Youth Shaped

We’d like every young person to shape their own Scouts experience and get the skills they need to be great leaders. For this to happen, it’s important we create opportunities for young people to use their voices.

When young people shape Scouts, they 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 influence what happens locally in Scouts
• 57% of young people will use their skills to run Scouts activities for other young people
• 40% of young people aged 4–14, and 10% of those aged 14+, will be achieving top awards

Progress on Youth Shaped

In 2022, we asked section leaders how much they thought young people were shaping their Scouts experience.

• 55% of 4,001 section leaders thought young people came together at least once a term to decide what activities to take part in. This is down 5% from 2018.
• Similarly to 2018, 49% of 3,979 section leaders thought young people used their skills to run activities for other young people.
• Similarly to 2018, 55% of 3,978 section leaders thought young people's opinions influenced local decisions in Scouts.

In 2021, Youth Commissioners across the country designed the YouShape Award to help young people Plan, Represent and Lead Scouting, and decide what they want to change or shape in their Scouts experience. Since its release in October 2021, we’ve sold 165,000 badges.

Another Youth Shaped objective is to increase the number of young people in leadership positions. We now have 540 inspiring local Youth Commissioners, growing from 460 in 2018.

We definitely want more progress in this area. Our UK Youth Commissioner, Ayesha Karim, has appointed a team of deputies with specific areas of responsibility, who’ll help increase the youth shaped work across our movement.

What’s next

Youth Commissioners are leading our movement to increase how many young people achieve YouShape Awards. Over 90,000 YouShape Award badges were earned in 2022/23.

We’ll explore how effective Youth Shaped Scouting is for our newest section, Squirrels, and how we can support Dreys to go even further.

Local Youth Commissioners will help embed 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’ve set ourselves a target of 100,000 badge sales in 2023/24.

We’re improving the support we give to our Young Leaders scheme. By doing so, we’ll reach our target of 19,500 Young Leaders in the movement by 2024.

Our UK Youth Commissioner, Ayesha Karim, will work towards our goal of 66% of all young people shaping their Scouts experience by 2025. She’ll also help to shape the future of Youth Shaped Scouting in our next strategic plan.