A poor tale ... but a good night

[onfire]

Hi, I have only posted about 45 times on here but generally dip in and out of the huge wealth of information and resources held within the forum. I haven't achieved much lately but I thought I should contribute something until I do a proper overnighter worthy of a post.

I work for a college delivering BTEC Public Services to students of 16 - 20 years old. we have two year groups and this year we took the second years on a bushcraft camp to consolidate what they had learnt on a bushcraft day at the end of their first year ... sadly it was rather a failure :-( but lessons have been learnt all round for next time!

Last year the students built rudimentary shelters from forest debris and then from tarps before cooking a pasta based meal over an open fire ...




... and we usually build on this experience by making them cook over fires during a two night canoe expedition. This year we put the bushcraft overnighter in as a fun experience first though.

We set off for a local woodland (coniferous sadly but that is the predominant woodland type around us) and through a misunderstanding between two of us staff ended up stopping too close to a farmhouse overlooking the forested hillside. The students were grouped into three's and settled into building debris shelters (and nothing else, although, as poor weather was forecast we did encourage the use of orange emergency bivi bags). They struggled to get these shelters built to anything like weather proof - some of them because of the swiftly descending dusk and others because they just didn't buy into the activity. Anyhow, as darkness fell the students began to cook over bushcraft stoves before bed.



I had spent weeks preparing stove packs for the students (scouring charity shops for utensil holders and tea / coffee / sugar canisters to be used as billy cans) and each group of three had two stoves held in a PLCE side pouch, together with a PLCE utility pouch containing flint and steel, cotton wool and wooden lollipop sticks in case the wood was too wet for their limited firelighting abilities ... knives were a no-no with this group! Some of the students got right into the swing of things but it turned out that many of them just ate chocolate and their stove packs were untouched even after breakfast the next day!





The fact that the groups of students were separated into small debris shelters in the darkness of the woods really calmed them down and a quiet night quickly fell ... apart from in the staff area where we soon had a social gathering around a fire ...



... and our hammocks (as we were teaching at 0915 after these students had limped home!



We rose the next day and had breakfast ... well three of us did. Even my colleagues had neglected to bring food with them so I had to share my bacon and rolls between three while two of the more motivated students got theirs cooking over the open fire. Even with all this time spent doing nothing the shelters were covered with litter and it took us over an hour of shouting and chasing to get all the rubbish picked up. The students destroyed the experience for me (and themselves) with their disinterest and idleness (although this is typical of this year group and I know that our first years will be much more engaged ... indeed some are buying their own hammocks in readiness already!) but it has made me look at the planning and thanks to this forum I have come up with some more focussed ideas.

Next year we will spend more time looking at the different uses of tarps for shelter, both as tarps and as tarp-tents. We will turn the overnighter into a two day activity to force the students to engage in the cooking, washing, eating etc and we will establish a circular aspect to the camp, deeper in the woods, so that the student shelters are built around a stone laid firecircle. We will look in more detail as instructing the students in the art of stripping, splitting and feathering wet wood to light a fire and I think we might take fish and rabbits to run a little cookery class in a survival style!

Thank you all for sharing your experiences and photos - hopefully mine will be a more interesting report next time.

 

[Goatboy]

Onfire, I found it pretty interesting. It's good to see a report about differently skilled groups experiencing what we do for fun. Some of them may not have bought into it, but at least a couple did and I feel is you can at least engage one or two in a group then it's been a worthwhile time and you may have made a difference to them.

Sounds like you put a lot of work into it and that you've laid the foundation for what could be an important time in their lives. Keep it up and more reports like this are always welcome to me.

 

[Harvestman]

Great effort mate. The amount of work involved in setting up something like this is huge, as I have done it myself. As you know well, with that age group you do well to engage any of them, so well done for achieving what you did. You learn from it, develop it, and take it forward for next time.

Oh, and great pictures too.

 

[onfire]

Thank you for your kind words ... Im not despondent, its just a shame that a period of huge potential went largely unfulfilled (especially for the effort involved), you are of course correct in that groups vary and some are more challenging than others. Some of my best bushcraft sessions were with our Learning Support students - some of whom were completely absorbed by the fact that they could levitate under a poncho (they couldn't see that their friend was in fact sat in a hammock)



... and others who went completely beyond their comfort zones as they made billycans out of bean tins and light their own fires from scratch!

 

[Harvestman]

There is scope for a great deal more of this sort of thing. The young people often have very positive experiences, although sometimes it takes a while for them to sink in. My lad used to complain and protest when I took him out like this, but in later years he often spoke about how much he had enjoyed himself.

 

[Goatboy]

That first photo of the second sets great, a mate of mine had a ferret that used to sit in a rabbit hole when you put him in and just stare at you for about 30 seconds before heading down... just the head and with the same expression.

 

[Norton]

I'm in the middle of a Youth Work degree and certainly understand your frustration with this age group. Were shelters perhaps a little too advanced with a less than motivated group? Tarp shelters are much less labour intensive but can still give a sense of achievement. If your group failed at the first hurdle, building a shelter, the mindset afterwards can be "why bother?" I still feel a sense of pride rigging a tarp up for somewhere to stay.

One large meal cooked together can also help. A large pot of stew prepared by some of them while some others make bannock to share. I also like to have a pudding of stewed apples. A little bit of butter, cinnamon and sugar and cooked for a long time really works. This also helps them realise different things can be cooked on the same fire at different temperatures.

Ultimately if you're taking a group out into the woods who you don't even trust with knives, and I've worked with young people like that as well, you have to consider their needs. Your organisation may well have had expected learning outcomes from the trip but if they were unrealistic it falls to the youth workers to raise that and decide on more realistic learning outcomes.

 

[Bluffer]

If you don't mind me asking, why are they not trusted with knives? Isn't the public services course designed to prepare them for one of the public services or armed forces?

Thanks for a great insight all the same, sounds like you have had a very useful experience from the 'trainer' perspective.

 

[onfire]

Thank you for that advice (and a recipe that does sound good). After 10 years of teaching at secondary and tertiary I have the levels and outcomes squared away, this was just a poor group. My first years will do the same trip but come out of it like Bear Grylls! This group had already made debris and tarp shelters, had created fire from sparks and cooked a communal meal so they had all the skills and experiences (combined with resources) to make the night a success independent of the staff. It was very much a case of 'you only get out what you put in'.

Id be very wary of giving any large group of teenagers knives - either because they will hurt themselves, lose them or give them back knackered lol

 

[onfire]

Hi Bluffer, I hadn't seen your post as I replied. The group can't be trusted with anything as they lose it or disrespect it but that is often the case with large groups, low staff ratios and the use of 'issued kit'. It is all a case of resourcing, available time for training and practise (as this is generally a sort of one-off activity)

 

[Bluffer]

Gotcha, I suppose in theory we all want to teach them to assess risk and take responsibility, but there is that big reality check when theory meets practice.

As a slight aside, is there any kit you are particularly short of?

 

[onfire]

It is hard to explain the issues with the group without meeting them, some of the kids are really switched on, others eager but not entirely with it, others who just want to be the centre of social attention and finally those who don't want to be there at all. Sadly, with this group in particular, it doesn't take long for them to start moaning at how rubbish things are ... which is crazy really as the course has been transformed since I took it over 9 years ago. My technician now was one of my students back then and he is amazed at the kit we now have and the activities on offer - I suppose what the students don't see is the time, effort and money (70% of the kit we use for all the course activities is owned by me) that it takes to put these activities on. We sign kit out at our stores and then the individuals sign it back in again at the end of the activity but this doesn't stop them losing headtorches, trousers, hats, tent poles etcetera. The area is hugely deprived (Objective One in Welsh Assembly terms) and that seems to carry across into the apathy and lack of respect that the students seem to have grown up with ... which is odd, as I would expect them to be more grateful for the efforts made for them.


There is always kit that we need as we have a small budget split over 200 students (covering 4 different levels from pre-GCSE to BTEC Level 3) doing a range of Public Services, Outdoor and Sport Units. To put it into perspective though, my students come out for a range of outdoor activities on one day each week, with an expedition plus an overnighter in each of their years. All students undertake 5 week training programmes in Rock Climbing, Canoeing, Kayaking, Coasteering, Gorge Walking, Caving and Hill Walking; with each of these 'packages' broken up with one-off days such as Bushcraft, Military Skills and Obstacles, Volunteering, River Tubing etc. The Year One students have just completed a hillwalking expedition in the Black Mountains (in the worst rain we have had in the Brecon Beacons for 20 years) and will undertake a sponsored night in a cave in February as a fundraising activity for my Mountain Rescue Team. The Year Two students undertook this bushcraft overnighter and will complete a Duke of Edinburgh Canoe Expedition in May.

To come back to the point of kit, I have created stove packs and have a couple of tarps and cordage, plus I have made up a fire 'tray' (you can see the pans sat on it in the top pictures) as well as large tripods to hang pots over the fire ... we are always short of billys, fire lighting steels and strikers, tarps and, ironically, appropriate knives to split kindling, feather wood, and (planned for my next bushcraft session in a few weeks) gut and prepare fish and rabbits to be cooked there and then - with my more enthusiastic first years! There is probably a lot more that we are short of but I cant think of it right now. Because of group sizes, staff ratios and the dreading meeting of hope, reality and health & safety we tend to break things down into small groups in a round robin setup for each 'training day' so that each set of students can be hands on but also supervised and encouraged in achieving each particular task aim.

Perhaps if I list the kit we have / use then you might suggest things that we are missing or might make life slightly easier? All this kit is provided by myself which is why I am so precious about not letting the students lose or damage it!

*Stove Packs - IKEA utensil holder with hole cut to light / feed fire, tent pegs, coffee canister billy can to boil one cup of tea at a time plus PLCE utility pouch with fire steel, tinder and kindling
*Homemade tripods and fire 'tray' thingy for cooking over open fire
*Aluminium pans (seen in photo's) for cooking meal on static 'training' day ... borrowed from Army caterers ;-)
*Gas bottle cauldron (for washing up on static 'training' day
*Two metal fire boxes (I forget the name but I bought them from a chap over on Song of the Paddle, or Canoe with a View I think)
*Collapsable silicone pasta drainer, chopping board, tin opener
*Army 20l Water Jerry Cans
*A few DIY hammocks made from Army IPK kits
*Small (1.5 x 1.8m & 1.5 x 2.4m) tarps plus cordage and bungees
*Silva mini binoculars - four sets down to one now :-(
*My personal small axe, flint and steel in leather pouch, wire 'survival' saw, rabbit snare and Mora knife

It doesn't look like a big list but we get a respectable amount done with it on the 'training' day alone! My next outing will be a much more energetic group and I will have a much more positive report and photo's in a few weeks!

 

[Bluffer]

I think a properly constructed debris shelter is quite ambitious, as it requires plenty of time and resources. Maybe build just the one shelter to demonstrate this and then allow them to use tarps for their overnight shelters.

I think Army-surplus ponchos will be your best buy for that.

Your twig-burners look good and achieve the aim, but because the real cooking is done on the fire, I would recommend muurika and/or dutch ovens but neither is a cheap option.

Have you seen the Hultafors heavy duty knife and the safety knife? Heinnie stock them for £5.95 and £3.95 http://www.heinnie.com/Knives/Hultafors-Knives/c-11-92-913/

 

[onfire]

Thank you for the tips - I haven't looked at the knives yet but I will do so shortly (when Im alone and free to hide my spending lol)

The kids in general do a good job:





I think I was overly negative in my post about this group, but only because the effort I put in makes it very easy for me to take the 'failures' personally - next time will be a much different affair!

Thank you all for your help and advice.

 

[Dirty]

Good evening
I've had similar experiences with groups, sometimes it's not you, it's them. I think a large group fire works better, even if they cook their own food on it. It's also easier to gather the fuel.
Those "sessions" can be a kick up the bum for your self esteem, especially when you find you've learnt a lot more than they have, but they will always learn something,( even if they find that you still don't like litter. ) and they have spent a night in the woods.
I would keep the kit budget, cheap tarps can be worthwhile, and string/bailer twine also good.
The best thing I can say is well done.

 

[Stringmaker]

I'm coming to this thread after reading your more sucessful trip report where you refer to this one.

Firstly, well done for all the effort, forethought and planning and getting them out there in the first place. As you obviously know, that age group is a real lottery. I work with primary school groups on a woodland/heritage/living skills project and find them so much more interested and engaged; good luck with the angst, egos and disinterest of the older ones!

For any given specific activity can I ask what the pupil/instructor/adult ratio is?

On our project it is usually 3:1 which helps massively in both controlling the activity and making sure everybody takes part.

Divide and conquer!