Scout Experience Survey
Take part in our Scout Experience Survey 2024. Have your say in what makes Scouts great and how we could be even better.
Have your say
We run our Scout Experience Survey (SES) every year to find out what you think about Scouts. Whether you’re a young person, a volunteer, or a parent or carer, this survey is your chance to tell us what's working well for you in Scouts and what isn't.
As a thank you for taking part in the survey, everyone who completes the survey will get a voucher code for 20% off at Scout Store (terms apply). We’ll also enter all young people and volunteers who take part into a prize draw to win one of 20 prizes of £50 Amazon vouchers.
The difference your views make
This survey helps us to understand what’s working well in Scouts, as well as telling us more about what we need to improve. From what you say, we can make better decisions about how to improve Scouts for everyone.
Since running the survey in 2018, we’ve gained some important insights through your feedback. For example, what we’ve learned about volunteers’ experiences has been key in developing our new volunteer experience transformation programme. We’re building new systems and making changes that we hope will make volunteering easier and more enjoyable.
The survey has also helped us to shape how we develop our programme, including the types of activities young people do, and has helped us to make the programme more inclusive and accessible to all. From the results of the 2023 survey, we learned that young people from more deprived areas were less likely to participate in adventurous and outdoors activities than those in other areas. This allowed us to explore what options we could give for grant funding to reduce these cost barriers. You can find out more about the results from the 2023 survey.
We also use the survey results to show the positive impact that Scouts has on young people, volunteers and communities. By highlighting these positives, we can make even stronger cases for fundraising and grants to support more young people in Scouts.
Our focus on representation in 2024
Since we started running the survey, we’ve noticed there’s been a much lower response rate from members from marginalised groups. This means we haven’t been able to explore the feedback from these specific members in more detail. Therefore, one of the barriers we face is that we don't know whether there are differences in the Scout experience for members from marginalised groups.
A recent report from the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) found that volunteers from underrepresented groups were more likely to experience feelings of exclusion in their volunteering role. They were less likely to be satisfied and more likely to say they want to leave in the next 12 months. The NCVO used this data, alongside other key results, to outline recommendations for how organisations could improve the experience for volunteers from underrepresented groups.
This year, we’re keen to improve representation in our survey results by hearing from more members from marginalised ethnic groups, marginalised religious groups, gender-diverse members, and disabled and neurodiverse members.
If you belong to one of these marginalised groups, we’d love to hear from you. Your voice will give us an understanding of the differing experiences of members, which will help us inform strategies around how we can make Scouts more inclusive and accessible for all.
Make sure when you take the survey this year that you’re using the right link for you:
We can’t do it without you
To make this happen we need your help. We’d really appreciate it if you could fill in the survey and let us know your views. Without your feedback we won’t know what challenges you face in Scouts, and therefore where our attention is needed most.
If you’ve regular contact with parents, carers, volunteers and young people, please also share the survey with them and encourage them to complete it. The more people who fill out the survey, the better we can understand how to improve our services, tools and resources.
Here are some templates you can use:
- Download an email template for parents and carers of Scouts and Explorers (Word Doc).
- Download an email template for Scouts and Explorers (Word Doc).
- Download an email template for adult volunteers (Word Doc).
- Download a 'take part in the survey' poster for volunteers
- Download a 'take part in the survey' poster for parents and carers
- Download a 'take part in the survey' poster for young people
A big thank you
If you've filled out the survey in the past, thank you. We’d love to hear from you again this year. We know we ask similar questions each year, but this is so we can compare results year-on-year to get a really good picture of how we're changing. Remember to share the survey with other volunteers, parents, carers and young people as well. We want this year to be our biggest response yet!
About the Scout Experience Survey
If you’re aged 13 or older in Scouts, you can take part. That includes young people (Scouts and Explorer Scouts), Network members, parents/carers of young people in Scouts (including Squirrels, Beavers, Cubs, Scouts, Explorer Scouts), and adult volunteers.
You can complete the survey via the below online links. Please make sure you select the link that applies to you (for example, if you’re a young person, volunteer, or parent and carer). The survey will be live from 28 May to 18 June 2024. Please make sure you complete it before then.
Please only complete the survey once, even if you have more than one child in Scouts, or both a parent or carer and volunteer.
If you could share this link with other Scouts, parents or carers, and volunteers you know, that’d be great.
Take the survey for volunteers.
There are several sections to the survey. We ask each group different questions to find out about their experiences in Scouts.
We ask volunteers questions about their overall attitude towards Scouts, including the impact Scouts has on them and whether they enjoy it. We also ask more specific questions about different parts of their volunteering journey, including joining, training, and support they get in their day-to-day role.
We ask young people (13 and over) questions about their skills, behaviours and attitudes to understand whether taking part in Scouts has an impact on certain life outcomes. We also ask young people whether they enjoy Scouts and the types of activities they do through Scouts.
We ask parents just a few of key questions about whether they like Scouts, how they heard about Scouts, and how much it costs them.
The data you provide us is securely stored in our internal encrypted servers and online in the Alchemer survey tool, in line with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law.
The only personally identifiable information we collect in this survey’s your email address for the purpose of the prize draw and if you’ve agreed to be contacted about future research.
All of the personal information you provide will be anonymised by removing your email address from the dataset once it has been extracted for the prize draw, and only the Scouts Data and Insight team will have access to this information.
We do ask questions for you to provide information such as your postcode, gender, religion, ethnicity and whether you have a disability, however these questions are all optional. The reason we ask these questions is so we can understand if there are any differences in experiences of young people and volunteers from different identity groups.
As a safeguard against individuals being identified from this data, we don’t provide analysis for responses lower than 20 to any questions response options. We also remove your postcode from the dataset once it has been used to identify geographical factors, such as which decile in the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) you’re in.
If you’ve any concerns about how data is being used for this survey you can contact the Data and Insights Team on data-insights@scouts.org.uk. For more information on how we manage personal data please see our Data Protection Policy.
All adult volunteers and young people who complete the survey can be entered into the prize draw. You just need to fill in your email address. The prizes are:
- 10 x £50 Amazon vouchers for young people aged 13-17
- 10 x £50 Amazon vouchers for adult volunteers
Read the full prize draw terms and conditions.
There’s also a 20% discount code for Scout Store for everyone who takes part.
From the 2023 results, we learned that young people and volunteers are more satisfied with Scouts, and young people are doing outdoors and adventure activities.
However, we also learned that the cost of Scouts has been increasing and some volunteers feel too much is asked of them.
Changes to the survey in 2024
Last year, those who took part in the survey gave us some useful feedback about what we can do to improve it.
We’ve taken this feedback on-board and have made some changes to the survey, including creating separate surveys, and reviewing and reducing the number of questions we ask.