Youth shaped
Contents
- Creating brighter futures
- A year of challenge, learning and change
- As Scouts, we believe in creating brighter futures
- Skills for Life: Our plan to prepare better futures 2018-2025
- Growth
- Inclusivity
- Youth shaped
- Community impact
- Keeping young people safe
- Three pillars of work
- Programme
- People
- Perception
- Theory of change
- The impact of Scouts on young people
- Working towards a regenerative change
- Our finances
- Trustees' responsibilities
- Independent Auditor’s Report to the Trustees of The Scout Association
- Consolidated statement of financial activities
- Balance sheet
- Statement of cash flows
- Notes to the financial statements
- Our members
- How we operate
- Fundraising: our approach
- Governance structure and Board membership – 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024
- Our thanks
- Investors in People
Youth shaped
Aim: 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.
Goals
- 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.
- Increase the number of young people achieving the YouShape Award to 100,000 between April 2023 and March 2024.
Progress a year on
- We’ve awarded over 70,000 YouShape Awards in the past year, which is working towards our goal of 250,000 young people shaping Scouts by 2025.
- We’ve launched our YouShape Awards for Squirrels to help us embed Youth Shaped Scouts into our youngest Section.
- We’ve improved the support we give to our Young Leaders’ Scheme. In doing so, we’ve achieved our strategic goal for Young Leaders, with 19,775 now in the movement.
- In 2023, we asked young people how much they thought they were shaping their Scouts experience. 75% of young people reported that they make choices about what they do in Scouts, with 56% reporting that their views influence what happens in Scouts locally.
- Another Youth Shaped objective is to increase the number of young people in leadership positions. We now have 532 inspiring local Youth Leads (previously called Youth Commissioners), growing from 460 in 2018.
- These inspiring Youth Leads have attended Support Weekends in October and April, with quarterly calls taking place to make sure they feel supported to excel in their roles.
- In 2023, 41.6% of 4–14 year olds and 5.4% of 14+ year olds achieved their Top Awards.
- We also made some changes to the King’s Scout Award to make it more accessible and inclusive for young people to achieve.
What's next
- Local Youth Leads 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.
- Our UK Youth Lead, Ayesha Karim, and the UK Youth Team, will work towards our goal of 66% of all young people shaping their Scouts experience by 2025.
- Ayesha Karim will also help to shape the future of Youth Shaped Scouts in our next strategic plan, including through making sure young people have a say in its formation.