As you will be aware, Aberdeenshire Council’s Procedures for Offsite Excursions document provides guidance on adventurous excursions and activities.
Where adventurous activities are led or provided by Aberdeenshire Council staff or volunteers, these people must have appropriate up to date qualifications. In most cases this will be a National Governing Body award or in some cases a specific Aberdeenshire Council qualification. Some examples are shown below, but this is not an exhaustive list.
This applies to all of the wide range of adventurous activities provided in or by schools and other establishments and includes adventurous activities within the Duke of Edinburgh award.
As part of our Excursion Guidance and as a requirement of our Adventurous Activities Licensing Service (AALS) licence, we are required to have the qualifications which staff and volunteers rely upon to deliver or lead adventurous activities, recorded where they can be seen by Heads of Establishments and by AALS inspectors.
These qualifications must be recorded on the Evolve system. They can be either scanned in or added in as photographs. This is done in the “My Profile” section of Evolve and then by clicking on “awards and training” once you are in “My details”.
While you will only need to include your qualifications once, except when they need to be updated, you will need to complete an Activity Leader Form (ALF) for each adventurous activity on each trip.
Qualifications and ALFs must be added in advance of the excursion to allow those authorising the activity to examine the qualifications being relied upon.
If the qualifications are unable to be seen on the Evolve submission, then the excursion will be unable to be authorised and the trip may be delayed while the qualifications are updated.
The establishment Educational Visits Coordinator (EVC) will be able to assist with this and the “Help” pages within Evolve give clear instructions on how to add in the qualifications.