Cambridgeskip

There's no easy answer to the drop off. Stay on rates are improving but they are still a long way from where we'd like them to be. A few thoughts though. Aged 14 means moving from year 9 to year 10 at school where they start studying for GCSE exams. The pressure on them in terms of school work ramps up significantly and only gets worse as they get closer to exams at 16 and then A level exams at 18. Many teenagers have to let something go in terms of extra curricular activities, for some that means scouts/explorers. Image - the image of scouting has improved signifcantly in recent years but it's still a long way from where we'd like it to be. I don't know how we deal with that. Structure - explorers is typically run at district level which means moving from a scout group a scout may have been at from age 6 and is all they have ever known to a different location with different adult leaders with scouts coming from different troops. It's unsettling. Snowball effect - the drop off means there are fewer explorer units than scout troops so typically they have to travel further when they move up which makes it less convenient which results in further drop offs. There is an increasingly argument to moving explorers back to group level. Ian may have other comments as Explorers are more his thing than mine! Although in better news I have two Young Leaders with me who previously quit main stream explorers and decided to come back as YLs.

I would agree! The current UK structure works because it broadly reflects typical peer groups here, particularly the scouts/explorers distinction. What we call secondary school is aged 11-18 and at most schools there is an element of separation between those in years 7, 8 and 9 (11-14) and those in years 10-13 (14-18) and despite being in the same school with the same teachers they are often referred to as the lower and upper school. Typically school sports teams tend to have year group based teams for years 7-9 with those in year 10 upwards competing for places in the over all school teams. When scouting was going down hill here the age ranges were not reflecting typical peer groups and that was where things went wrong. If BSA is going to shuffle its age ranges around they need to reflect American peer groups and not British ones.

From experience girls typically look after themselves when it comes to periods. We keep a supply of sanitary towels in our HQ, all the girls know where they are if they need one. We always take a supply to camp. Again it's part of the arrival briefing to tell the girls where they are. Very occassionally one of them vanishes, presumably a girl who gets caught out and goes to grab one. I only recall one occassion where a girl has actually asked for one. The conversation went broadly, Scout - "I need a sanitary towel Skip, where are they?" Me - "Store room, middle shelf, next to the spare toilet role." Scouts - "Cheers." Yes be ready to deal with it but don't worry about it. Odds are you'll never actually have to have much of a conversation about it.

Looking around the world I don't think there is any worry that BSA will collapse altogether. Kids these days aren't really all that different to what they were 20, 50 or 100 years ago. They have more opportunities and live in a different social environment but what hasn't changed is that put them outdoors and get a fire going and they are as keen for adventure as they ever were. What also hasn't changed is a very hman desire, whichis particularly strong among the young, to belong to something. BSA and scouting more widely provides that. There will be changes, it may not end up looking exactly like it did 10 years ago, but it will still be around.

At the moment I have a group of 5 scouts working on the "herritage" section of our local knowledge badge. They are looking at the history of our troop, which is pretty extensive going back to 1911. This evening, having found out the various places the troop used to meet they went for a bit of a walking tour. Nice and easy, all within half a mile of our current building. One of the venues is a picture framing gallery. It's a working workshop but surprisingly, given that we don't think the troop has met there since the 1940s, there are still markings on the walls marking the patrols. Best of all though is the owner..... talking to him he's clearly a bit of a historian and knew a lot about scouting history. And there's good reason for that. It turns out his father was of the 20 boys on the original 1907 camp at Brownsea Island! I think the troop will be dining out on that one for a little while to come Photo of him with the scouts here. Wolf patrol symbol on the wall behind.

I can give you something worse.... at the end of summer camp a couple of years ago one patrol, for reasons no one could fathom, put the used, damp and dirty scouring pads and cloths back in their patrol box. Left their to fester till they were next used a couple of months later. Wow. What a smell.

Only once a year photo update? I'd suggest you need to go for more than that. We are moving to, if we're not already at, a world where if an organisation is not on the internet they may as well not exist. You want to find info on something or someone and the internet is the go to source. And your troop website is the first thing a prospective member or their parents or a potential adult volunteer will see. So yes keep it simple, make everything easy to find the important information (with THE most important being how to get in touch and join or volunteer) but also make it look fun and positive. Lots of photos of the most recent events. And I mean camps, high adventure, action packed stuff. Not courts of honour or stiff photos in uniform. And I don't think once a year cuts it.

You know, if I ever had the opportunity to speak to your son I would ask that he reconsider. While I have never camped at a world jamboree I did have the privelidge of going to the European Jamboree in 2005. It was an extraordinary experience. To one side of my unit were Italians, the other side of them were Irish. The side of us were Polish, the other side of them Isralie. Across the track from us were Dutch, Swiss, Portugese and Ugandan units. Altogether I think there were 68 countries with contingents there from across Europe and many beyond. In 2015 my group were luck enough to send 5 explorer scouts as part of the UK contingent to the Japan jamboree. They all loved it. None of them were expecting the experience they got. You're quite right it's different flavour. It's not a cheap flavour, but it's a unique one. You can't really anticipate it till you get there.

The reasons for the intial decline were complex and having been a scout during that time it is broadly described as due to years of stagnation and failure to modernise. Also it is rapidly approaching previous levels. The best estimates, before proper censuses were done is that membership peaked at about 650K. Last census we were at 618K, widely expected to be up again this year. So yes, growing and thriving.

My scouts here in the UK are 10-14 and I don't really see it. Sometimes they seem to drift into single sex groups. We went punting back in June. We told them to sort themselves into boat groups and they ended up single sex. A few weeks earlier we'd been sailing and they naturally sorted themselves into mixed sex boat groups. It just depends on what we are up to. Our actual patrols, where most chores are done, are mixed and there's certainly no gender based division there. They simply get stuck into it together. Maybe it's the sort of girls that come to scouts rather than girl guides simply not standing for any having to do the cleaning nonsense but it certainly doesn't happen. This is what coed chores typically look like. I think that is a harsh way of describing it. As an outsider looking in, while BSA top brass have made a hash of implementing it, I get why they have gone for this structure. The USA is one of the most diverse countries on the planet. Any solution had to allow for staying strictly same sex or allowing things to blur because of that diversity. And yes I can see that in practice those that want to will blur it. They are treading an extremely thin tight rope and I think this is as good a solution as any.

It doesn't look that different to the group system that we have in the UK that you don't have at present. Most commonly a group consists of one each of beaver colony, cub pack, scout troop an explorer unit with one committee sitting over the top. However at larger groups such as mine we have two scout troops and two cub packs. We have two SLs (what you call SMs) two sets of ASLs (ASMs), although we do fill in with each other if we're short on adults on any given week, and two PLCs. Most of our programmes are separate. My troop meets on a Thursday, the other troop meets Wednesday at the same location. We have one pool of camping gear that we draw from. In fact the patrol boxes are twinned, ie shared between one patrol in one troop and one in the other. We have one bank account. Camps are variable. Our lower key weekend camps are mostly separate. However summer camp is always joint as are a few other headline events. eg we have gliding lined up for April. True we have two troops for different reasons to you, we simply ran out of space to accomodate everyone that wanted to join so started a second troop. Both troops, to be clear, are coed. However I suspect that it's a model that may end up looking familiar your side of the Atlantic just with boys in one and girls in the other,

Very true, this side of the pond the necker is very much what says "scout". Typically on camp we don't wear full uniform except for formal moments except for the necker which we normally wear all the time. Typically worn over the collar (if what we're wearing has a collar) but I don't think we have a specific rule about it. Nearest we have is that the official badge positioning diagrams show it as over.

Thanks for the suggestions chaps, a few things to go and look out for there. Off line someone suggested, in terms of things thats scouts might be lijely to have about their person, some phone or camera cases with magnetic clasps.

So my scouts want to do a survival skills camp.One of things we've got planned is building their own compasses (as well as other natural navigation techniques).The actual process of building one out of a magnetised needle is not that difficult. No worries there. What I wanted to do though was take it a step further and raid ebay or similar from some old electronics and get the scouts to extract magnets from them on the spot. As would probably be the case in a real survival situation! Ie break open up your phone, ipod etc and extract a magnet. So far so good.However.... I am a biologist by education (hence no problem with showing them how to read a tree to find north!) not an engineer or similar. I am slightly concerned by breaking these things open and what nasties may or may not lurk among the various components. I'm thinking heavy metals and the like.So has anyone done this before? And do you know what bits we should avoid going near? Or am I being overly paranoid?

Remember it's the kind of thing that beds in though. I think you're seeing it from the perspective of a den/pack going from as is to six (I'll call it that to distinguish from a full on patrol) If you are in a situation where from the moment they walk through the door aged 6 they are introduced to the idea of working in a six and that for various things someone may be asked to be in charge (obviously the complexity increasing from age 6 to 10/11) then that will be accepted. Young children are extremely impressionable and if introduced to something as being the way it is at a young age they will accept that as being the way it is.

In the UK our cubs use somethng that vaguely resembles a patrol system. We don't have Dens like you do instead the cub pack (8-10 year olds) is divided into sixes and the Beaver Colony (6-8 year olds) is divided into Lodges. Each typically has 6 Beavers or Cubs in it. They certainly don't act as full on patrols, as Latin Scot says they aren't old enough to function quite like that. Typically though games are played on an inter six/lodge basis, chores on camps are done in a six/lodge, a six may well all sleep in a tent together. In particular in Cubs each six will have a Sixer, who is the equivalent of a PL.. They don't have the same responsibility but they are acknlwoedged as the snior members of the pack and will be asked to buddy younger cubs, do flag break etc. Those small groups do work quite well both at week to week meetings and camps

I am genuinely unclear on whether this is serious or satire.

Thanks Ian, that's exactly what I was trying to say! The handful we have had turn up who cause a drama quickly find that the rest of the troop don't want to be involved and it is the drama queens that leave shortly after. It's simply not an environment where they find that it is tolerated, in particular by their own peers.

I'll speak to our cub leaders and see what they think. It might take a bit if shuffling given the time difference. What time zone are you in?

This isn't an experience I recognise at all. My experience is that the types of boys and girls who will get involved in, for want of a better word, "drama" simply don't have the motivation to be scouts in the first place. The handful that do turn up don't last long at all. That attitude doesn't fit and the rest of the troop doesn't tolerate it. Yes there are some differences in what boys and girls like in the same ways that there are differences in what the older and younger scout like but it's not so different as to disrupt things. It can lead to debate in the PLC or in troop forums but there will be debate in the PLC and troop forums if it was single sex as well, just over different things. This is the reality of coed scouts on camp. Boys and girls mucking in together. It's no different to it just being boys.

You're right in that it didn't bring boys back in itself. What I would argue though is it was the first stage in a much larger, and desperatly needed, modernisation and it was that over all change that started putting bums on seats again. The image TSA has now is a whole world different from what it was in the 90s. Our annual scout census is done at 31 Jan and the results announced in April. Certainly locally we're expecting numbers to be up again. I'm aware of 1 new beaver colony, 3 new cub packs and 2 new scout troops in our district alone. If that is reflected alsewhere I'd expect another sharp jump. I said in another thread that I doubt that the membership changes will be the last major change you will see in BSA. Clearly something is amiss if you are losing members. The core part of BSA is good. Get young people outdoors, working together in small groups, allowing them to lead and take ownership of the program. That basic set up is the same worldwide. So I certainly don't expect that to change. Some of the other stuff around the edges though, I would expect changes to that. Possibly the uniform, possibly the award system, possibly age ranges.

As I've said more than once I would be very hesitant to land the losses in the UK in the 1990s and early 2000s at the door of going coed. There was simply too much else going on. I was a scout till 1994 before moving to Venture scouts. I can tell you that the image of scouting in the UK at the time sucked. And it sucked becase it stagnated. Nobody was quitting because of girls joining. They were quitting because of the awful uniform which hadn't been updated since the 1960s. They left because the age ranges which worked in the 1960s no longer reflected natural peer groups. They left because HQ were utterly clueless about PR and thought that putting an elderly chief scout, major general (retired) whoever it was on TV in uniform and renewing his promise was the way to get kids through the door. Dear God it was awful. And I remember the hard time I got at school for being a scout. Trust me, none of it was remotely to do with girls. Things turned around because finally HQ got a grip and changed what needed to be changed. The change to scouts/explorers/network, the updated uniform, the full time PR staff at HQ that knew what they were doing.

With the exception of Venture scouts the Uk didn't go coed till 1991 (local option) and fully coed 2007. Number started rising in 2005. Long way from a 30 year gap.

I'd say a couple of things..... I remember when the first girl came to my current group. Now fare enough this was with cubs rather than scouts but it went like this.... Comments had been made, mostly by adults, that it would be a disaster, that the boys wouldn't stick around, they wouldn't like it. On the night she came along I treated her exactly the same as any other new cub. I asked one of the sixers* to adopt her and take her into her six. I introduced her at flag break. Her name was Martha. And then we got on with the usual cub night. Nobody quit. She fitted in. And a couple of months later she was joined by further girls and no one batted an eyelid. Nearly everyone I've heard of that has seen an all boy pack or troop or unit go coed has had exactly the same experience. Then there is this photo. I like this photo. Taken on our 2016 summer camp. We'd had a day trip to seaworld in Brighton. This was taken as some had finished and were waiting for the stragglers to join them. A mixed groups of boys and girls just bonding together. It's on our website and used as the banner photo on our twitter feed. Quite simply it works.

My troop (coed) is lucky enough to have a twin troop in Canada, also coed that we have done a series of exchanges with.. Obviously I can't speak for any other Canadian troops but they do no such thing. At night adults go to bed, simple as that. Same this side of the pond as well. Absolutely no need for there to be any extra stress. Young love occassionally blooms but it's never caused a problem. The boys and the girls are there to do what scouts do and it's never caused us disruption.