Update on Walking for Health training services

Published: 9th May 2012
Volunteer Walk Leader

Latest information on Walking for Health training services following the handover from Natural England.

The administration of Volunteer Walk Leader training has now been partially reinstated after being suspended late in 2011 as part of the handover from Natural England. Please consult the relevant section below to see how this may affect you. Regarding all other services, we are aiming to reintroduce them as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience during the handover.

Information for Cascade Trainers

The key change to the training administration is that we are now able to receive and process training documentation. If you have trained new Volunteer Walk Leaders since the training administration was suspended, but have not submitted the documentation, now is the time to do so. If you arrange any training days from now on please send us the relevant documents. The new address for sending documentation can be found here.

For more details please consult the training section of the website. There you will find updated versions of the training documentation and updated training slides. We are aware that some documentation still includes Natural England branding but these materials can still be used for the time being if necessary.

Please note we are not currently able to provide training materials such as the VWL training handbook and certificates. These still need to be downloaded from the training section of the website.

Information for potential Volunteer Walk Leaders

If you wish to become a Volunteer Walk Leader please check the training calendar. If you cannot find any events there, please contact us. We are currently contacting all Walking for Health Cascade Trainers so we may now be better placed to match interested walkers with trainers, but in some cases it may still be necessary to contact local schemes. This can be done by using the walk finder.

Information for Scheme Co-ordinators

If you are looking for a Cascade Trainer to train walker leaders for your scheme, please check the training calendar. If you cannot find any events there, please contact us. We are currently re-establishing contact with the cascade trainer network, but in some cases it may be necessary to find trainers by contacting other local schemes.

Information for potential Cascade Trainers

The training for new Cascade Trainers will remain suspended for the time being. It is our aim to reintroduce this service as soon as possible. Thank you for your interest in cascade training and please continue to check the website for future developments.

 

Comments

desdemoor: (15 May 2012)
 

Handbooks and certificates

Rosemary -- we appreciate the difficulties volunteer cascade trainers without access to office printers and copiers are having in the current circumstances. However I'm afraid there is little we can do to address it for the time being. Natural England ran down their stocks of printed training materials once they knew WfH was to be divested and handed no printed materials over to us. They had already stopped sending ouit printed materials in November. We do intend to print fresh stocks of key materials but we are not in a position to do this immediately. The materials will need revising and updating and at the moment we have no-one to undertake this task as we are still recruiting our  Walking for Health team (no staff came over from Natural England either). We are working hard to restore as many services as we can as quickly as possible but please do bear with us.

If you are offering training to other health walks schemes then it is perfectly fair to ask them for a contribution towards the cost of printing the necessary materials, and perhaps for help in doing so if they have access to better facilities than you do. They should be covering all their own training expenses. There will always be some costs attached to delivering Walking for Health effectively and it's certainly not fair to expect volunteers to subsidise this.

Des de Moor
Ramblers Walking for Health Team

rosemary: (15 May 2012)
 

handbooks and certificates

As a volunteeer cascade trainer for our small group Kennington Health Walks in Oxfordshire. I would find it difficult to download and print off many copies of the training manual for new walk leaders as that would require an awful lots of printing on my home computer and I do not think that as a volunteer cascade trainer leading a training day (for free)I should be expected to do that!
Whilst our group does have a small amount of funding that we got for ourselves specifically for delivering training days that money was intended to mainly support our group. I am happy to help other Oxfordshire groups with training new leaders and have done so on many occassions it would seem unfair to have to print off training manuals at home and at our groups expense for new leaders coming from other walking for health groups who have simply not bothered to get themselves some funding over the years.