Ringing Forums

The workgroup briefings are available as a video to watch or slides to scan through on the briefings tab of the website here: https://cccbr.org.uk/about/workgroups/recruitment-and-development/ if you were unable to join but are interested in the content.
Discussion ranged from how best to connect potential recruits with teaching towers from guild websites to the need for short videos to attract younger recruits and the importance of welcoming returning ringers who may be ‘rusty ringers’.

A quick reminder that if you would like to see best practice Association websites for recruiting new ringers or learn top tips for regaining past ringers and have the chance to join the Recruitment Network then email Paul for the link to the next Recruitment and Development workgroup briefing…
Sunday 8th Feb from 20:00 UK time
RDLeadatcccbrdotorgdotuk

Here’s one link which might help: https://www.whitingsociety.org.uk/old-ringing-books/ellacombe-bells-somerset.html
I’ve definitely read articles on this topic in the Ringing World so it would be worth searching their archives and I think John Harrison will have some advice on sources.

The next Recruitment and Development Ringing 2030 Workgroup briefing will be on Sunday 8th February: R&DBriefingFeb2026
Request the meeting link from RDLeadatcccbrdotorgdotuk if you are interested in how your Association website can help with recruitment AND how to attract lapsed / resting ringers back to ringing.

It sounds like you are being respectful of the band, with their current experience, when suggesting how to work to improve and I think that is also ‘normal’. Ignoring bad striking or giving up trying to teach people how to improve how they ring (as well as what they ring) might feel like a standard experience in your tower but there are lots of towers (including many in Kent I expect) who are always encouraging listening and learning and discussion about the tweaks which can lead to improvements.
I think the difficulty is that many ringers don’t go outside their own tower so if a tower doesn’t have someone willing and able to lead this focus then the band don’t know what they are missing.
In a volunteer led set up it is hard to know how this can be changed as there is lots of information available but no route to ‘manage’ the capabilities of tower captains or ringing masters except district / branch involvement and that depends on volunteers time and capacity as well.
I’m glad you are making a difference to the band you ring with. If you shared your thoughts with the district or branch ringing master or training Officer do you think they would be interested in suggesting following a similar model to other towers who might benefit?

“I think Roger might be over estimating the degree of attachment to service ringing. It is what we have all grown up with as the dominant form of performance, so we accept it as normal, but that doesn't mean they identify with it. I took a straw poll of what ringers would do if ringing at their church ceased and the options available were: (a) ring at a secular tower, (b) travel some distance to a church with service ringing or (c) give up•. Of the 30 people who replied 80% said they would ring at a secular tower rather than travel to find service ringing.”
I’m confused! Roger was quoting your assumption that ringers are attached to doing something for the church rather than the art of ringing and he was aiming to demonstrate that many ringers don’t think about service ringing (or ringing for the church) as key.
Now you are replying to say he is overestimating the importance of church and that your straw poll reflects that people like ringing as a local activity over and above as a church activity!

I think you are both right that for many people ringing now service ringing is an expected habit but not a key driver and many ringers would very happily come ringing every week at a secular tower.

“One thing that stands out to me is that in the grouping that's successful, mobility of ringers is the norm from the very start. To me that has all sorts of benefits, is that something that happens in your area?”
In some towers.
I find this interesting because some people like to teach in their tower and keep their band with them to ring their way or progress the way they lead them and for many of the people involved this works very well and these are some of the most successful towers locally.
Others are much happier to encourage learners to go to other towers too, often because they or one of their band regularly go to that same other tower so you get networks with some cross over of ringers which can help people to progress faster. Some of these towers are bands which struggle for numbers or struggle for experience so visit other practices regularly for the opportunity to stretch their own skills but if they then encourage learners to come along too there is a crossover benefit and progress can improve.
Generally people don’t start joining other practices until they can ring in rounds and often it is when they reach plain hunt that they want to get more than one opportunity a week to practice their skills.

Second bugbear, unconsciously denigrated ringers by using ‘just’ or ‘only’ before an activity. E.G. they can only ring rounds, we’re just going to ring call changes.
One experienced ringer near us has banned the use of ‘just’ for exactly that reason, when you ringing called changes it’s not ‘just’ called changes for at least one of the ringers!

In the area where I ring it is assumed that all learners are working towards method ringing, even if some might only choose simple method ringing (and some experienced ringers are still practicing how to treble to doubles). Not every tower practice can manage plain hunting and beyond but every tower band is aiming to get there.
I see younger learners developing faster through the skills and therefore moving on more quickly (often) compared to an older learner who joins the same number and variety of practices but I don’t see older learners being ignored or held back or assumed to be not interested in extending their skills.
I do see some older experienced ringers who have actively chosen not to extend their skills beyond a certain point and others who feel ‘stuck’ at a certain stage, especially if they don’t have time to visit other practices alongside their home tower.
I think we have a good culture (where I am) of working towards a first quarter covering, a quarter trebling, a quarter inside, etc and a path from plain hunt to trebling to ringing inside which lets people move into method ringing so that they can take it as far as they like.
Ringing ‘press’ has celebrated both young learners and older learners achieving impressive goals so I don’t think anyone should feel held back by age.
It is definitely true that supporting ringers (of any age) to extend their skills is time intensive for the ringers around them and I know you have talked before about how more could be done with simulator sessions and online trainings to help bridge the gap when the chance to ring with a band is hard to arrange.
I would be interested to better understand at what point people hit the limit of local support in different areas because where I am it becomes difficult when you want a supportive band for surprise major but I understand that in some areas of the country it’s already difficult to get the chance to ring bob minor with a stable band around you.

@Tina@Vicki Chapman will the CCCBR coordinate the application for full circle change ringing? Presumably it makes sense to have one organised entry than multiple similar but different entries for bellringing?

So what sort of team do ringers think they are signing up to? What pitch were they given when they were recruited? Were the band’s objectives made clear? Was the goal of method ringing stated? Were performance skills emphasised? Was there talk of shared commitment as well as social bonding?

I think this is very true. It also shows up when people move where they live and find themselves with a new home tower and might find the culture or expectations are very different. Some towers are always striving to develop and others are steadily providing a service and many are somewhere in between but acknowledging that is useful.
Often when you are inside a culture you don’t recognise it so a new perspective helps to ask questions and open up discussion.
Definitely as part of a recruitment it makes sense to explain your expectations or your usual practice as a band.

I don’t know of any Association/ Guild /Society which is using electronic voting.
I think there is a general feeling that people should sit through the meeting (online or face to face) to hear the context etc before voting but that’s largely just because it’s always been done that way.

For those using membership systems like MemberMojo it would be easy to either ask a question within a renewal or offer a vote as a checkout item in the shop (with no price) to collect votes from members only and I guess making sure only members can vote whilst anonymising the results is the challenge but when you vote at the meeting people see who raises their hand so an admin seeing who voted each option wouldn’t be any different.

The next article has not been published yet…. I can post here once it is.

Yes! That’s the article I remember. Thank you.

Maybe there are some useful ideas here: https://www.festivalchurches.org.uk/case-studies/
But I can’t find the article I was thinking of (sorry).

I don’t know whether anyone can really provide evidence that changes they have made enable them to be financially viable for the future but I do remember an article about a church I think in Cornwall which had significantly increased ‘visitors’ and donations by bringing in community activities ranging from ringing sessions to playgroups. I think it was part of the Save the Parish information but it might have been a Ringing World article.

There’s a discussion thread called The Road to Wigan’s Tears which goes into this topic a little bit and Simon Linford has provided some good information on categories of churches and what level of attendance / funding a church needs to achieve to survive.

I guess the St Clements Cambridge model uses ringing as a way to keep a church building open every day but this works for Cambridge as a city with lots of visitors and wouldn’t work in a rural village so it will depend on the exact location.
I remember being surprised in the article about the church in (I think) Cornwall that very few regular visitors were needed to justify keeping the church open and be considered a success.

My home tower church is considered a success because the church is hired out for recordings and filming and this brings in income despite a relatively small congregation but this works because it’s in London and with good acoustics so wouldn’t work everywhere.

I think I would start by looking at the equivalent community hall facilities in the local area and what happens there, if there is already a scout hut or Methodist hall or similar being used for yoga classes, music for toddlers, etc then the church has less chance of finding other users but if there’s a need for spaces which is not fulfilled then churches work well as food banks, libraries, cafes, music venues…

We had an approach from an American university who had a London summer placement to explore music and heritage. They paid, based on wedding fee rates for six and something generous for the tower and the cost of the ART Discover books, for a one hour experience.
That was fairly targeted because they were specifically in London to link music to heritage and that lends itself to an introduction to bellringing talk.

If you can only provide two ringers then you are more limited but you could still get them chiming in rounds with the bells down, possibly use handbells for some called changes and depending on your tower kit show a video of full circle change ringing.
Lots of people find the simple experience of climbing a spiral staircase to a room the public don’t normally see exciting. If you can add in some local fun facts or a view from the tower they will enjoy it.

On the other hand… I went on a mystery picnic which was a birthday gift and it was well put together to take you to independent shops and collect picnic ingredients, visit a herb bed at the park and see some sights. So I can see how something similar with a bellringing experience could work. People who choose this sort of event are likely to be curious and open minded so it could be a combination of PR and recruitment.

The high level of experienced ringers needed to support fast tracked progress is definitely the issue, the place where bellringing struggles compared to many other activities where one teacher can help small groups to improve.
The use of simulators for extending the ringing repertoire is not perfect, nothing is quite the same as ringing with ‘real’ ringers who a) smile at you but b) go wrong sometimes, but improving how we use simulator sessions feels like a key to supporting people to extend their capabilities in between high effort sessions for which people may have to travel quite far, etc.
If we tried cast of 1000 with a full day of ringing every second month and ‘homework’ to be done with simulator / Abel / pen and paper in between it could be more productive than relying on regular practice sessions.

The part about accepting people who won’t go further and how to manage that is definitely a tough one in local district / branch arrangements as some people will continue to come and ask to ring the same method month after month without ever seeming to improve and it’s not really possible to ask them not to come, you can only really (in my experience) encourage them to do some homework and set themselves some goals. But we notice some of the ringers with better potential get frustrated with the ‘wasted’ time or poor quality ringing and are then less likely to come to the practice themselves which becomes a vicious circle if you then miss the ringers who could be supporting more challenging ringing.

John Harrrison’s article in the RW this week talks about a decline in membership two to three years after each special push for new ringers. One of the reasons for this seems likely to be that some of those ringers find they can’t progress any further at their tower and don’t feel supported by the Branch or District to keep them progressing and another proposed reason, which could also be true for some, is that bands become overwhelmed by learners who all need to practice endless plain hunt (for example) and some of the more experienced ringers lose interest or the tower stops recruiting while getting this batch of learners to a standard.
Every time we aim to increase the ringing population quickly we hit this kind of barrier so asking the experienced ringers to help becomes increasingly tiresome (for many).
This does suggest that methods which allow for more solo learning and practice, mixed with very targeted opportunities with the investment of support from experienced ringers, will become more and more important as the available bank of experienced ringers decreases (based on the age profile of ringers).

Paying for the kind of support offered in the ARA would make it a very expensive ringing course so we probably do need to work on the basis of making helping attractive (by limiting how often we ask, ensuring the students are well prepared to make the most of it, offering interesting towers, enjoyable socialising around the ringing, etc). I guess ARA students could be asked to offer their time for a next level down RA the following summer, something targeting surprise minor / Stedman triples, for young ringers who may have had less opportunity to be seen and less opportunity to get into surprise ringing which would ease the burden on the grown ups and set the culture for paying it forward.

Angela (as a RFTK returner) has used a variety of ways to ask people to get in touch if they are willing to join the Marketing workgroup and what she gets is lots of views on what the workgroup has done badly in the past or what needs to be done beyond the remit of the Marketing workgroup and no actual volunteers to get involved.
It’s no wonder that available enthusiasm walks away and focuses on more local activities where it is easier to make an impact as a willing individual.
The major challenges don’t change, small scale solutions are being tried in a variety of local ways, failure to drive bigger / faster change is the responsibility of everyone who has awareness of the issues and the chance to be involved. The Central Council is an amalgamation of ringers who aim to work together to help improve ringing but we all have the chance to be part of it and it’s easy to criticise without investing time in trying to help.
I understand the frustration that change can be very slow in a volunteer led set up which relies on people (associations and towers) choosing to adopt ideas and strategies (because they can’t be told what to do) but I don’t think the Exec or the Council can be held responsible for the current situation without acknowledging that they are the product of the ringers overall.

I think for each local Association to set themselves up to be an employer would be relatively high investment / effort when they are likely, at least at the start, to be employing one or two people only. If the church is already an employer then it’s easier for them to add one person to the payroll. If the CCCBR becomes an employer then it too could scale up. But I agree that the current CCCBR is not set up to offer the service of being the employer for local ringing centres.
The administration and responsibility of becoming an employer is a barrier to changing the model for bellringing because it is generally so locally driven.

The piano teacher quoted above raises a slightly different context of ‘gig economy’ employment or self employed ringing teachers who could earn money direct from students but I wonder whether this could really be practical with insurance, using the church as a venue and using the church ‘equipment’ with H&S risks, safeguarding risks, etc. Even piano teachers presumably have to be careful about inviting students into their home for lessons, perhaps as a group activity bellringing is safer in some areas and riskier in others.