Good morning, all!

When I took this role, I had planned to provide quarterly updates for visibility; certainly I provide a quarterly update to the region to provide them with some oversight and to facilitate governance and, in the spirit of openness and transparency, it's only appropriate that I do the same with all of you. I had intended to write something a little closer to the end of Q2, rather than 1/3 of the way through Q3, but Real Life has conspired against me and I have been delayed for myriad reasons.

Projects and Department Update
The department continues to function in a largely unchanged manner. We've been monitoring the impact of GCAP and we are quite surprised at the sheer number of returning controllers who fall outside of the currency self-service window. Many of these returning controllers are recently returned, but we've seen a few return that have been absent for well over a decade! They are greatly welcomed back, and my team are working hard to ensure that we can bring those returning back to currency efficiently and without interruption to our rating training process.

The Division has also been carefully considering the implementation of the revised Transferring and Visiting Controller Policy, with some updates having been provided by Ben. We continue to review where we stand and ensure that we smoothly facilitate as many applications as we can, again without interruption to our normal rating training processes wherever possible.

I have enjoyed a quieter Q2 than I did Q1. I have a meeting with my team on this coming Thursday to catch up and discuss where we might make improvements and, asynchronously Mr Jennings is leading on a revision to our ATC Training Handbook. However, this will be supplemented for the first time with an ATC Training Policy. Many might view this as an unnecessary change, however there have historically been a number of changes made in which have broader impacts to the division and it is right and reasonable that these changes have at least some oversight at the DSG level. To that end, what we are allowed to do will, largely, be enshrined within the ATC Training Department Policy. How we do those things will be encapsulated in the ATC Training Handbook. Will has done tremendous work on the Handbook to date and I hope that we will see a release of both documents in short order.

Many of you will have attended the first of many DSG 'Town Halls' at the beginning of last week, with the first being specifically focused on ATC Training. I was generally pleased to see good engagement from a number of people and hope that I was able to provide some insight to people as to what we're up to. 

Statistics
It wouldn't be an Arkley blog post without some numbers, right?!

It is right and proper that we offer hearty congratulations and thanks to @Samuel Lefevre and his team in TG App who, in only seven months, have surpassed the total 2023 rating upgrade count. Mr Lefevre recently shared some statistics within the approach mentors team, whereby he reported 10 rating upgrades  throughout 2023. So far this year, we've already seen 12 and a number of our students are progressing well through their training. I am excited to see how high we can push this number throughout the remainder of the year, particularly after the summer period.

Across all training groups, as we head into the summer period and that shiny thing in the sky makes an irregular appearance, people bury themselves in books ahead of exams and Real Life gets in the way, we've seen a bit of a slow down in mentoring  but this appears to be neither significant nor problematic. Specifically, here's a quick comparison of the number of mentoring sessions across training groups:

• In TGNC, Q1 saw 220 mentoring sessions with 207 in Q2.
• In TG TWR, Q1 saw 99 mentoring sessions with 81 in Q2.
• In TG APP, Q1 saw 97 mentoring sessions with 74 in Q2.
• In TG ENR, Q1 saw 42 mentoring sessions, with a whopping 56 in Q2 - my thanks to all of our en-route mentors for stepping up in Q2.

Summary
It's a pretty short blog post from me, in all honesty: things are moving in largely the direction that I would like and we're expecting 'bigger things' to come later in the year. There will, of course, be further updates to follow as and when things  come up, but in the meantime, please continue enjoying the network, let me know if you have any questions and please extend your collective thanks to our excellent group of mentors.

All the best,
Adam