite a bit of mountaineering experience in the Alps, and in the Himalaya, the logbook was "thin" on Scottish Winter experience. A week later, I had scraped through the assessment, but now agreed with Fred Harper. I was "thin" on just those aspects that were relevant specifically to Scotland in winter. It seems harsh if you can't count scrambling days in Snowdonia as relevant experience for the Hill and Moorland Leader award, but I understand the point.

So, what are those underlying principles.

First, I don't think employers can or should rely entirely on a prospective leader's own self-assessment of their experience, even in something as "low level" as lowland (eg Bronze D of E) expeditioning. In the majority of cases, such a self-assessment may be accurtate, but there are too many examples of where this has gone wrong.

Secondly, required qualifications do not need to test skills that are not relevant for the job. Yes, if, as an employer, you insist on summer ML for moorland leadership (or especially lowland expedition leadership) you will cover all the bases, but you quite unnecessarily narrow your selection field. There is a justifiable role for qualifications at all levels, almost right down to the "tying your shoelaces" level.

Thirdly, if, as an employer, you require staff, especially volunteers, to hold a qualification, you should be prepared to pay for the necessary training and assessment. Several posters have noted that the cost of eg ML training and assessment is prohibitive, but this ought not to be a factor for the candidates themselves. Yes, our field is one in which the gaining of necessary personal experience is normally highly enjoyable (white-outs in Scotland anyone?) so it's not unreasonable to expect people to fund much of that themselves, but not IMO the cost of training and assessment courses.

Finally, there is a role for "in-house" rather than NGB qualifications, especially where the prospective leader will be working in a confined geographical area, or where only a subset of the skills assessed by the closest relevant NGB qualification is actually required. But such in-house schemes, for example those historically operated by the Scout Association, need to be overseen (including the assessment and sign-off of candidates) by a technical adviser who does hold the appropriate national qualification. Normally, this should be at least at the level required to assess candidates in the closest relevant NGB Award.

Martin