Jim Perks – The responsibility of being Teacher

Everyone Calls you Teacher, which is nice. But you do quickly realise that’s there’s huge responsibility that sits under that name. You know, the planning of it, the execution of it great, fine, we can all do that , we’ve done that as Ops Officers years ago, so you do become a bit of an Ops Officer again. Then you realise that you are Teacher, not Assessor, Teacher.

You’ve got to teach these guys, and it’s not … you shouldn’t have to be teaching them how to war fight, how to fight the submarine. You should be teaching them how to command, how to look after their people, how to take their crew with them. We tried to ensure that they understood what fatigue and tiredness does to an individual, particularly themselves, how their characters do or do not change under pressure and stress.

Go to learn that there’s a lot of self-learning in this which is Teacher’s responsibility to draw that out and ensure that learning happens, to make them the very best Captains that they can be, because they’ve got to take 130 people with them.

That’s the difference being in command. It’s the same in any command, but it’s amplified in a submarine ‘cos you can’t go away and ask somebody.