I hope you’re all enjoying the summer weather and making the most of the runs and trips available.

As I write this, we’re preparing for the Observer Weekend, which is an important event in the Observer and Training calendar. We will be taking some key themes from the Observer training day we held earlier in the year and developing these into practical sessions that can be applied on the road. The Observer Weekend provides an opportunity for communications and updates with the Observers, is partly a ‘thank you’ for all the work the Observers put in and allows the Observers and Training Team to further develop and share best practice.

There are two initiatives that will be discussed at the Observer weekend that have a much wider relevance to the club:

  1. We are planning on organising some weekend sessions for Associates. These will be slightly more ‘intensive’ than normal and could comprise observed runs in the morning and afternoon of both days of a couple of weekends. This should give the selected candidates up to 8 observed runs over a couple of weekends.
  2. We are planning on running a trial of the IAM RoadSmart scheme ‘membership by portfolio’ which was previously known as ‘group sign off’. This scheme gives a local group, such as TVAM, the ability to qualify Associates as Full Members without the requirement for an exter-nally conducted assessment. The intention is to attract and retain those members who are currently put off by having to face an external examiner (however friendly they might appear on the day).

We will be discussing both of the above at the Observer Weekend so that we have criteria in place to evaluate the trials and we can judge what resources we might need to ensure they are effective. I hope to be able to update you on these initiatives soon.
With lots more riding going on in the summer weather I want to remind everyone that if you are unfortunate enough to suffer an incident whilst riding then please let the Training Team know by dropping an email to incident@tvam.org. We would like to gather more information about incidents so that we can evaluate our training programmes and all information will be treated confidentially.

Look forward to catching up with you all on a social run or trip somewhere soon.

Best wishes

Chris Brownlee
Chief Observer