Category Archives: About ATE

  1. Just for fun: the 2019 Monitor Training Course staff team by numbers

    The figures featured in this blog are all based on real sums. We just can’t show you our working because we’ve lost the envelope we did the maths on. Over dinner on the eve of the 2019 Monitor Training Course, the instructing team did a quick tally of the Superweeks and school weeks they’d worked…

  2. About ATE: It’s ATE’s 20th Birthday! Cat W talks about what these 20 years mean to us.

    This year, ATE celebrates its 20th birthday! Together with our predecessor body, Colony Holidays, we’ve been running for over fifty years, and this year celebrates 20 years since we were established as ATE. We spoke to Cat, a Monitor and former Superweeker, who put on her Official Birthday Party hat to talk to us: “Twenty years of…

  3. Ethos: Play on Superweeks

    I’m lucky that my experience in schools, with scouts and with summer camps has given me plenty of opportunity to see opportunities of brilliant play opportunities in action. I have never been more impressed than what I’ve witnessed on Superweeks run by The Active Training and Education Trust (The ATE Trust). On a Superweek, play…

  4. The ATE ‘Curriculum’

    We have so many fun ideas and activities up our sleeves that we never run the same week twice, so every Superweek, school week or activity day we run is completely unique. But to give you an idea of what you might get up to with us, do take a read of our ‘official curriculum’: Foil…

  5. The Great Outdoors

    The chief executive of the National Trust, Dame Fiona Reynolds, gave an interview to the Times this week (March 2012) regarding what she suggests is a nationwide ‘anxiety’ that is causing children to miss out on play and nature. “Children are missing out on the sheer joy and physical and mental well-being of being able…

  6. Serious fun

    Millions of British children are “culture starved” as they have never been to an art gallery, theatre or museum, a study has claimed this week (Feb 2012) on BBC news. The research, commissioned by Visit Birmingham, found four in 10 children had never been to an art gallery, while a quarter of parents had never…

  7. We don’t try to keep children from getting dirty and we do climb trees

    We think we are fairly unique organisation. We are professional game-players and fun-havers, and take this role incredibly seriously. We are not a big-headed organisation, but we do know that we deliver something of extremely high quality, and it’s delivered by people who care, a lot, and who share an ethos and philosophy surrounding just…

  8. 50 things you could find yourself doing on a Superweek this summer

    Following the lead of our very good friends at the National Trust, we’ve created our own list of 50 things to do. You’ll find all of these and more on your Superweek this summer, and we reckon it’s really, really important that you do at least 30 of these things before you get too old and…

  9. So what actually is ATE? | Keynotes from Barry

    How exciting, I find that I am finally entering the ‘blogosphere’. A bit chilly, but I think I might take to it. One of the problems that everyone who is, or has been, involved with ATE Superweeks (or Colony Holidays before them) has is the extreme difficulty one finds in explaining to other people what…