Youth Shaped

Every young person should shape their Scouts experience, and develop the skills they need to be great leaders. Creating opportunities for young people to use their voices is an important part of this. If young people shape Scouts, they’ll improve our movement, and become more likely to achieve their top awards.

Our Youth Shaped goals

By 2025:

• 66% of young people aged 6- 18 will be influencing what happens locally in Scouting
• 57% of young people will be using their skills to run Scouting activities for other young people
• 40% of young people aged 4- 14 will be achieving the top awards and 10% of those 14+ will be achieving top awards

Progress on Youth Shaped

In 2020/21, we asked young people and section leaders how much they thought young people were shaping their Scouts experience.

The results were a mixed bag, which isn’t a surprise, considering the impact COVID-19 had on Scouts.

73% of young people thought they came together at least once a term to decide what activities to take part in. This has stayed roughly the same since 2018. However, 87% of section leaders thought the same, which is up from 60% in 2018.

Only 54% of young people thought they used their skills to help run activities for other young people. This is down from 95% in 2018. 49% of section leaders thought the same thing, which is the same percentage as 2018.

Only 38% of young people thought their opinions influenced local decisions in Scouts, which is down from 50% in 2018. 40% of section leaders thought the same thing, decreasing from 53% in 2018.

Youth Commissioners across the country designed a new Scouts badge for the YouShape Award. The award is designed to help young people to Plan, Represent and Lead Scouting, and lets them decide what they want to change or shape in their Scouts experience. The award then encourages young people to make their changes happen, through requirements related to Planning, Representing and Leading. Young people decide themselves when they’ve met the requirements of the Award. To date, Scout Stores have sold 80,000 YouShape Awards.

As well as shaping the programme, another Youth Shaped objective is to increase the number of young people in leadership positions. We now have 580 inspiring local Youth Commissioners, growing from 400 in 2018.

Our focus is still on supporting young people to take up leadership positions and achieve their top awards. As part of our focus on this, we now have youth representation on every national programme of work.

We’ve got an active Community of Practice group that brings young people together to coordinate and inspire change.

We’ve added new resources to support adult volunteers in delivering our youth shaped goals. This includes resources for young people turning 18, new programme resources, case studies to support the YouShape Award, and updates to existing resources on our new website.

The National Role Pool is a group of young adults from across the UK who’d like to get involved in Scouts nationally, and it now has 40 members. They’re taking on various roles, from youth trustees on the UK Board, to members of subcommittees and project boards. 

What’s next

Youth Commissioners will work with our Early Years team to understand the effectiveness of Youth Shaped Scouting in our new Squirrels section, and how we can support Dreys to go even further.

Local Youth Commissioners will focus on embedding the YouShape Award in programmes across the UK. This’ll work towards our goal for 250,000 young people to be shaping Scouts by 2025.

We want the recovery of our membership numbers to include a boost in Young Leaders. This has fallen behind the growth of other sections.

This year, we’ve appointed our third UK Youth Commissioner since we created the role in 2014. Ayesha Karim takes over from Ollie Wood in September 2022. We’d like to thank Ollie for his dedication and hard work since he took the role in 2018. He’s achieved brilliant things, and we know Ayesha will do the same.

Influencing at the highest levels of the movement, Ayesha will work towards our goal to have 50% of all young people shaping their Scouts experience by 2025. She’ll also shape the future of Youth Shaped Scouting in our next strategic plan.