Cambridgeskip

It's an extraordinary image and one that I hope ends up in the public consciousness. With regards to the political side things are a bit different in European countries that were historically occupied by the Nazis and/or fell within the former Soviet Bloc. Scouts in those countries tend to be a lot more politically motivated. That's not to say they are ever party political, more that they are more inclined to get involved in standing up to meat heads like this lot. Quick historical fact.... scouts were heavily involved in the resistance in countries occupied by the Nazis. It was actually Dutch scouts that cut the cables to prevent the blowing up of the Nijmegan bridge during operation Market Garden

This wasn't on a camp but was camp associated..... I got a phone call one Sunday afternoon, it was one of my PLs. She explained she had borrowed her dad's conference calling facility from work and the whole patrol were on a conference call planning a camp. She'd called me up to get me in on it as they had a couple of questions. I answered them and rang off leaving them to it. Scouts and tech have their place! Have to say I was quite impressed with that patrol.

There may be better tools for various tasks but as above, scouting is not an aim in itself. We are preparing young people for life. The smart phone is here, it’s not going away, increasingly young children are getting access to them. We should embrace that fact and play a part in making sure that they use them with courtesy. Simply banning them gives a double whammy of both missing out on their uses and making us look out of touch with the modern world. There is a whole world of information that is available (if you have reception) at the touch of a button that could be useful on a scout camp or day trip. Weather forecasts, train and bus times, opening times and prices of pretty much anywhere you might want to go. If the scouts are going to take the lead then they should be finding out these things if at all possible. Similarly as I said above, they can take photos and airdrop them to me on the spot. I can update our website, facebook and twitter from my phone. I also agree with Stosh though. If they lose or break or run down their phone then tough. Like him I take the not my problem approach. I do though think that it is a good life skill, and one that I am happy to pass on to my scouts, to know how to nurse your phone battery and make it last.

I personally trust them to use them appropriately and with one or two exceptional incidents they haven't let me down. When they use them as cameras on camps they have been able to email or airdrop photos to me on the spot and I have been able to put them on twitter and facebook in real time. Over all I see this as a balance. On the one hand the genie is out the bottle, this tech exists, we're preparing young people for life, and part of that is appropriate use of tech. Banning it doesn't teach them that. On the other hand the adventurous side of the program does take them places where this tech won't work. They need to be able to function without it.

Something I'm planning on sharing with my scouts tomorrow night. Today I've been caught up in some horrendous travel disruption. A fire outside London's Euston station has damaged signalling equipment and basically nothing is moving in or out of Euston tonight. To put that in some context trains from Euston go to Birmingham, Liverpool,Manchester, Preston and Glasgow. We're talking disruption to 100s of thousands of people, some of who are not going to et to their destinations today. I'm in the process of picking my way round a convultued route. I should make it home albeit I reckon on being about 5 hours late home. It's a frustrating day and one I would normally have a rant about, something along the lines of "that's 5 hours of my life I'll never get back. It's all about context though. Those 5 hours are part of what I hope will be another 50-60 years in this life (I'm a 30 something) On my train was a man on his way to London for experimental cancer treatment. I over heard his story as he was being interviewed for a television documentary. As things stand he only has 2 months left to live. He was diagnosed with a brain tumour after he collapsed just a few days after getting married a couple of years ago, before he'd even departed for his honeymoon. If this treatment he's heading for doesn't work his life expectancy can be measured at around 1500 hours. This afternoon he spent 3 of them on a stationary train just outside London. Last I saw of him staff of Virgin West Coast Trains (who I cannot praise highly enough for their efforts to help this man) at Watford Junction Station were trying to find him a taxi to get him into central London. Despite all my delays, feeling hungry, feeling in need of a shower, I really can't complain. One of our scout laws is also that a scout makes good use of his time and is careful of his possessions and property. Kind of makes you think doesn't it?

Only in an acting capacity till we got someone else sorted out to take over, but ultimately yes she did it.

To be fair 19 is exceptionally to be a leader in charge although there is no rule against it. There's an interesting second part to the story though. She was living in Cambridge because she was a student at the university here. As the time for her to graduate and probably move away approached she handed the pack over to a parent who had been an assistant leader. Now as it turned out she ended up getting a job in Cambridge after she graduated so stayed on as assistant leader, effectively swapping roles with him. He though had a number of changes in personal circumstances which meant he struggled to keep up with things. Not his fault, just life happening. And when things started going wrong, guess who the parents started to look at again to keep the pack running.... yes the now assistant leader, still only aged about 22. An interesting tale!

Back in 2009 when I switched from running cubs to scouts I handed the cub pack over to a 19 year old. She had to fight a few battles to be taken seriously by parents. I supported her by not supporting her. I regularly got emails about cub events from parents who insisted on continuing to direct them to me. I had to take a very tough line by forwarding them to her to deal with and neither of us even acknowledging that I had received them in the first place. The message got through in the end. Sometimes you need to be a little bit bloody minded!

General consensus is that there is demand for 3 or 4 more scout troops in the Cambridge district so if you're willing ed happily take you Re cost of living - it's really quite variable across the country. London and the surrounding areas are a complete joke. How anyone can afford to live there is beyond me. Once you move away though there are places that are relatively cheap. North East england, East Lancashire and South Wales aren't bad. Then again major cities like Manchester, Leeds, Bristol and Edinburgh while not quite as bad as London are quickly catching up.

Where abouts in the states are you? Is that the same everywhere? Or does it vary across the country? While we have plenty of parents working with cubs and beavers we see very few with scouts and explorers. Of the 12 adults I mentioned above only 1 is a parent of a current scout with 1 more being a grandparent (albeit his grandson is at another group) with an average age of 31. Given that low number of parents we have we'd have troops and units fighting over a 23 year old leader! If you don't feel welcome round your way feel free to come over this way, we'll certainly sign you up I think we have more of a problem here with men who think they will be thought of as a danger to children than we do with people who actually think that they are.

There's fairy knolls everywhere in Scotland! Just wanted to add.... as well as the 5 scouts I had on the course there I also had 2 explorer scouts who had done the course several times before and who had volunteered to go back as staff for the week. They had a week of peeling potatoes, cleaning toilets and other equally glamorous jobs. It's a common gig for explorer scouts to have! The chap who had been there 55 years took me aside to describe them as "the nicest and most useful pair I've ever had here".

i think we're saying exactly the same thing here!

But I think the stigma is more what people, at least this side of the pond, are concerned about. Most people can see that if you conduct yourself properly and follow the rules (eg avoid being 1 to 1 with a child) then you are not realistically going to be falsely prosecuted. The issue more is that someone makes an unsubstantiated complaint and no mater how much you are exonerated the mud sticks

I can see the difference. Kid breaks there leg hiking, you get a complaint and whether it goes legal or not, whether it's upheld or not it will never carry the same stigma of child abuse. That's not to say I worry about it because I know that such allegations are vanishingly rare, but I do get the difference.

Ours is also handled on a group to group basis but we have an annual scout census on 31 Jan where each group submits its numbers to HQ broken down into various categories. This also includes those on its waiting list who are old enough to have joined but haven't yet been offered a place (as opposed to the parents who have their 4 year olds on the waiting list) A lot of groups here use a system called Online Scout Manager (OSM) which has been designed to produce this at data the push of a button (it does a lot of other useful stuff as well like collect subs by direct debit, online sign ups for camps, automatically update badge records). So I can see that at the moment my group has a waiting list of 15 x scout age 8 x cub age 8 x beaver age 6 x too young (so not included in the 50000)

Similarly we are expected to copy in another adult if emailing or texting a scout. If I'm honest there has been the odd exchange of texts, particularly with older explorers, where I haven't but broadly yes, I would copy in at least another leader or their parents. As Ian said, we don't call it two deep leadership but certainly we shouldn't plan on running an activity with only one adult present. It's either 2 or more or none Certainly again I would avoid hanging back with one scout, it would be multiple scouts or have another adult. Equally though I wouldn't avoid physical contact altogether. There have been times when I have had a kid who has been really quite distressed and an arm around them has been entirely the right thing to do. Although I have made it quite clear to other adults in the area what was going on. I guess the question really is though how widespread that fear of having the finger pointed at you has got? It is as pervasive as it seems to be getting here?

There was a big scouting media frenzy this side of the pond yesterday. Essentially a big press release that made most national papers and TV channels about the need for more volunteers. Currently 50,000 kids on waiting list and the need for more adults to shift them. What was interesting though was the reasoning on the numbers. The line from HQ is that while there is a record number of adult members each individual is only able to commit to a smaller amount of time than they would have historically. Hence while the 3:1 child to adult ratio looks like a lot adults it doesn't really tell the full story. Now on a personal anecdotal level this bears out. My troop of 35 scouts can call on 12 adults at full strength. Now if they were all there it would be far too many given that scouts should do as much as they can for themselves. However it's not the full story. Due to various personal, work, academic and family commitments it would be rare to see more than 5 on any given night or event. Indeed I don't think that all 12 have ever been in the same room at once and I think 2 of them have never even met! However..... if you look "below the line" at the commentators on various website a different story seems to play out. Look at the Guardian and comments from its readers. Various thoughts given but the one that comes up most regularly is that of men scared of having the finger pointed at them either officially or via gossip for behaving inappropriately with children. Now the Guardian is an unashamedly left wing paper. Zip over to the other end of the spectrum at the Daily Mail (makes Fox News look like Socialists!) and you get a very similar pattern. So it doesn't seem to be a let wing v right wing issue. So I'm not really sure which is the bigger issue, time or fear. How do things tend to play out your side of the Atlantic? Are these the biggest issues? Which one seems worse? I'm curious!

I think that there is a middle ground to be reached here. Yes we do need to allow scouts to learn from experience but I also think that training them does involve setting certain parameters. So I will insist that there are protein sources, I will insist on fruit and vegetables. (I won't allow fizzy drinks!) I won't dictate what they are. I will allow them to learn that some things are messier than others, not ideal when there's a lot of program to fit in. I will allow them to learn that penne cooks quicker than spaghetti. I will allow them to learn that high sugar in summer means lots of wasps. And so on. But we are dealing with kids and they do actually need to be taught a few things before they get started. The initial parameters and learning from experience are just two sides of the same coin.

A quick chip in from me.... one of my ASLs who's been doing this stuff for over 50 years has a great saying, he reckons the job of the scout leader is to make themselves redundant. A quite simple way of describing of what we should be aiming for.

So I thought I’d share a fascinating bit of scouting history from this side of the pond, about an impossibly eccentric place called Lochearnhead Scout Station, somewhere I have just come back from. Some of my scouts ae attending a mountaineering course there and I’ve spent a few days on the staff there, mostly cooking, cleaning and maintenance. The life of a scouter is a glamorous one! Lochearnhead is a small village in the Scottish Highlands which, until 1951 was served by a railway line. The railway closed and the station was abandoned. Around the same time Melville Basille, the County Commissioner for Hertfordshire Scouts, down at the other end of the country just north of London, had started organising mountaineering trips to the Highlands for scouts from Hertfordshire. At the time they would camp but he was looking for a site to have a dedicated building to use as a base for these trips. After a few recce trips he stumbled upon the old railway station. It was acquired on a lease by Hertfordshire Scouts and later purchased outright and the process of turning it into a dedicated centre began finally opening in 1962. There’s a bit more history on how it developed here. The station buildings themselves have been turned into a dining room, lounge, kitchen and office. Log cabins are on the old good yard and track bed providing accommodation. They’ve maintained the railway theme with lots of rail memorabilia all over the walls, the warden is known as the station master as well! Do a google image search on the place and you’ll see what a weird and wonderful place it is. There’s a few bits of history though that are not included at the link above. Melville Basille’s middle name was Nicolson, one of the great Scottish clans and he was descended from them. He arranged for the clan tartan to be officially used by scouts who came to the station and to this day anyone who stays there either on a mountaineering course or on a more general camp can wear a necker made out of it. The Nicolson hunting tartan is worn by the chief mountaineering instructor at the station. Also at the time the station opened there was a second railway line that ran past the village, just a few hundred yards from the station. The nearest station on that line was several miles away. In the early days of it opening scouts visiting used to have to camp. Special arrangement was made with what was by then British Rail for trains to stop on the line where it was closest to the station to unload the tents and scouts and to walk down the hill. Quite extraordinary and the kind of thing that would never happen in modern times! Especially as the second railway line has itself now closed J I’ve been there several times and can describe it only as the most eccentric scout campsite of any sort I have seen anywhere. I did both the initial course held over Easter and the advanced course held over a new year as a teenager. You can see some photos from then here including an 18 year old me! Fast forward 20 years from then and although I am a scouter in a different county I have still been able to send some of my scouts on courses there. They are still there now (I had to be back at work today!) but here’s a couple of photos from earlier in the week that I think sum up what the place is like. Two 13 year old scouts at the top of their first mountain in -12C wind chill and horizontal snow. And then back at the station for a well earned brew. The neckers they are wearing are the wonderful Nicolson tartan mentioned above. The best bit of history is that one of the staff from the opening in 1962 is still there 55 years later. He’s getting a bit long in the tooth to get out in the hills much and instead spends most of his time producing the colossal meals that hungry scouts who have been out in the hills eat their way through. Long may it continue.

I think Tyke may be more commenting on there being any rule at all regarding the sleeping arrangements for adults. Other than a requirement for adults to have separate accommodation to youth members adults are free to choose their own arrangements regardless of gender, marital status etc Quite simply a big cultural difference I think.

A balance always needs to be struck. Photos are taken for a reason, for people to see. And if you want to promote your pack/troop/unit you need people who are not already members to see what they are missing. The impression I have is that BSA is far stricter on photography than we are here in the UK. Here we find it quite variable from group to group. My group is probably the most open on photography. We take a ton of photos and post them publicly on our website. We of course would take down photos of any given child if the parents asked us to. Not a problem. Other groups are more private and post in password protected areas, that kind of thing. One thing we would never do though is post full names. It's just a complete no no. It's the first stage of possible cyber stalking. And to that effect (and the real point of this post) it's worth reading this post on 1st Facebook scout group (a quite UK dominated Facebook community for scouters). It shows what exactly someone was able to do with minimal information. Quite chilling and well worth a read, possibly by the scouts themselves.

I concur with the stuff above but would add a couple of things. 1. Keep a dry set of clothes for sleeping in that never come out the sleeping bag. What that can for moral is extraordinary! 2. Where ever you are try and keep a fire going as much as possible. Again the effect on moral is huge. 3. In advance I have actually had my scouts practice doing something very simple, how to get into a tent wearing wet clothes without getting everything wet inside. Ie. open tent door. Turn your back on it. Then sit down while simultaneously dropping your over trousers. ie dry trousers whens sitting on ground sheet. Take off coat and put in plastic bag. Take off boots. Take off over trousers and put in plastic bag. It sounds like such a daft thing to have kids practicing but if they can get things like that right it makes for a much more comfortable trip.

I mostly agree. Scouting should be developing kids into being able to spread their wings! I do think though that while it shouldn't be used by anyone to further isolate themselves I think it should provide an element of safety. Perhaps a very vague analogy should be as a trampoline rather than a crash mat. You can fall on both quite safely but the former will help you get back to where you should be. Or something like that anyway. I'm sure you get the picture!

It's quite a common camp fire song this side of the pond, albeit a variation (night dress in summer and pink pyjamas in winter). Always loved that one