Quest - learning or resettlement?

When we talk to people serving in the Armed Forces about Quest we often hear expressions like 'Oh yeah, that's that resettlement mag, isn't it?' and 'I don't read it. I'm not leaving yet!'

Yet huge amounts of our editorial and much of our advertising is nothing to do with jobs outside the Royal Navy, the Army and the RAF, and training specifically developed for Service leavers. It is actually about learning throughout life. About what is variously called personal improvement, education, personal development and lifelong learning in the Services, and no doubt a number of other things elsewhere. For simplicity, we will call it education here.

This process is managed, encouraged, facilitated and administered by the Service education staff through units and specially designed centres that link with Service and civilian education and training facilities. There is money to support this activity, and it has its own chain of command. This creates a budget, which is a good thing; and a stovepipe that can make it appear to be an activity that is separate to and not integrated with others, which is a bad thing.

It is a fact that everybody serving in the Armed Forces will leave them one day. A few people will leave because they die, but the vast majority will leave because their contract comes to an end - voluntarily or because they are time-expired. The process that helps them make the transition from uniform to the outside world is called resettlement - but only by the Services.

This also has its own budget and staff system, as well as separate contracts with civilian organisations to provide services. It has its own buildings and offices, clerks and cleaners, forms and allowances. So it is housed in a separate stovepipe to the education one.

Cut vertically, these are different systems. The individual commanders and managers within them talk with each other and co-ordinate what they are doing - but only so far as single-Service priorities allow. (And single-Service priorities can differ greatly and involve a certain amount of 'friendly' sniping on occasion.)

It may be that this up-and-down slicing of the cake is necessary in the real world of funding and budget accountability. It may even be that this is a wholly satisfactory way in which things should be run. We do not seek to criticise here, but merely to point out the realities.

But while stovepipes can be very useful in allocating priorities and resources, they can lead to blinkered thinking. Like the leader of a Service presentation team a few years ago who insisted that his job was to encourage recruiting. What he meant was that his team was paid from the Service recruiting budget. His job, of course, was actually to promote the Service, and indeed the other Services as well, to the general public in order to improve their support and understanding.

As far as individuals are concerned, general and specialist Service training, education and resettlement training are all part of their lifelong development as a person. Within limits, the person who has undertaken more lifelong development will be more capable at more things than the individual who has done less. The stovepipe that paid for it, or that provided the individual who organised it is utterly irrelevant to the individual - all that matters is that it happened.

So this cake that the system slices vertically for its own reasons is actually sliced horizontally by the user - the individual Service man and woman. As they work their way through the various training stages of a Service career - recruit, military, specialist, management, education, resettlement - they pass through a series of stovepipes that are providing the resources for and delivery of the activity they are undergoing. As long as there is liaison and dialogue across the edges of the stovepipes, this will work; and the best system will have stovepipe joints that are invisible to the individual.

So we go back to the beginning of this leader, and ask 'Why is Quest seen as a resettlement magazine when its content is so clearly about lifelong development of which resettlement is only one part, albeit a very important one?'

The answer, clearly, is that we are seen as belonging in the resettlement stovepipe despite all the content that clearly proclaims otherwise. Why this should be the case we cannot say. Perhaps it is the fact that we talk with the Career Transition Partnership. But we talk with education authorities and government departments, with colleges and universities and with the single-Service staffs as well as with the 'purple' MoD policy-makers.

So, we say that Quest should be put into education facilities as well as resettlement centres. Give Quest to all learners as one tool among many that will inspire and help them to make the most of all the opportunities available to achieve as much as they can. Use us throughout a Service career rather than just at the end of one.

Single-Service priorities can differ greatly and involve a certain amount of 'friendly' sniping on occasion

Quest should be put into education facilities as well as resettlement centres

Use us throughout a Service career rather than just at the end of one