Growth

We grow when we offer a great programme for young people, create new spaces for young people to join, and recruit new volunteers to support them.

We’ve bounced back from losing around 1 in 4 youth members during the pandemic, and the last 12 months represent our fastest growth since World War II.

Our growth goals by 2025:

• We’ll have 547,000 young people aged 4–18 in Scouts
• We’ll have 88,000 front line volunteers (Section Leaders, including Assistant Section Leaders and Section Assistants)
• We’ll have 19,500 Young Leaders

Progress on growth

This year, youth membership is up 16% to 412,986. This means 59,769 more young people are now gaining Skills for Life, who weren't last year. While growth has been strong in all sections up to aged 18, we’ve seen the strongest growth in Beavers, our section for 6- to 8-year-olds.

Our waiting lists have grown to over 90,000 young people who’re hoping to join us. To create more spaces for these young people to join our movement, we need even more adult volunteers to support us to open new sections. Our current waiting list number is the equivalent of over 5,000 sections.

We opened 389 new sections this year, but while we recover from the pandemic, we had to close 620.

We’ve seen an increase of nearly 4,000 front line volunteers, Section Leaders, Assistant Leaders, and Section Assistant roles. Since there’s been a reduction in manager, governance and supporter roles, our overall volunteer numbers are down 2%. We think this is due to the changes we’ve made in recording numbers, as well as our continued efforts to ensure data accuracy and compliance.

To help us grow, we’re rolling out a suite of resources. They aim to help with recruitment and retention of new volunteers and young people, and support with the opening of new sections. We’ll also continue to identify funding for supporting local growth over the coming year.

What’s next

Thanks to volunteers’ efforts across the country, supported by our staff teams, we believe we’ll return to pre-pandemic membership numbers during 2024. To achieve this, we’ll need a concerted effort and resources. We think it’s vital for meeting our longer-term growth ambitions, and for delivering our other strategic priorities, such as our new section, Squirrels.

Our main strategic challenge is having enough volunteers to support as many young people as possible. There’s a key interdependency between our ability to improve the experience our volunteers have with us, and our growth ambitions. These changes are to make volunteering easier and more fun, meaning we can better attract new volunteers, and keep our current ones onboard.