Permits you issue yourself

Most campsites only ever record tickets from outside — an NGB award, a first aid certificate. Somebody else issues those and somebody else expires them, and all we do is hold the dates. If that’s you, skip this section; nothing below appears until you ask for it.

A centre that trains its own instructors needs something else: its own sign-off. “May run our tower” is a decision you made, not a certificate somebody posted you, and it has two parts a ticket doesn’t. On the qualifications list, choose We do — a permit when you add one.

Say what it rests on. A permit can list the outside tickets behind it. This is the part worth having: when one of those lapses, the permit stops covering a session even though nobody touched the permit. A first aid certificate running out in August quietly undoes an archery sign-off made in March, and a flat list of certificates has no way to notice. The schedule names the ticket that did it, so you get “rests on First Aid, which expired 1 August” rather than being told the permit is bad.

A permit needs a name against it. Until somebody signs it off it reads as not signed off — which is deliberately not the same as not held. One means they’ve never done it; the other means they finished in March and nobody signed the form. Those look identical on a rota and are nothing alike to fix.

Log how they got there. Training, supervised sessions and an assessment, each with a date and who they were with. Anybody who can run a session can log one — the person who ran this morning’s archery is the one who knows who assisted, and making them find an administrator first is how the log stops being kept. Signing off is an owner-or-leader job.

You can say how many supervised sessions a permit asks for, and the sign-off box tells you when somebody is short. It will still let you sign them off: you may have watched them for ten years, and a system that refuses just gets four made-up sessions typed in, which is worse than an honest record. The count keeps showing what actually happened either way.

Point an activity at the permit rather than the outside ticket and the session check covers everything behind it at once. The evidence pack prints permits too, and a permit nobody has signed prints in red rather than as a blank — blank reads as nothing to report, and this is the opposite.

One limit worth knowing: a permit can rest on outside tickets, but not on another of your permits. “Level 2 needs Level 1” can’t be written down — list Level 2’s outside prerequisites on Level 2 directly. Ask us if you need the other thing.