Play YouShape ladders

Youth voice and the organisational strategy 2025+

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

• You may want to mark out the lines for teams, such as with masking tape, cones or chalk. You may also wish to mark arrows on the floor to show people which direction to go in. 
• As this activity is for Scouts UK research, 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. 
• We know that Squirrel Dreys introduce the session with a story. We’d suggest using ‘What We'll Build’ by Oliver Jeffers, a story about building a future.

Running this activity 

1. Gather everyone together and explain that in this activity they’ll be thinking about the things they like about Scouts, anything they'd like to do more of, and what they’d like to make better or change.
2. Ask everyone to get into two equal teams. .
3. Each team should get in a line, facing each the other team. Leave enough space between the two lines in the middle for moving up and down. Each person should have someone from the opposite team facing them. They can stand or they may want to sit down, either on the floor or on chairs. 
4. Explain that you’ll read a story out. Each pair will be given a word that appears in the story. When the pair hears their word, they must: 
   
   1. Go through the ‘ladder’ to one end of the line (the space between the two lines) in one direction 
   2. Go around the outside of the lines to the other end.
   3. Go back through the ladder and return to their space as quickly as possible. 
5. The first person to get back to their space earns a point for their team (their row). You may want an adult volunteer or young leader to help keep score. 
6. Give each pair a key word from the story that they need to remember.
7. You could demonstrate how the game works by reading a short bit of the story with some of the key words to allow players to practice running through the ladder, but without keeping score.
8. Once everyone is ready, read the story aloud. You may want to pause after or emphasise the key words. 
9. After the story’s finished, add up the scores for both sides and announce the winning side. 
10. Now everyone understands the game, create a new story using the blanks sheet. Ask everyone the questions on the bottom of the sheet and use them to fill in the blanks.  
11. If you’re running this activity for the whole section, you could choose or vote for the most popular answer. You could also run this activity in smaller groups. 
12. When the story’s complete, give everyone a new keyword from the new story and play again. You may need more than one pair per word.
13. At the end, you could find out more about some of the answers. For example, why they choose that? What do they like about Scouts and what could make it better, and why? Will they want to still be in Scouts in 10 years time?
14. You can submit your groups most popular answers through our form.