The impact of Scouts on young people

Every year, we conduct the Scout Experience Survey (SES), as we try to better understand our members’ attitudes and experiences. In this survey, we asked our young people, aged 13–17, questions about Scouts’ key Theory of Change outcomes:

• Adventure
• Skills for life
• Wellbeing
• Leadership
• Citizenship
• Connectedness

Running the survey is a great way to find out if, and in what ways, the impact of Scouts is changing throughout our Skills for Life strategy.

We’re proud that, since 2019, Scouts has seen significant improvements in youth outcomes, especially in the areas of adventure and wellbeing. This trend highlights the positive impact Scouts continues to have on our young people’s lives.

Scouts is thrilled to report one of the SES’s key findings. Our young people are now significantly more physically active. The heartening news is our young people engage in, at least, 30 minutes of physical activity more frequently than their counterparts in 2019. This illustrates the effectiveness of the range of Scouts programmes in promoting a healthy lifestyle to our young people. We’re also pleased to report that our young people, compared to 2019, are more satisfied with life generally.

These high-level results are supported by a number of positive feedback areas:

• 95% of our young people take part in activities they hadn’t tried before Scouts.
• 94% developed life skills that’ll benefit them in the future.
• 85% of our young people say they’re happier since joining Scouts.

We’re pleased to see that all these measures improved since last year.
Other positive impacts of Scouts, revealed in the SES, include:

• 68% of our young people say they’re healthier through being part of Scouts.
• 84% of our young people say Scouts has made them more confident.
• 78% of our young people tell us that, through Scouts, they’re happier to help in their local area.
• 40% of our young people say, through attending Scouts, they do better in school.
• 66% of our young people say Scouts has made them more confident about getting a job in the future.

These results highlight the positive impact our activities, Groups and volunteers are having on young people’s personal development and engagement.

The SES also shows our young people are finding Scouts more challenging, but still enjoyable, than in previous years. This is a clear improvement on last year’s results, which saw around half of our young people feeding back that some activities could be more challenging.

Summary

The SES shows that, since 2019, Scouts has made tangible progress towards improving outcomes for our young people. There are clear improvements to be seen across adventure, wellbeing and skills for life, where increased physical activity and higher life satisfaction all demonstrate Scouts’ positive impact on our young people’s lives.

We’re still committed to improving the experience of our young people in Scouts. The insights from this survey, along with other feedback from our young people and volunteers, feed into the programme activities we’ll develop in the year ahead. The SES gives us a sharpened focus, showing us where new programme development should be targeted to respond to our young people’s needs.

We’re developing programme resources that focus on healthy relationships, as well as good mental health and wellbeing. Informed by our SES results, Scouts will increase its focus on how it helps young people to improve their wellbeing by building connectedness and caring for others.

Through information gathering, like the SES, we continue to learn and refine its offering as part of our movement’s ongoing efforts to give young people the best possible start in life.