Peter1919

Interesting. In the UK the Chief Scout used to be the figurehead AND run the Association but about 15 years ago The Scout Association split the role into a firgurehead Chief Scout and a UK Chief Commissioner who runs the Association. People within Scouting in the UK still know who the UK CC is and are relatively excited to meet them and have them attend an event (more so adults than kids) but that is not their primary role which is overseeing the Associaiton's stratergy and programme development and the wider national volunteer team. i dont think any UK CC would see the Chief Scout as upstaging them as opposed to fufilling their figurehead role. I note that your National Presdient role has recently been renamed National Chair. Seems to me like the title of President of the BSA might have just been freed up

A full list with their backgrounds is available on the Scout Association website at http://scouts.org.uk/about-us/ambassadors/ but a fair summary would be Olympians or Paralympians, Adventurers, TV and Radio presenters oh and Britain's only astronaut

Ok interesting where you guys have taken the discussion. So in the UK we don't just have Bear Grylls as Chief Scout we also have some more minor celebs as Scouting Ambassadors. Sometimes they do events by themselves other times the accompany Bear to things. What they all do is help get publicity for Scouting, we have been fairly succesful in the last 12 years or so on getting fairly regular national news coverage of Scouting, most usually on breakfast news programmes where they like a good news story, Part of the key to this success has been having a celebrity to hook the news item on and then pivoting that so that the youth members do the talking. So you take a celebrity, get them to visit a large Scouting event such as a jamboree. This becomes a news item even if only on the local news. They then interview the celeb and some youth members as to what Scouting is about and in recent years this message has been about how we need more adult volunteers as we have more kids wanting to join Scouting than we have spaces for. This drip feed has helped to start to turn the public perception of what Scouting is when they see kids having fun at amazing Scout events. Classic example of news coverage of a Scouting event visited by Bear http://www.itv.com/news/meridian/update/2017-07-30/thousands-in-kent-for-scout-jamboree/ NB the video at the bottom is what was broadcast on TV. Oh and the exisitng members seem to love having Bear visit and this is the kids of stuff he can get up to when visiting an event (Steve Backshall is one of the Scouting Ambassadors I mentioned, he is a kids TV naturalist and adventurer)

Not sure if you are aware but Bear Grylls is actually the Chief Scout in the UK, he is just a figurehead he has no exectutive role at all. He does publicity events and getting around big Scouting Events meeting as many Scouts as possible in the weekends he gives up his time to do this in. He does all this as a volunteer, no salary or anything (The Scout Association do pay all his expenses including the hire of a helicopter to fly him around multiple events on the same weekend)

The sounds about right. The number of times I have to explain to our Scouts that is a neckerchief not a womans neck scarf and should be rolled neatly as you describe not be shoved through a woggle (slide) without rolling which ends up looking a bit like a napkin worn around your neck with a napkin ring.

I think they just look plain ridiculous and would look much better and smarter without them

Yes but the senior executives could decide to reduce the number of employees below them in order to protect their own high paying jobs in the long run. I would be very interested in a comparision between the ratio of employees to youth members in BSA and TSA I know TSA has roughly 450 000 youth members and around 50 000 adult members. I would guestimate that there are under 1000 people employed in Scouting in total in the UK

I have read this whole thread and I must admit from my position as a UK Leader I find the number of professionals involved in BSA very surprising and quite baffling as to what they all do. In the UK The Scout Association employs relatively few people directly, almost all based at our national HQ or at HQ owned activity centres. Most Scout Counties employ 1 or two people for administrative support and if the County own a large enough campsite or activity centre they may employ staff to run these. However for the most part UK Scouting is volunteer led and the volunteers are in charge of any employees not the other way round. The Scout Association does employ a Chief Executive but they run the business side of Scouting (The Scout Association owns Scout shops, has its own insurance brokerage and runs several activity centres). The volunteer UK Chief Commissioner runs Scouting in the UK, they set the strategy and direction in conjunction with the volunteer board of trustees. There are professional support staff based at HQ who are in charge of things like programme support etc but again they answer to volunteers not the other way around. Info about how The Scout Association is structured locally can be found at http://scouts.org.uk/about-us/organisational-information/local-structure/ and nationally at http://scouts.org.uk/about-us/organisational-information/national-structure/ If BSA is facing drastically lower numbers due to The Church of LDS withdrawing then I really think they need to fundamentally look at their structure and decide if employing so many people is really justifiable and financially viable in the future. You really don't want to go down Scouts Canada's route of ever increasing membership fees imposed on a lower and lower number of youth members to the extent that the fees are so high it puts people of joining so affect numbers of youth members and so on in a vicious downwards spiral.

Why? Do you actually have any experience of Scouting in the UK? I am a UK Scouter and I think we run excellent Scouting, its different to BSA, with a lot less emphasis on ranks and advancement but its still Scouting.

Just to pick up on this B.P. had his sister, Agnes, help set up the Girl Guides and after he married Olave she eventually took over as Chief Guide. Girl Guides did not eventually fold into the British Scouting Programme, Guides still exists completely separately to Scouts. The Scout Association admitted girls whilst the Guides did not and do not admit boys and did not merge with the Scouts in any way, in fact there are more Guides in the Uk than there are Scouts despite Scouts being open to both genders.

I have never heard of Katrina Yeaw so I looked up what happened in her case and Wikipedia (ok not the most reliable source I admit) says she was denied entry to a Boy Scout Troop for being a girl and her father filed a lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America in 1995, accusing them of discrimination. The lawsuit was ultimately unsuccessful as BSA was determined not to be a business so is allowed to set its own membership criteria. So it does not appear there ever was an application for Eagle Scout in her name that came across National's Desk for them to have dealt with differently.

As a UK Leader who has worked with both female and male Scouts (10-14) and Explorer Scouts (14 to 18) for over 12 years now then I would like to make clear that from my experience girls in Scouting are not so different from boys that they can't do exactly the same programme as boys and get just as much out of it. The girls that aren't into the sort of activities you run in Scouting will mostly not even join and those that do will soon leave when they realize it is not for them just the same as some boys do. I think BSA have spectacularly mishandled this decision and announcement though. They have clearly failed to properly consult their volunteers on this. The process should have been much longer and more in depth with a two stage consultation on this. First stage should have been on "should we do this?", and the second stage, assuming the first resulted in a decision to consider admitting girls, should have been on "how should we do this?". Then proper working parties of grass root volunteers that would have to implement this on the ground to work out exactly how it would work. Then if and when the decision was made to allow girls then some proper support material should have been produced and sent to all Leaders at the same time as the official announcement so that all Leaders and some answers to likely question both they, their members, their members parents and other supporters and the public might be asking them. IMHO BSA will lose alot more members and volunteers over how they have handled this than over the actual decision to admit girls itself if they had done it right and bought their volunteers along with them by including them in the decision making process.

Our Group is I think somewhat unusual in that just about all of our Leaders were Scouts or Guides (Girl Scouts as you would call them). We have very few parents as Leaders, I think I can think of 1 out of about 14 Leaders. Our SL was a Guide and was a parent of a Scout when she became a Leader but her son is 23 now and is an Assistant Scout Leader elsewhere (he was an ASL in our Troop until he moved 18 months ago). Many of our Leaders were Scouts in our Scout Group (including myself) and of those that weren't most were Scouts elsewhere and moved into the area. This includes female Leaders given some Scout Troops here have had girls since 1991 so the first female Scouts in the UK are now around 36 years old. The Group that meets just up the road from us however has a lot of parents (or parents of former youth members) as Leaders so it does vary alot from Group to Group. As to family camps, Groups can run family camps and some do so regularly however its certainly not something all Groups do and due to safeguarding there can be a fair amount of admin and paperwork involved in organising family camps as all adults who stay overnight on a camp need a criminal records check done on them in advance. Then you have to work out how to involve the adults on a family camp so that they all make a positive input and don't just sit around watching their kids doing things. I think if done right they could work well and would help you identify good potential Leaders amongst the parents

Hi All I am Peter, I am an Explorer Scout Leader and Assistant Group Scout Leader based in Headingley in Leeds, England, UK Have a look at our Scout Group website to see what we get up to the photo albums might be the most interesting part for you guys. I have lurked on here occasionally in the past but thought I would finally join so I could post to answer some of the questions some of you have about how girls in Scouts works in the UK following the recent announcement by BSA of their plans to admit girls Peter

In the UK Scout Patrols are usually made up of around 5 to 8 Scouts so they used to all fit in one tent. In the UK Beaver Colonies (ages 6 to 8) are usually have a maximum of 24 Beavers and are mostly oversubscribed. The fact is that Beaver numbers have grown from 108 000 in 2010 to 128 000 in 2017 but we can't open enough new Colonies fast enough to keep up with demand. This, unfortunately, means that most Colonies do have some kids old enough to be Beavers waiting for a space to open up. I would not say that girls dominate youth leadership, they do make perfectly good Sixers and Patrol Leaders and maybe are slightly overrepresented in these roles but not to the extent that boys don't get a chance to lead and the good thing is both get to learn to lead people of both genders which is what they will have to do out in the real world as adults.