How the combined courses operate

By Cycling UK
Many of the courses that Cycling UK provide integrate training and assessment into a single, continuous course.

This means that the course is designed to enhance your existing knowledge to the point of you understanding and applying the requirements of the qualification to become a competent mountain bike leader in the context of that qualification.

Courses that are provided as combined training and assessment include:

  • Young Leader
  • Trail Leader
  • Technical Leader

Your experience

In order to attend each combined courses, you will have some prior knowledge and application of various areas such as mountain biking, group management or navigation. The course pre-requisites for each course are shown on the respective webpage.

At higher levels, the pre-requisites will include other courses that build and evidence your skills and competencies in fundamental areas. These fundamentals will then be built on and applied in more depth or in more difficult contexts and environments. An example of this is at Technical Leader where you must hold the Trail Leader Award beforehand.

You may have experiences and skills gained from other qualifications or work. These will be useful and will aid your learning, but they will still need applying to the circumstances that mountain biking situations within the qualification you are completing can present.

Pre-course work

Before your course, you need to complete some work. You will use and apply this work during your course, so it is important to complete it. An overview of the work required includes:

  • Assistant Leader: questions
  • Trail Leader: questions
  • Technical Leader: questions and completed logbook

Assessment

Whilst much of the course is about learning, some is also about your Leader Trainer assessing your skills. Much of this is formative assessment, where you will receive feedback and be able to go on towards a summative (final) assessment of your skills. This process should be as non-intrusive as possible, in order to provide as real a situation as possible, under the circumstances of a course situation.

The expectations of the qualification you are attending will be outlined during the course introduction. You will be provided with information, exemplars and environments to help you achieve these expectations. Should you choose not to apply these principles during the course, you will have to complete that particular section of the criteria in the future in order to achieve the qualification. All the sections which are completed during the course, you would not be required to show again.

Course workbook

A course workbook will be provided on the course, which will be used throughout to provide learning exercises and to evidence your continual achievement. This can be forwarded on to you electronically as a pdf file, by request, following the course.

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