In April 2007 the new Army Training and Recruitment Staff Leadership School will open at Pirbright, Surrey. All training and education of soldiers falls under the remit of the Army Training and Recruitment Agency (ATRA). It is responsible for every stage of a recruit's progress from initial selection and recruit training, through specialist courses prior to being posted to a regiment.
The ATRA annual budget is £600-700m, from which it needs to enlist 15,000 recruits and to train almost 100,000 officers and soldiers. It delivers 1500 different types of courses and runs at least 6000 individual courses each year. In real terms this means that ATRA is training on average 12,000 officers and soldiers every day. ATRA itself is a sizeable organisation with ten divisions and 12,000 staff, all of whom ultimately report to the Director General of Army Training, Major General Andrew Graham, CBE.
ATRA is also the lead agency for two of the six tri-service Defence Training Establishments (DTEs), the Defence College of Logistics and the Defence College of Communications and Information Systems. The purpose of DTEs is to harmonise military training by replacing the old single service system with a tri-service structure. Five other DTEs fall under the remit of other agencies:
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College
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Agency
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Logistics
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Army Training and Recruitment Agency
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Communications and Information Systems
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Army Training and Recruitment Agency
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Intelligence
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No comment from the M.O.D. to our enquiry
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Medical Education and Training
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No comment from the M.O.D. to our enquiry
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Colleges of Mechanical & Electrical Engineering
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Naval Recruiting & Training Agency
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Colleges of Police & Personnel Administration & Aeronautical Engineering
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Training Group Defence Agency
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In its Annual report ATRA also mentions several factors that they believe have contributed to the 10.3% shortfall in recruitment targets for soldiers and 5.8% shortfall in officer recruitment. These include, the government’s policy on increasing participation in tertiary education, the Iraq war, negative publicity from the Deepcut inquiry and the Adult Learning Inspectorate’s Safer Training report, which highlighted serious shortcomings in the army’s treatment and training of new recruits. These included low-levels of literacy and numeracy amongst recruits, inadequate remedial assistance, bullying and poor selection and training of instructors. The recommendations of this report are already having a direct impact on creation and management of DTEs and in the evaluation of the consortia bidding for the new Tri Service Academy.
