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.

My understanding is that the recruitment portal is being set up because ART are focusing on teaching people to teach so whilst they offer a page to help people find a teacher they can’t offer a complete service to find a place to learn to ring everywhere.
Some Association and Guild websites are more accessible than others for someone who knows very little about bellringing but might want to learn so the Portal should help but a lot people do go through a local site from a Google search (or from a social media post, etc).

Hopefully the census (survey) which seems to be planned for November will help us understand the number of towers where no one can teach. Although it looks like it’s focused on individual ringers saying what they have done in a week so it might not capture the teaching gaps.

In the Recruitment and Development workgroup we have focused on sharing ideas / materials / case studies with those who are interested (as individuals rather than Associations) but I get your point that we are not pushing Associations to assess their capabilities or analyse the towers which are at risk of losing their band through inactivity.

help us understand the number of towers where no one can teach. Although it looks like it’s focused on individual ringers saying what they have done in a week so it might not capture the teaching gaps — Lucy Chandhial

If you want to capture what people ‘can’ do then asking what they ‘did’ in one week isn’t the best way to do it.

This is true.
I think the Census is designed to be a moment in time but until we see the planned questions I don’t know what it will capture.
If it doesn’t cover this kind of capability question then maybe I can address that separately with the R&D workgroup via the Associations later in the year.

It would be a shame to miss the opportunity to capture capability. Currently the only data we have on teachers is from ART. There were lots of teachers before ART and we don't know how many are still active but have not gone down the ART route.

I’ll see if I can find out who is organising the survey but as far as I know the workgroups are not being asked to give any input. I was part of the pilot for the last survey and gave input before and after that but I don’t know what’s happened since to change it into a census.

Currently the only data we have on teachers is from ART. — John Harrison

ART's Annual Reports are publicly available on the Charity Commission Website. The total number of delegates on its teacher training modules since the start in 2012 is 6,162. Of course many do not go on to become accredited, but ART had 811 accredited members at the end of 2025. In addition, these teachers have enrolled 11,029 new ringers on the Learning the Ropes scheme. Therefore a significant proportion of the currently estimated 30,000 ringers have either been taught by an ART member or attended an ART Module, especially when you consider that many ringers in each tower do not teach.

Since Ring for the King in 2023 when 471 people enrolled on Module 1 to learn to teach bell handling, there has been a steady decline to 401 in 2024 and 368 people in 2025 enrolling on this module. My concern is the saturation point. If Ringing 2030 is to be successful at the scale needed, take up needs to be turned round dramatically.

However, my experience as a Tutor on some of these modules is that delegates mirror the demographics of the ringing population, with many over 60, and coming because their existing tower captain is no longer able to ring. They are coming out of necessity and are not ideal trainee teacher material. This cannot be sustainable. The 1988 survey showed that the most successful tower captains were those in the 20-40 age group. Much more needs to be done with those aged 16+ in young ringers groups and university societies to get them involved with teaching. Many completing activities have young leaders schemes, why not ringing?

I think it is partly simply the demographic of ringing.
Let’s say 10% of ringers are willing to learn to teach and to teach (as a hopeful guess).
This is probably roughly consistent from age 18 to 70 because the general willingness to invest time to support others doesn’t significantly change with age.
If only 10% of ringers are under 30 and another 20% 30-50 (a guess) then a teaching module with ten people learning to teach will only have 1 under 30 and 2 30-50 year olds.
I don’t think there are more people willing to learn to teach in the older age groups as a proportion, just that there are more of them to start with.

A couple of older ringers have told me that they think the origin of today’s problem is the people who learnt in the 1970’s and made little effort to teach or recruit for their whole ringing career.
Now a reduced population of people under 50 is being expected to take more responsibility because otherwise there will be no one left in 20-30 years time.
But the proportion of ringers wiling to make it more than a hobby and to invest time to support others (whether that is teaching, running practices, organising district practices, etc) hasn’t really changed so a few people are being asked to take on everything.
I am wary of expecting more younger ringers to take on more because this could push some of them away from ringing at all. Some people really don’t want additional pressure to take responsibility when they are studying or starting a career or raising a family and some people will never take on responsibility.

I think we can make it easier for those who are willing to take on responsibility by having good structure, like the ART programme does, and be supportive that new leaders will do things their way (within reason) and share positive stories of young people who teach, lead, etc (which we do) but I think piling on the pressure that ‘saving’ bell ringing sits with young ringers is not helpful so there is a careful balance to be managed.

If a survey in 1988 found 20-40 year olds were the most successful tower captains could those 60-80 year olds still be the most successful tower captains? What makes you think it was their age that made them successful rather than something about cultural development in learning to relate to others which helped that generation be better leaders and would continue to be part of their leadership style as they got older?
Just thinking locally about my experience I don’t see an obvious link between age and tower Captain success (if successful means building a band, seeing ringers develop and ringers enjoying the regular practice so continuing as ringers).

Ultimately willing ringers in their 60’s will continue to be very useful in most towers as they are fit to teach, have time they are willing to invest and represent a significant proportion of all bell ringers (whether they learnt in their teens or on retirement).

A couple of older ringers have told me that they think the origin of today’s problem is the people who learnt in the 1970’s and made little effort to teach or recruit for their whole ringing career. — Lucy Chandhial

If a survey in 1988 found 20-40 year olds were the most successful tower captains could those 60-80 year olds still be the most successful tower captains? — Lucy Chandhial

This seems to be conjecture. In my initial post I said that a lot of effort goes into recording peals and publishing all manner of peal statistics, but very little research goes into analysing recruitment and training.

With a few mouse clicks I can see that from around 1950 to 1990 around 550 people a year rang their first peal. Since then there has been a gradual decline and last year only 146 people rang their first peal. A total of 4,709 people rang one ore more peals in 1980 and that dropped to 2,124 in 2025. I can see everyone's names and with a few more clicks find out much more too. Similarly I can see the names of 16,955 people who rang one or more quarters in 2012 and 12,500 people in 2025. However we have no reliable metrics on the numbers of active teachers, or how many people they have taught to handle, and how many are still ringing after 1 year, 2 years and 5 years, etc.

Part of the problem is the quality of teaching. There are some excellent teachers out there, but many others struggle, and would welcome help and guidance. This has been recognised for decades. In the 1990's the Central Council launched the Management Teaching and Maintenance (MTM) course. There was also the Ringing Centres initiative.

The Council's Education Committee also proposed Certified Instructors and the establishment of an 'Instructor's Guild'. There were concerns that if introduced, churches and insurance companies might insist that ringing was only taught by certificated instructors and, where none were available, ringing would cease. At the 1999 AGM the following resolution was passed “The Council asks the Education Committee not to pursue the question of certification of instructors until the Central Council Instructors’ Guild is fully established nationally and is working well.”

Following this the Education Committee set up the Network for Ringing Training. Similar to today's Ringing Recruitment Network, so we are still going round in circles.

My concern is that the baby boomers have been teaching people in their own age group all the way through. There are less and less of them. Many are suffering burn out from years of teaching and many are less willing to go out in the evenings like they used to. A lot of the the over 60 ringers are also recent learners. Many do not have the reaction time to safely rescue people who lose control. Many come on ART Modules not because they are keen to learn to teach, but because there is no one left in their tower willing to take it on.

I don't see a problem with encouraging more young ringers to get involved with teaching. You only have to look at what the Cambridge and Birmingham University Societies have done to refresh their societies in recent years to see what an impact this has had. Also the Gloucester & Bristol DA took their youth team to man a mobile belfry at a Scout event in Cirencester a few weeks ago, having held a teacher training course for their youth group last year. Everyone had great fun and rather than push them away from ringing, it could have the opposite effect as they recruit and train other young people their own age and make new friends. Had a group of grandparents manned the belfry, it would not have had the same effect. Whilst the over 60's have their place, it needs everyone working together, a balanced approach and to recruit and teach smarter.

https://www.mobilebelfries.org/case-studies/

I do agree with you that more statistics would be useful.
But I also think we need qualitative research / input as stats like the decline in peal ringing don’t answer the ‘why’ and, as others have considered in past discussions, it might be partly just that people don’t invest three hours of a day in one activity as much as they used to years ago.

I have no problem with encouraging young people to teach but I am wary of the weight of expectation on younger ringers. I know myself (at 50) that people suggest I could take on the roles which people in their 70’s are giving up but there are only so many responsibilities I can take on and for every 70-something wanting to retire from responsibility there is less than one ringer under 50 to take over and we shouldn’t expect every ringer under 50 to be willing to take on responsibilities within ringing because many (like many over 50 ringers) just want it to be a hobby which fits into their wider life.

I fully get that ringing is in a difficult position now, growing ringing at a time when many of the past teachers and helpers are retiring means we left it too late to make it easy. I think that’s why we need ringers of all ages to work together to support good quality recruitment and teaching to give new ringers the best possible opportunity to enjoy ringing and stick with it.

But, yes, more stats would help us understand where we are today and Associations should be talking about and interested in the recruitment patterns and the retention rates within their area as this is essential to the health of the ringing community in the coming years.