Edington Centre delivers ITTS to Devizes Branch

During the last three years the Devizes Branch, with the help of our Guild and the Ringing Foundation, have established The Edington Training Centre. We are very fortunate to have this facility in our area and we run regular Training sessions at all levels. We also run Beginners practices during most weeks and have been surprised at the number of new ringers who regularly come along from all over the Devizes Branch to have supervised “Time on the Rope”. Absolute Beginners Courses have been very well attended, resulting in at least 22 new bell handlers during the three years with 20 of these still ringing and enjoying their new activity.

As you can see we are a product of our own success so to speak and we were struggling to keep up this very exhausting programme – that is until our first ITTS Day Course last September. We now have three and some times four Teachers accredited to Module 1 and at least two Mentors who come regularly to teach at The Edington Training Centre. As a direct result we have four new Bell handlers who have all attained the Level 1 of the Learning the Ropes scheme and six more teachers who have embarked on Module 1 and will be taking Module 2 in May.

There are ten Committee Members from the Devizes Branch and Training Centre with a total of 20 ringers who have been instructed in the ITTS way of teaching bell handling, this means that our students enjoy continuity and a good standard of bell control training in at least 14 of our Branch Towers which in the 7 months that we have been involved with ITTS is pretty good going.

I would like to record a big thank you to the Association of Ringing Teachers, our Tutor Frank Seabright who has instructed and inspired us and to all the Devizes Branch Ringers who have given their time and patience to be involved in this. I think that the ITTS is such a clever idea especially with the Mentors (mainly Tower Captains or ringers who have already taught bell handling) being so involved – it results in confidence, skill and companionship together with many new ringers which is what we should all be striving for.