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Birmingham 4
Birmingham - taster session

This year, BUSCR has had an extremely successful freshers recruitment period, in no small part due to the support we have received from ART.

We have been lucky in recent years that a lot of existing ringers have come to Birmingham for university however at the start of this year we found ourselves with 4 student ringers and not knowing of any existing ringers coming to Birmingham. As a society representing all the universities across Birmingham we have always had challenges with being affiliated with specific student unions/guilds and haven’t been affiliated with any since 2018. This has made it difficult to get involved with freshers’ fairs.

With the help of Simon Linford and Ian Roulstone’s chancellor contacts, we secured a space at Aston University’s freshers’ fair. Using our grant from ART, we were able to hire the Touring Tower for the day. We spent the day on the stall, giving people a go on the mini ring and advertising our upcoming taster sessions at Edgbaston. We found being able to give people a go extremely beneficial and drew people to the stall. By the end of the day we had 60 student’s phone numbers to send more information to.

Due to our lack of affiliation with the University of Birmingham’s student union we were not able to have an official stall there. This didn’t stop us! We set up a makeshift stand along a busy campus route, with a table and handbells. Three of our existing ringers spent 5 days handing out flyers, giving people a go on handbells and encouraging them to come to our tower taster sessions. This was much trickier than having the mini ring at Aston, however, we were still successful and gained some interest.

During these freshers fairs we had two existing ringers approach us keen to join. We have already rung a first QP for one of them. It is a shame that neither of them had been told about us in advance, they both come from towers with ringers that know about university societies. We decided to run 3 dedicated taster sessions at Edgbaston, our student tower. These were extremely well attended with 44 people attending across the 3 nights. During these sessions we gave everyone a demo of ringing, tower tours to see the bells, some handbell ringing, a go at ringing tower bells (and brownies!).

Following these taster sessions, everyone was invited to join our regular practices as well as some additional 1-to-1 sessions. We are pleased that 15 people have returned to the first 3 practices of the term after the taster session and are making excellent progress. It’s also been nice to see many of the new recruits getting involved in the social side of the society, with trips to the pub held after every practice and the Halloween party/quiz coming up. Throughout the sessions we have been using the LtR logbooks to help structure our teaching, particularly using handbell ringing due to the limited tower space. We look forward to using these books more as our learner’s progress.

We would like to express our thanks to ART for their grant, which allowed us to have the mini-ring at Aston, along with all their ongoing support and advice, Ian Roulstone and Simon Linford for their assistance in the mini ring at Aston’s freshers fair and to our master, Lucas Williams, for all his hard work in organising all of our recruitment events. This recruitment period has been extremely successful, and we look forward to building on it in years to come.