Ringing Forums

I receive the learning to ring enquiries for the bellringing.London site and therefore receive enquiries mostly related to the Middlesex Association but sometimes beyond. I agree with your approximate stats on the number of enquiries which actually lead to someone who learns.
Last year we had 60 enquiries (43 in 2024 and 66 in 2023).
Alongside this I hear of many enquiries made within a specific church, from people who hear the bells whether church goers or not, and are drawn to ask about ringing.

The Recruitment and Development workgroup held a briefing on 8th Feb that shared a newcomer’s perspective on Association websites and how we could improve the learning to ring accessibility. The slides and recording are available here: R&D briefing slides for recruitment via websites

It is still obvious to me, from the enquiries I receive, that we don’t always have the teaching capacity to match the enquiries and that the Ring for the King style big uplift in recruits is hard to handle so a steady drip feed is easier to work with.

I’m sure the recruitment portal will help. But it still relies on local availability of teachers with time to commit so that enquiries are followed up and people are given their best chance to learn.

We will need more ringers to be willing to learn to teach handling. ART is willing to run the courses to support people to learn to teach but many people shy away from the time commitment or the responsibility / risk factor or both.

Associations could do a review of which towers are unable to teach new learners and try to address this as a fundamental key to building a band is being able to teach from scratch.
This is probably more important now than whether or not people get the chance to ring Bristol maximus or how many peals are rung but I agree that our Association Annual Report and committee meetings tend to focus more on the ‘elite’ end of ringing and less on ensuring we will have ringers in the future.

Whilst stressing the need to focus attention on recruitment per se we also need to consider retention of individuals. Most social activities go through an inevitable change of participants over time, whether it's anything from bell-ringing to evening institute badminton. Groups that are unaware of that process and so fail to address the factors affecting retention of membership fail to be self-sustaining. Every university society loses a tranche of members each year but focusses heavily on the next year's student intake with a robust recruitment process. They have finite durations of membership and can turn a blind eye to the retention problem. However, most other groups, such as ringing bands and caving groups, have the opposite problem - if they wish to survive they must actively recruit enough to maintain at least an equilibrium in numbers, but if they fail to address why members lapse, members will keep leaving and recruitment of replacements becomes a permanent, major problem. There is a 'critical mass' situation - existing numbers and current activities must be tailored to sustain the interest of participants. Small groups of experienced participants, if they're indifferent to the needs of inexperienced beginners, will not retain the latter no matter how hard the group ostensibly recruits. There must be enough experienced people around who ARE aware of the needs, aspirations and interests of those beginners. We must be willing to pay attention to what the beginners are doing and what they want to do. If they don't want to ring a peal in two months, accept that, and find out what will sustain their interest for the next decade and work on providing that.

With the best will in the world initatives by the CCCBR and guilds and associations will fail if the frontline resources dont exist. There is a massive disconnect between the CCCBR , Guilds and Associations and the average parish band, where one exists. Reform was promised by the CCCBR it never came in any meaningful form. As others have said there are those that do and most effective initatives are locally based and those that talk a lot and pontificate. Sorry to be blunt but we have seen similar events produce little longterm uptake , ring for the king being an example , and to keep doing the same thing hoping for a different result is madness

I think the CCCBR has learnt from the Ring for the King experience and decided to aim for a steady recruitment drive, locally led rather than event driven. The aim of the new portal is to give people a useful place to land if they Google (or ask Chat GPT, etc) about where they could learn to ring.
It is definitely true that without people willing to teach at a tower the band will not grow. I think most parish bands do know someone from their local Guild or Association who offers some kind of support or advice, even if it’s simply by joining in and ringing with them once a month, but people are unlikely to be pushy about ideas around recruitment and teaching because the time investment means people have to want to take it on.
What would you like the Association / Guild or CCCBR to do differently to encourage or support towers to recruit and teach effectively?

As a former CC Rep and from yhst expierience I remain of the view that the whole organisation needs to slim down and stick to the things that no one else will or can do . Doves Database, Methods, promulgating information and good practicr and recording peals, basically an information exchange. In the current economic climate expensive get togethers shouldnt be part of the agenda, deal with it on Zoom or teams , one rep per guild , the rest made of people doing something . Cutting out large in person meetings would go a long way to save the planet. I could go on.

We seem to have deviated significantly from the point of my original question which was that a lot of effort goes into recording peals, but very little goes into analysing and learning about what is happening with recruitment and training, and what affiliated Guilds and Associations are actually doing on the ground to address the current demographic challenges? A planned national survey in 2015 was abandoned due to hostility from certain quarters, so it will be interesting to see how many get on board with ensuring a good response to this November's planned national ringing census.

The www.wearebelringing.org URL was set up two years ago for the Essex Jamboree and the 'recruitment portal' was supposed to be up and running soon afterwards. Looking at this year's CCCBR's meeting papers the Technology Workgroup's brief report talks of problems with resources getting the portal back on track, with an engagement portal planned to be deployed this summer. But summer will be over soon and I am not convinced. Also isn't this duplicating what ART has been doing since it was established following decisions made at the Council's 2017 AGM, with £20,000 of the Council's own money?

We seem to be going round in circles and getting nowhere.