Corporal Alexander Ogilvie reports on his recent attendance on the SNCO Course:
On the 26th of April I and a number of other Cadets from the Wellington region caught a bus to RNZAF Base Ohakea. We were heading off to the Senior NCO Course which is a Course that is designed to train Junior NCOs to become Senior NCOs.
This Course differs from the JNCO Course primarily by its way of organising the NCO’s attending, instead of being told what to do all the time and how to do it we were mostly left to do it all ourselves. The idea behind this was that it would be a self-management course, we would have to organise all our ironing and wake ourselves up, set our own shower time and a number of other tasks such as that.
For everyone who has been to Ohakea and stayed in the Barracks, we stayed in M block which is the accommodation block opposite from L block. The relevance of this is that we were staying in our own room. This was important as it added another level onto our self-management – we had to keep our room tidy and everything organised in our own space, with no one else to watch over us and spot anything we might be doing wrong.
The course I attended happened to be a trial course for a new system of running the course for 6 days rather than 7. This meant that we would have far less time to be able to complete all our lessons and examinations than previous courses had. Despite this we were able to achieve an almost 100% pass rate with only a small number of people needing retests and an even smaller number failing. Those who did fail usually only failed in one of the three examinations.
Another change in this particular Course was that the staff were all Junior Officers with the Course being staffed by three Pilot Officers with two Warrant Officers and an Under Officer as Cadet Staff.
We jumped straight into training on day 1 after setting up our Barracks, marching down to the Training Centre that afternoon. We did lessons for the rest of the evening until around 5.30 at which point we marched to the Mess to eat dinner and from there we marched to our Barracks, sat around for a while, some of us studying our notes and then went to bed.
After a 6.00 am wake up (which would be the wake up time every day for the whole course, for those of us that didn’t sleep in anyway) we got ready in around 45 minutes, marched to the Mess, ate breakfast and marched to the Training Centre. We remained there until around midday, at which point we marched back to the Mess, ate lunch and the returned to the training centre until 5.30 where we again returned to the Mess, ate dinner and marched back to the Barracks where we studied our notes for the upcoming test and then went to bed.
The schedule remained almost identical to this throughout the week so I won’t say every single part of it, but the main points was the 6 am wake up, 6 pm dinner and training in between those times.
We were examined on three different subjects throughout the course and these were Instructional Technique, Drill and Leadership. The first of these, Instructional Technique was basically just teaching us how to instruct a lesson at our Squadron. We had to create a lesson plan on a random topic given to us and instruct a lesson on it. Throughout the lesson we conducted, we were marked by two staff sitting at the back of the classroom and if we met the criteria we passed. For my practice (There was only a practice for the lesson examination as it was deemed the most difficult and we had enough time) I was given a lesson on the recovery position and then for my main theory lesson I was given a lesson on the environmental care code (this was lucky as I had taught that lesson two times already at our unit).
The second of the assessments was a leadership assessment. In this we were given a task and we had to brief and then command a team of around ten people to complete the task. We were assessed on our control of the group and how we gave out commands to complete it. We were also assessed on our briefing method which was GSMEAC in this situation (the Brief is the introduction to the task you give to your team, in this case you need to explain the ground, situation, mission, execution, administration and logistics and finally command and control).
And the last assessment was the Flight SNCO drill, the same as what the Corporals or Sergeants do every night when they are in command of a Flight on Parade. This particular assessment was of course split into Corps, with the Cadet Corps for example doing platoon drill.
Despite the fact that our course was a day shorter we still finished with at least half a day spare and so we watched a movie on the final night and just relaxed.
We were told by the Regular force sergeant who had been in charge of our course that we were the best course he had had in the seven years he had been running courses, with not a single person being sent home or disciplined and almost all of us passing every test despite the fact we had a day less than any other course. We also had a very high standard in our random inspections, and only one person’s room was deemed to be below standard but that was most probably due to the fact that they woke up 5 minutes before breakfast and proceeded to get dressed and get outside in around 4 minutes and still have his uniform to a good standard (which I must say I was quite impressed by) so as could be expected his room wasn’t very good.
