To all Club Water Safety Advisers
See also the page below on 2006 audits.
By letter in December 2005 every Club Hon. Sec. was advised not to audit on the previous year's form but to wait for instructions to do this on line.
In accordance with the Regional, and with the ARA Council, requirements, your club Water Safety Adviser (or a committee representative with responsibility for safety) should have submitted to the RWSA a Club Safety Audit by the 30th April 2006. By April end many clubs - some 140 odd - had not done this. By letter dated 22nd March 2006 to the Hon. Sec. at the address given by the club on the last audit, the ARA gave specific instructions to every club how to audit. It is not uncommon for the Club Hon. Sec. to have "limited" communication with the Club Water Safety Adviser and, often, most other officials in the club! So it is not suprising to the writer that less than 60 clubs of over 200 had managed to make the April deadline.
This has not been helped by the failure of the ARA's IT specialists, who were contracted to provide the Online system, and the consequential difficulties some CWSAs have had with the use of Excel in the back up plan.
Your RWSA had researched an on line back up for the Region and, at the April Council meeting, got sanction from the Region to commision an expert IT specialist to do this over the May day Bank Holiday weekend. This is now running and has been improved over the last week or so on the basis of feedback from users. Over 50 entries have been made on line representing 70 odd clubs when link clubs are taken into account. Two clubs, Molsey and Surbiton High School (same CWSA) were kind enough to do it on line as well as I had pleaded for them to do. (These clubs were the second equal ones to send in an audit and deserve considerable credit.)
By the 15th May, a day after the regional deadline, there were still over 63 clubs un-audited. Various ones promised to do it "today" and one said it had but I have not recieved it on line.
As of 1st June I am still missing over 50 clubs of which I am in contact with two (LRC and Metropolitan) who are "about" to audit.
Audits for clubs are done as follows;
Any TRRC club shown on this list as not having sent in an audit is now having action taken against them. The will be written to and given 7 days notice that they will banned from competition and disaffilation proceedings will be set in progress.
Instructions for audits on line
1 Look at the questions first by downloading the excel spread sheet from the ARA site (for the 'other' regions).
2 Prepare all your answers in soft copy at your leasure. Note that the swimming question test on the on line audit is slightly more specific than that on the excel sheet.
3 Please go to THIS link
http://safety.thames-rrc.vorboss.net
You will find the ARA Club audit on line on a 'look alike' of the Regional site.
Note that, if you don't know an answer, you can put in "[anything]" and move on to the other questions and then back. You cannot save and go back so it is best to know the answers first!
When you have filled in all the questions press the last Send or Finish button and that is it! Done!
4 I will get an email telling me you have done it and what time and within a montho or so I will send you a copy with my comments.
The software will enable me to have a CSV file of that audit and all the audits to date and the '57 varieties' of question in columns and this can be put into an excel spreadsheet for analysis so all the regional data can at once be collated.
POLITE REQUEST FOR HELP
A thank you to all efficient club WSAs who sent the audits by the end of last month. For those consciencious and well-organised 60 odd clubs listed on this link here that have done this already, and a particular mention must be made of the excellent performance by many of the Oxford colleges, we are requesting you - if you can possibly bear to - to redo the audit on line (mostly cut and paste?). This will enable the region to have all your data automatically collated and save a huge amount of mindless effort. There is absolutely no requirement to do so and, if you can't bear the thought, the RWSA or other persons will simply buckle down and do it.
Yrs
Chris George 1/6/2006