Over the weekend of 15th-16th March 2025 the Association of Ringing Teachers (ART) held their annual conference this year at the University of York. Several members of the LDG were in attendance. Some had been before, and for some it was their first adventure!
Leicestershire has benefited in the last few years from a number of willing teachers attending various ART M1 (handling) and M2 (progressing to ring with others) teaching modules with many now being certified and more working on it. Not all areas are as lucky as we are, but we met with ART Members from at least as far afield as Plymouth to Glasgow!
It can often be easy to be stuck in your local view of how ringing is going, maybe your local area has struggled to recruit and retain new ringers, maybe you want to recruit but you don’t have anyone willing or able to teach. For those of us who are teaching it is invigorating to get together with others doing the same and share ideas and enthusiasm for the future of ringing. The palpable positivity about the future of ringing, hearing about the amazing stuff going on with hubs and youth groups and rebuilt bands is great.
Over the Saturday we had a number of presentations about styles of leadership and of learning. We had seminar style discussions on safeguarding, running youth groups, and how ingrained culture can both help and hinder. There were practical sessions on using simulators, using Hawk-Ear, teaching ringing with good rhythm, trying out new techniques for addressing handling faults. There were discussions about having difficult conversations with ringers, and trading ideas to help learners overcome stumbling blocks.
There was a very good demo of the new smartringer.org website for managing our learners which we hope to get access to later this year, and of course there was a meal out to a local pub! No larger gathering of ringers would be complete without a pub!
Sunday we had a very interesting presentation from Simon Linford on the risks to churches with the changes going on in the C of E, and how we may as a community need to look at the big picture as nostalgic rings become stuck behind the bureaucracy of Listed Building Status without the “freedoms” offered by the church’s Faculty procedures.
The cherry on the cake at the end of the weekend was a trip to go and ring at York Minster. 66 of us had signed up to go visit, which when the staircase has a fire safety capacity of 38 meant we needed to schedule as 2 groups! Everyone who wanted to got to have a ring. Even those of us not familiar with 12 bell ringing had a go on R&CC. Rebecca Banner was delighted to be able to up her personal best heaviest bell ever rung by ringing the tenor, she even stood it quicker than everyone else who was visiting (in that group) which earned her some applause!
We came home at the end of the weekend, exhausted but enthusiastic to keep up the good work and look forward to a more local conference next year as they hope to hold it in the Loughborough area.
Sarah Catherall
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