Keeping young people safe

Safety

Aim: Safety is a golden thread throughout Scouts. Alongside safeguarding, it’s our number one priority to keep young people in our care safe from harm.

Progress a year on

We’ve continued delivering our agreed three-year safety road map from 2023 to 2025. This has included:

• Safety training: We’ve improved and maintained compliance with core safety training, with over 98% of all members having undertaken this.
• Safety Assurance: We’ve established a direct primary authority partnership to receive Primary Authority Advice tailored to our specific needs. Initially focused on UKHQ activity, the primary authority provide a key point of contact and source of assured information which supports regulatory compliance and which other regulators must have regard for. The primary authority also undertakes independent inspection providing assurance on regulatory compliance on the ground. Over time, this’ll provide additional confidence in our UKHQ safety processes and practice.
• Shared learning: Learning from incidents and opportunities for improvement informs our reviews of rules and guidance and is shared with members through our webinars and member emails.
• Reviewed our Policy, Organisation and Rules: This includes guidance and supporting templates. We then delivered briefings and training sessions in line with our updates.
• Moving forwards, and following the inquest into the death of Ben Leonard, we’re proposing to go even further to make sure every child and young person can enjoy Scouts safely.

What's next

We’ve undertaken significant learning from the inquest into the death of Ben Leonard and the Coroner’s Prevention of Future Deaths Report. We’re committed to fundamentally changing our approach to safety, and we see this as a transformational moment for the movement. The changes we’re making include:

• Significant investment in our UK safety team to support delivery and training.
• Developing a new strategic partnership to review our policies and practices and develop new ways of working, including external inspection.
• We’ve updated existing safety training so it can’t be clicked through, and we’re commissioning new supplementary safety training.
• Developing new movement-wide safety training which is level and role specific.
• Adding more scrutiny and external critique to our movement-wide assurance processes.
• Creating new policies to commit to embedding a duty of candour, and how we support and deal with critical incidents.
• An external review of our permitting scheme and the understanding of external approaches to audit and inspection.
• Introducing new neutral suspension powers for those involved in critical incidents or significant near misses.
• Publishing a new annual Safety Report next year, providing further information on safety in Scouts.
• Review first aid guidance, training, and assessment to make sure it meets good practice.

In addition, we’ll:

• Review the guidance, support and information we provide to the movement, so we continue to make safety information easily accessible and understood.
• Continue to support the implementation of the Learning Management System (LMS).
• Review and improve our incident management processes.
• Continue to embed our continuous improvement culture.

Safety governance

We have a range of measures in place to keep everyone safe. These include:

Our Safety Policy: Our Safety Policy clearly outlines our commitment to safety and our expectation that everyone in Scouts will play their part in keeping young people safe. We review the Safety Policy each year, and it’s informed by wider sector best practice.

The Safety Committee: The Safety Committee is a sub-committee of the Board of Trustees. It’s chaired by a Trustee who’s an external appointee with working professional experience in health and safety. The Safety Committee includes independent members, with experience in health and safety across different sectors. The Committee links to people responsible for providing leadership, and oversees the safety policies, procedures, and rules we give to our volunteers.

The Board of Trustees are updated quarterly on safety matters. Each year, the Board gets a full report of Safety Committee activities.

Safeguarding

Aim: At Scouts, we continue to be committed to keeping young people in our care safe from harm. This is our number one priority. Along with safety, safeguarding is the golden thread throughout our movement.

Progress a year on

• Our Yellow Card Code of Practice is fundamental to keeping young people safe. We updated our Yellow Card to make it easier for people to report things concerning them, and our members have ordered over 180,000 new Yellow Cards. This means people now report issues directly to our HQ Safeguarding Team.
• We’ve worked with Childline to develop a new child-friendly poster for young people so they know how to speak in confidence about any concerns they may have. Over 17,000 have been ordered for Scout meeting places across the UK.
• We’ve invested more resources into our safeguarding team, so they can respond to current and anticipated increases in the volume and complexity of referrals. This has led to team reorganisation and new ways of working, so we can be more efficient and effective in our response. Since making these changes, we’ve significantly reduced the number of open cases and improved how we respond and manage ongoing cases.
• We’ve worked with NSPCC to review and update our safeguarding policy and mandatory safeguarding training. This is subject to ongoing review with the external organisation to make sure our practice is reflective of emerging themes, trends and risks.
• We’ve updated our quality assurance framework, which has a blend of internal and external independent scrutiny, using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative measures. Learning is fed back to the team as part of our continuous improvement journey.
• A campaign by survivors last summer increased our understanding of areas that remain a concern for people who have been victims in Scouts. This contributed to us accelerating the planned changes to the referral pathway for safeguarding complaints and updating the Yellow Card of Conduct.

We’re continuing to listen to survivors’ experiences to learn how we can keep improving. Work is underway on adding external scrutiny to our assurance processes and we’re also working with an external organisation to create a lived experience panel so survivors can inform our policy and practice.

What's next

• We’re planning to continue to listen to and work with survivors more collaboratively over the next year.
• We’ll continue our work with an external organisation to create a lived experience panel.