Supporting your adventurous activities
AE are experts in the provision of technical advice and work with a range of schools, colleges, outdoor centres, commercial companies and charities to offer a full range of services.
With many years of expertise in a broad range of settings, we are passionate about helping you facilitate authentic adventure and removing barriers to participation in outdoor activities for young people. A big barrier is often confidence of leaders or organisations in knowing whether they are doing things 'correctly' or with a more streamlined approach to paperwork and admin.
Whatever you want to achieve and wherever your starting point, our aim is to enable you to run the activities that you want to while ensuring that you maintain safe practices and put in place the necessary paperwork, processes and practicalities. We focus on not only HSE compliance but practical advice so that your activities on the ground ensure safety, rather than simply producing reams of paperwork that may never be read.
We are also able to offer on-site / site-specific training to enable your staff to deliver activities within school without undertaking formal qualifications or NGBs.
Streamlining and enabling...
We can help support you with:
- Advising on the most appropriate equipment for an activity, training staff in how to use it, care for it and store it properly, equipment record keeping;
- Checking equipment - e.g. thorough annual/6 monthly PPE checks and records;
- Site specific training and assessments - e.g. high and low ropes courses, climbing walls, bouldering walls;
- Advising on risk-benefit assessment procedure, templates, accompanying staff on recces;
- Formulating safety policies and procedures;
- Assessing how appropriate a location is for a specific activity and making site visits/recces;
- Continuing professional development days or workshops specific to your staff or groups;
- Delivery of Off-Site Safety Management and a range of CPD courses for school staff, SLTs and EVCs.
Expert Witness Services
Expert Witness services in land-based outdoor activities are provided by Cat Charlton at AE. This includes a full range of services from site visits and report writing, through to provision of information in the courtroom.
Cat is in a unique position to combine her legal understanding and experience (LLB Law Degree, MA - King's College London, Legal Practice Course - College of Law) with high level, land-based outdoor qualifications: WMCI and IML.
To ensure that her skills remain up to date, Cat undertakes regular CPD including training accredited by the Cardiff University Bond Solon CUBS expert witness programme. Further, Cat has experience of cross-examination in court on live matters (most recently December 2020) - a vital skill for an expert witness to be experienced in.
Please get in touch and ask for Cat if you would like to discuss a matter - all enquiries are dealt with in the strictest of confidence.