Leadership, Safety and Risk Management

Cave Safety Guidelines

ASF Cave Accident/Incident Form

The ASF Cave Accident/Incident Form is available here for reporting any accidents or incidents (a situation where an accident nearly occurred). You can download a text form which can be filled out and emailed to the General Secretary
or download a PDF form and post it to:

Australian Speleological Federation Inc.
PO BOX 388
BROADWAY NSW 2007

Accident Form as Text file or Accident Form as PDF file

The ASF Caving Leadership Scheme

Adopted January, 1998
Contact the Executive as the Convenor position is currently vacant
Download the Caving Leadership Training Scheme Overview Adopted January, 1998 (594kb pdf file)

The ASF scheme has arisen to accommodate a range of needs of clubs in the federation. These range from those that are under land manager pressure to have a formalised scheme in place to ensure continued access, to those who do not have these immediate needs, but see the advantage in better documentation of the training the club already provides for their nominated club leaders.

It is a recreational outdoor leadership certificate which is based on national competency standards. The requirements for a vocational award in outdoor leadership are similar to those required for the ASF scheme. However there are other administrative aspects in a vocational award, such as administrative skills, which are not part of the ASF Scheme.

The scheme is not a set of skills required for every member in ASF clubs. It was designed for those who are leading dependant caving parties . These will be trips involving beginners or novices and those trips which involve members who are under 18 years of age, to well documented caving areas.

For experienced groups of cavers, some people will consider that the dynamics of peer group caving with the sharing of leadership and knowledge, and the changes in leadership roles within these groups makes it unnecessary to have a nominated "trained leader" in charge of the group.

However, the training will be a useful option for those who wish to extend their personal skills in caving leadership and all members of the Federation are urged to consider participation in the leadership scheme.

Flexibility is expected in the implementation of the ASF Caving Leadership Scheme. Club members who have no immediate need to be an accredited Caving Leader are not expected to be required to have a Caving Leader in the party to go caving.

However, the more Caving Leaders a club has the easier it will be to run trips for dependant parties for training new club members.

The ASF Caving Leadership Standards consists of:
Horizontal Caving Leader
Laddering Caving Leader
Vertical Caving Leader

Each Leader level consists of five streams;
Personal caving skills
Leadership for caving with dependent parties
Emergency and rescue responses
Supervised caving leadership
Assessment of the candidates leadership ability leading a dependent party

There are three levels of Caving Instructor;
Horizontal Caving Instructor
Laddering Caving Instructor
Vertical Caving Instructor

As experiences gained in applying these standards, areas for improvement will no doubt be identified. Clubs are encouraged to develop training resources such as notes, information packages, etc and make suggestions or ideas on further developing these standards.

For copyright reasons, these standards are not available online. Corporate members should contact the Executive for a copy of the standards. Individual members should ask their club secretary or training officer about the standards.

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