Introducing the Instructor & Cadet Training Pathway (ITP)

Hi there,

It's here. After months of development and one of the most requested additions to membership we've ever had, the Instructor & Cadet Training Pathway is now live for all BMABA clubs.

For years, the same question has landed in our inbox in a hundred different forms: "I've got a brilliant assistant. How do I turn them into an instructor properly?"

Until now, the honest answer was that the sector didn't really have one. Martial arts has never had a consistent, structured, safeguarding-led route from the mats to the front of the class. Talented assistants and young leaders were developed on instinct and goodwill, with no shared framework, no recorded evidence of their journey, and no recognised standard at the end of it.

The ITP changes that. And crucially, it does it without taking the development of your people out of your hands.

What is the ITP?

The Instructor & Cadet Training Pathway is a structured development route that takes assistant instructors and young cadets from supervised support roles through to recognised, qualified instructor status, all under the supervision of an experienced lead instructor at their club.

It brings together everything a developing instructor needs in one place.

A defensible national standard. We set the minimum requirements at every stage. That baseline is standardised, indexed and quality-assured, so an ITP stage completed in one club means the same thing in any other. It's a national benchmark clubs can stand behind with parents, venues, insurers and anyone else who asks.

A clear, staged progression. No more guesswork. Learners move through defined stages with transparent expectations at each step, so both the learner and their supervising instructor always know where they are and what comes next.

Supervised, evidenced development. Every learner is linked to a supervising instructor, and progress is logged against their record. When someone completes the pathway, there's a full evidence trail behind the certificate, not just a handshake.

Integrated CPD. The pathway draws on our growing library of CPD courses, from safeguarding and first aid awareness through to coaching children and young people, curriculum design and trauma-informed practice, so learners build genuine underpinning knowledge as they develop practically.

A safeguarding-first cadet route. The cadet strand is designed specifically for young people developing leadership skills within their club, built around age-appropriate expectations and the supervision and safeguarding standards you'd expect from us as a professional standards body.

Your club, your pathway

Here's the part we're most proud of: the ITP is club-driven by design.

Our minimum standards are exactly that, a minimum. They exist to guarantee a consistent, defensible national baseline. Everything above that line belongs to the club.

Want your pathway to be tougher than the national standard? Raise the bar. Clubs can build more challenging, more rigorous in-house programmes on top of the base requirements, so your ITP can reflect the standards your club is known for.

Clubs can also add their own custom CPD requirements to the pathway. Dedicated in-house courses. Competition experience. Club events. Specific training milestones. Whatever development looks like in your dojo, gym or hall, you can build it into the pathway and track it in exactly the same indexed, professional way as the national requirements.

The result is the best of both worlds: a standardised, quality-assured system for tracking instructor development, wrapped around a programme that stays personal, bespoke and 'on the mats'. Driven by you, not by us. We provide the framework and the floor. You decide what excellence looks like at your club.

Why it matters

We support a workforce of more than 6,500 instructors and coaches across 200+ disciplines, and one thing is true in every single one of them: the next generation of instructors is already in the room. They're the assistant holding pads on a Tuesday night. They're the teenager who stays behind to help pack the mats away.

What they've been missing is a road. The ITP gives them one, and it gives clubs a way to develop their own people to a recognised national standard without inventing a framework from scratch, and without sacrificing what makes their club's approach their own.

For clubs, that means succession planning stops being a worry and starts being a process. For assistants and cadets, it means their commitment is finally visible, recorded and recognised. And for parents and students, it means the person stepping up to teach has demonstrably earned it.

How to get started

The ITP lives inside MyBMABA, our member portal.

Clubs and lead instructors: log in to MyBMABA and you'll find the ITP under Flagship Programmes, or head directly to mybmaba.org.uk/portal/itp. From there you can enrol learners, assign a supervising instructor, customise your club's requirements and track progression across your whole team.

Built with you, as always

Like everything we build, the ITP exists because our members asked for it, shaped it and tested it. It's been designed to work in real clubs, run by real people, on real training nights. This is version one, and it will keep growing, so if you have feedback once you're using it, we genuinely want to hear it.

Read the full release here; https://mybmaba.org.uk/introducing-the-instructor-cadet-training-pathway-itp/