Play Commonality

You’ll need

Pens or pencils
A4 paper

Participant Information Letter

PDF – 101.7KB

Youth voice in the organisational strategy 2025+

We want young people to take a leading role in shaping our next organisational strategy, so that Scouts stays relevant, interesting and engaging for generations to come. We want to hear from all backgrounds and corners of the UK, as well as all ages, from 4-24! We’re so grateful for the time you’re taking to make sure your young people have a voice in Scouts and we hope you find these activities thought provoking as we shape the future of Scouts in the UK!

Chris Styles, UK Youth Team Member (Youth Voice)

Special edition activity - closes 14 October 2024

Before you begin

Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. There's also more guidance to help you carry out your risk assessment, including examples.
Make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help.

Planning and setting up this activity

This activity can be used for Scouts UK research for our 2025 strategy. We ask that you make the parents and carers of all young people taking part are aware of the activity. They must acknowledge or consent to their young person taking part. You can do this by sending a letter, we’ve attached one to use to this page.
You can use this activity for the YouShape award, which is all about young people bringing their ideas to Scouts.
You may want to run this activity as one big group, two small groups or a few smaller groups, depending on how many people are taking part.

Running the activity

Gather everyone together and explain that they’ll be doing an activity to help them give feedback and what they like and what they’d improve about Scouts.
Explain that they’re going to play a game of commonality. The aim of the game is to have something in common with everyone.
To start the game ask the first question, which is ‘What is the best thing about Scouts?’
Choose one person in the group to go first. They should say what their one word answer is, such as ‘Adventure’ or ‘Kayaking’. They should then write this word on a piece of paper and hold it up for people to see.
Ask the group if anyone also has this in common. If only one person agrees, they make a chain by standing next to the first person. If more than one person agrees, then play Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide who joins the chain. Only one person can join the chain at each turn.
Now, the person who joined the chain then shares their word, which should be a different word to the first one. Again, they write down their word and hold it up.
Again, asks the group if anyone agrees with the new word and repeat the process. If one person agrees, they join the chain. If multiple people agree, they play Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide who joins.
Once the chain’s complete, ask the group to rank themselves in order, from the most popular answer or most important word to least popular or least important. This could be also be done in smaller groups.
When everyone’s finished, note down the order people are in.
Ask people how they came to this decision. You could see if anyone agrees or disagrees and why
Now, repeat this activity with a second question, which is ‘What do you get out of Scouts?’
Once this questions has been ranked, note down the answers again.
Now, ask everyone to get into smaller groups and think of a plan of how their answers could help us to plan Scouts in the future, both for your own group and for Scouts across the UK. You could ask some prompt questions, such as ‘What can Scouts do to keep being fun/giving young people skills for life?’ and ‘What does Scouts need to change to keep being fun/giving young people skills for life?’
At the end of the session, an adult should submit their group’s ranked answers from both questions to the Smartsheet form. You could also include any notes of the plans made by the groups.

Reflection

This activity was all about people sharing their ideas of what makes Scouts fun. It was also about learning what ideas they have in common. Are there any activities or skills you’d want to learn or do again? Did you learn anything about each other too from people’s ideas?

You had to rank the ideas. How did you do this? How did you make sure people’s ideas were heard? How did you do this fairly? Which ideas had the most debate about them? You might have had to compromise your ideas with other members of the group. Did you think the rankings were right or would you change anything about them? How did your experiences in Scouts influence your ideas?

Everyone had lots of ideas. Are there any ideas that can be done now by your section or group? Or do the ideas need more action to be taken, such as a new badge introduced by the local area or Scouts UK? What would you do if you were in charge of: a Scout group, a Scout district or county, a country, Scouts UK?

Safety

All activities must be safely managed. You must complete a thorough risk assessment and take appropriate steps to reduce risk. Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Always get approval for the activity, and have suitable supervision and an InTouch process.

Active games: The game area should be free of hazards. Explain the rules of the game clearly and have a clear way to communicate that the game must stop when needed. Take a look at our guidance on running active games safely.