Cambridgeskip

A few years ago we had a cooking night at scouts. During it one of the scouts, because someone bet him that he couldn't, punched a hole in the bottom of a washing up bowl. It wasn't intended as a wanton damage, just a stupid bit of teenage boy stupidity because he was too dopy to not say no. It was, in theory, easily dealt with. General dressing down and scout was informed that he would be buying a new bowl to replace it. Bring it in next week please. Next week comes around. Scout arrives without new bowl. Mum walks into the hall with him and comes to speak to me. She apologised. Not for son's stupidity. Not for her son having failed to buy a bowl and bring it with him. Instead she apologised that SHE hadn't had time to go and buy one. I could have wept. Alas there are some parents that will just never get it.

As it happens its nowhere near as bad as last year. In 2016 there was persistent rain for a couple of weeks before hand. Add that to clay soil and 3000 pairs of boots and ended up being a bit like Ypres circa 1917! Thankfully without the casualty rate.....

My troop was at a big event at Gilwell Park at the weekend. Also camping there were the Explorer Unit we feed into, albeit about as far away from us as they could be. Two of the explorers who had been scouts with me took the time to come over to our pitch just to say hello. Sometimes the small things are the biggest thing

Yes, they bring a couple of rides into Gilwell for major events like this. Adds a strange extra flavour to proceedings! It's not all about the rides though, there's plenty of more traditional stuff going on although you can forget any concept of camping 300 feet apart. Guy lines from tents are typically crossed with those from the troop camping next to you...... Our photos on our website here now. Includes video of the bag drop, which was awesome! This is the photo I was trying to upload on Friday evening And this is my favourite one of the weekend. It's what happens when you let your scouts look after your phone while you get a go on the climbing tower. Cheeky little wretches

Even back in the real world and access to a PC I can't get photos to upload. Something about error Code 500? Anyway, great weekend, lot of fun, lot of mud. We're having an unusually mild period for winter at the moment, mostly grey and damp. When I have all our photos on our group website I'll post some links. There was a company came in for the weekend who organise stunts on film sets, they had the massive cushion they use for people falling from heights. Scouts got to fall on it from a quite knee trembling height....

Curses! The joys of technology! Anyway, go through to our twitter feed @12thcambridge and you can find the photos there. Rain has stopped, kids all in bed so sleeping bag here I come. Plenty of tweets tomorrow

Daft question but can anyone see the photo?

So this is a load of my little horrors at Gilwell for the weekend, it's a mini jamboree, about 3000 people, called wintercamp. Lot of mud! Temperature currently about 4C with steady drizzle. It's been below freezing for a couple of days so we now have rock hard ground covered in about a Cm thick of slimey mud. Bit interesting under foot! We're tweeting the weekends events on @12thcambridge and our Facebook group Facebook.com/12thCambridge Thinking kind thoughts about my sleeping bag..:::

About 3 years ago I went to a gig at a local music venue, on the way in I heard someone call my name, looked around and one of the door staff looked vaguely familiar. He came over with a smile on his face and then I realised that years earlier he had been one of my cubs. He'd not been the easiest kid, could be a bit of a tear away but was likeable all the same! He shook my hand, and thanked me for his time in cubs, came to the bar with me and and insisted on getting me a beer. He was now about 19 and working there to pay his way through university. Moments like that make you feel about 10 feet tall! Also from cubs.... the school most of them went to had a bring your parents to lunch day. One cub's parents couldn't make it, so she asked me to come in their place! You don't get as many cute moments as that with scouts.....

Same as calicopenn. Rabbit hole etc. It's a long time since I've actually used a bowline though. Figure 8 is much better.

I should add we are very lucky with the gliding. The neighbouring county to us (I guess what you would call a Council) own a glider but don't have an airfield in their area to keep it, so it is kept and operated at an airfield just outside Cambridge. Very convenient resource to have so close by! Most scouts aren't that lucky.

We had our last night of the year last night with the now traditional Scout Oscars. Basically we show off all the photos we took during the year and also present various prizes. So these are the highlights of what we got up to. Time for me to put my feet up for a couple of weeks now before we head off to camp on 6 Jan. We like to get started early!

Isn't that exactly the point of the original passage though? You and Ian may laugh and cry at different things, but ultimately you both have times when you feel joy, you both have times when you feel sadness and distress. Different cultures mean people do that in reaction to different things, but all people do it.

All useful, but I wonder for how long 7 and 9 will be relevant, at this side of the pond? There's a generation (including me) that has been brought up on metric for just about everything. Give it another 20 years and pounds and ounces will look as antiquated as pounds, shillings and pence!

Thank you. I couldn't agree more with all of that. I shall be blatantly thieving that for use with my troop.

That sounds more like cubs here. While parents are the most common source of recruiting leaders, and where a pack is short on adults they may ask to set up a leader rota, it isn't a family program as such. It really operates as a younger version of scouts. So to put that in context the cub pack in my group currently has 27 cubs with 7 adult leaders, 3 of who are parents of existing cubs.

Babysitters we most definitely are not! I've heard many reasons why people don't want to sign up as volunteers, not wanting to be a baby sitter is not one that I've had. By far and away the most common is lack of time. In the UK I think we typically have the longest working day and longest journies to work of anywhere in Europe. We have others that don't want the paper work, other's who are scared they'll be accused of something, other where it just isn't their thing at the end of the day. Kids who are not interested in scouts are also few and far between. You sometimes get one sign up, but they quickly disapear again when it is clearly not for them. I think you completely misunderstand what coed scouting is all about.

I think that is what we call the Young Leader scheme here in the UK. Explorers aged 14-17 can volunteer with Beavers, Cubs or Scouts (although the latter typically they tend to be 15+) When done well it can be fantastically successful, but it does need proper buy in from the explorer themselves and the leaders of the Colony/Pack/Troop they volunteer with. It's rare for a 14 year old to hit the ground running and it takes nurturing and training to get them to be really capable but when successful you have an 18 year old ready to go adult leader appear at the far end of it. It also works the other way. A 15 year old explorer scout who knows what they are doing with fires and tents etc showing new adult leaders how to do it.

I had a hard time at what we would call secondary school (11-18 year olds), stemming mainly for being the working class kid at a very middle class school and being academically actually quite good but in an academically excellent school. What I learned from that experience was how to make myself invisible.It's a skill an awful lot of kids have to learn just to get by as teenagers.Those that have had to do it know exactly what I'm talking about. Those that dish it out do so to the easy targets, those that they can easily pick out to being different to them. To survive I learned all the tricks of how to blend in. And there is no way on God's earth I would have worn my scout uniform to school. I may as well have worn a sign round my neck saying "kick me".

I agree wit some and disagree with other points here. I certainly agree that hosting the World Jamboree in 2019 will be highly influential. There will be an awful lot of both scouts and adults who will be exposed to coed scouting for the first time. Those who camp at the jamboree, the many more who will go on day trips, families who host others as part of home hospitality. And their friends. I would anticipate a greater acceptance of coed scouting following that. If memory serves, and Ian may correct me if I am wrong, the admission of girls to all sections here followed a number of groups which just started unilaterally accepting girls. It was a bottom up movement among certain groups and HQ eventually went along with it. Certainly that was the impression I had, bare in mind I was only 13 so perfectly capable of getting the wrong end of the stick! I think you may be over egging the pudding in terms of linking the drop in numbers in the UK with going coed. There was an element to it I would agree, a number of adult leaders who quit as they didn't like the way it was going. However, being a scout and Venture scout in that period I wasn't aware of a single youth member that quit because of it. The issue was more the program, the image and the terrible uniform for the many of my friends that quit while I kept going. That's not to say that you wouldn't have initial losses. Any organisation that goes through a fundamental change will suffer losses, either in protest at the change or before the change if it comes too late. Either way there would be fall out. Here in Cambridge a number of the university colleges saw academic staff resign in protest as one by one they were opened to women. Such is life. If I were BSA HQ at the moment I would be steering clear. The impression I have is there are an awful lot wounds being licked following the settlement of the gay issue and making a fundamental change to the membership model is probably the last thing they want to get involved right now. Equally though that very issue, not wanting another fight, could result in a blind eye being turned to units having girls as unofficial members. I suspect that, one day, the change will be made. Across the world previously male only institutions of all sorts have only gone one way.

It would depend on what the limiting factor is on that 100K surely? If the limiting factor is how many young people want to join then yes there has been a loss. If the limiting factor is capacity of the units then possibly not, depending what the limiting factor on that is! Simply too many variables to give a straight forward answer.

Ah yes Peter Duncan..... He had been a children's TV presenter in the 1980s and early 90s and had a reputation for pulling slightly crazy stunts. In addition though..... turns out that when he had been a jobbing actor in his early 20s and hadn't broken into mainstream TV he had appeared in a few low budget films which were only just this side of being full on "adult" in nature. The tabloids of course spun it into us having a porn star as chief scout and was full of shock and horror. In terms of selling the movement to teenage boys though......

Right.... back on it.... I'll start with facts So strictly speaking, the large drop in numbers did follow the opening of all sections to girls 6 years earlier. That though does not tell the whole story. Bear in mind I was a 13 year old scout in 1991, a Venture scout form 1994 and a 19 year old assistant cub leader in 1997. During the 1990s female scouts, outside of Venture scouts were rare. I didn't see one in my troop at all before I left for Ventures and my troop was in the process of getting smaller. There were the odd one or two here and there but they certainly weren't there in great numbers. Most beaver colonies, cub pack and scout troops were still boys only. The pack where I was an ACSL from 1997 was the only one in the district that by then had decided to admit girls and was still the only one when I left in 2000. Numbers though were still nose diving across the country. When I arrived in Cambridge in 2000 there were only two groups, that I was aware of, that were open to girls. And both of them were thriving! In 2005 my group opened a beaver colony, something we hadn't had before, and as such cubs and scouts went coed as well. By this time I was CSL (ie in charge of the pack) and I can safely say we didn't have anyone leave because girls had joined. I can't speak for the scout troop. This was around the time that numbers across the country had turned the corner and was shortly after the whole new program was introduced in 2003. Since then numbers of boys and girls have continued to grow. What follows now is opinion I believe the issue was stagnation. With the exception of some cosmetic changes there had been no significant program changes since the 1960s. In early 2000s scouts were being invited to wear uniforms designed in the 1960s. The trousers were particularly awful. They were awful. Scouting was not cool. In fact as a teenager it was pretty much social suicide to admit to being a scout. the age ranges for older members also reflected a world that had gone. In the 1960s most people left school at 15 or 16 and went to work. Hence that was when scouts finished and Ventures started. By the 1990s nearly everyone stayed at school to 18 and increasingly large numbers were going to university. the result was that 15 and 16 year olds who should have been PLs dealing with younger scouts were getting used to socialising with 17 and 18 year olds at school and didn't want to know about their younger charges. Similar the 19 and 20 year olds who should have been taking the lead in venture scout units were vanishing to university and the units were not functioning as they should. Something had to give. In 2003 Scouts moved to a 14 cut off, we had Explorers 14-18 and Network Scouts 18-25. This was with a complete change in uniforms and a refresh of the award scheme (can detail that at a later date if you want) In my opinion, it was the old program that caused the drop, and the new program coupled with the 2007 centenary and jamboree PR that turned it around.

That is a very hard question to answer because there were so many factors in play. In addition I need to get my shoes on and go to scouts! I will try and give a proper reply either later this evening or tomorrow.

Happy to oblige for the UK. I have opinions but will keep it factual. First of all the timeline for coed went something like this..... Pre 1971 no female members at all, only female adult leaders. 1971 - girls admited to what was then the Venture Scout section (15-21 year olds) 1991 - girls admitted to all sections (ie 6 and upwards) on a local decision (group by group) basis. 2003 - all new sections or groups to be coed, there must be the opportunity to go all the way through (ie if beavers, 6-8 year olds is coed then the cubs, scouts and ventures/explorers at same group also have to go coed) 2007 - all groups coed. The exception to this is at what we call "closed groups". These are pretty rare and are groups attached to other institution, most typically a private school. If that institution is single sex then the scout group may be single sex. It is permitted for a group to run a parallel but separate boys and girls program. In practice it is very rare and where it is seen is mostly at groups that are sponsored by a mosque. The coed scouting rule has been enforced by national HQ to the point where a group of leaders at a group in Luton (not far from Cambridge) were dismissed for refusal to admit girls. Numbers - this is a tricky one. There have been number fluctuations since going coed but they have not followed a pattern that matches the coed change. From the 1960s through till the late 1990s numbers throughout the country numbers were pretty stable at 600-650,000. In the late 90s, from around 1997 onwards, they fell off a cliff bottoming out in around 2004-5 at about 450,000. Since then they have climbed steadily to around 580,000 at the last census in Jan of this year. If memory serves! The number of girls as a percentage of membership has grown steadily but now seems to have now platued at around 20% although scouts and explorers typically have a greater percentage than beavers and cubs. (normally due to parents signing daughter up for brownies and then she decides to jump to scouts rather than guides) Points of fact, I offer no opinion but worth considering when looking at how and when the numbers turned around 2003 - wholesale changes to the program including changes to age ranges, uniform and the badge system. 2007 - extraordinary levels of good publicity from hosting world scout jamboree