Dan Jarvis – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Defence

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Dan Jarvis on 2014-06-17.

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what criteria he will use in deciding in which schools to establish a new Combined Cadet Force detachment.

Anna Soubry

The cost of setting up a new Combined Cadet Force (CCF) unit under the Cadet Expansion Programme depends largely on the number of cadets in the unit.

Decisions on opening new CCFs in schools are made jointly by the Department for Education and Ministry of Defence (MOD). The key criteria for deciding which schools can establish a new CCF are the ability of the school to fund the new unit and provide sufficient adult volunteers to run it. However, we are particularly interested in establishing CCFs in areas of deprivation.

No assessment has been made of the effect of establishing new CCFs in state schools on recruitment to community cadet units. However, it should be noted that CCFs and community cadet units deliver different but complementary elements of the MOD’s youth engagement strategy.