Scout Experience Survey
Take part in our Scout Experience Survey 2025. Have your say in what makes Scouts great and how we could be even better.
Have your say
We run our Scout Experience Survey (SES) each year to find out what you think about Scouts. Whether you’re a young person, a volunteer or a parent/carer, the Scout Experience Survey is your chance to tell us what's working well for you in Scouts and what isn't.
As a thank you for taking part in the survey, we’ll enter you into a prize draw to win one of 20 prizes of £50 Amazon vouchers. Plus, everyone who completes the survey will get a voucher code for 20% off at Scout Store (terms apply).
The difference your views make
The Scout Experience Survey helps us understand what’s working well in Scouts, and what we need to improve. This helps us make better decisions about how to spend time and money more effectively to make Scouts better for everyone.
Since running the survey in 2018 we have gained some vital insights through your feedback. The 2024 survey revealed key insights, including:
- Young people tell us Scouts has given them the opportunity to build confidence, learn new skills, try activities they’ve not done before and make lifelong friends. Young people love doing adventure and outdoors activities but feel they don’t get the chance to do them enough. They feel the programme could be more challenging.
- Feedback from parents and carers was mostly positive. Many praised our volunteers and say that Scouts is great value for money. However, some parents highlight that Scouting can be expensive and more exciting activities (e.g. trips away, camps, adventure activities) may be off-limits for lower income families.
- 90% of volunteers say they enjoy volunteering with Scouts. However, we did see a drop in satisfaction compared with 2023. Some of the main challenges volunteers face include having too much to do and not getting enough support in their role. We hear that having more volunteers to help would reduce workload but recruiting new people can be a challenge.
Your feedback helps us understand what we can do to improve Scouts for everyone. With the results from 2024 we are working with our Programme, Volunteering, Learning and Assurance teams to address concerns of volunteers, young people and parents alike to make Scouting easier, more enjoyable and safer for everyone.
We also use the Scout Experience Survey results to show the positive impact Scouts has on young people and communities. By highlighting these positives, we can make even stronger cases for fundraising to support more young people in Scouts. This year, compared with 2019, young people are more physically active, value the outdoors more, and have better wellbeing outcomes like happiness and confidence.
We can’t do it without you
To make this happen we need your help. We’d really appreciate it if you could fill in the survey and let us know your views. Without your feedback we won’t know what challenges you face in Scouts, and therefore where our attention is needed most.
If you also have regular contact with young people or parents / carers, please also share the survey with them so we can hear their voice too. The more people who fill out the survey, the better we can understand how to improve our services, tools, and resources.
Please share the survey with other parents, carers, volunteers and young people you know and encourage them to complete it. Here are some templates you can use:
- Download an email template for parents and carers of Scouts and Explorers (Word Doc)
- Download an email template for Scouts and Explorers (Word Doc)
- Download an email template for adult volunteers (Word Doc)
- Download a 'take part in the survey' poster for volunteers
- Download a 'take part in the survey' poster for parents and carers
- Download a 'take part in the survey' poster for young people
A big thank you
If you've filled out the survey in the past; thank you. But please fill it out again this year. We do ask similar questions each year. This is so we can compare results year-on-year to get a really good picture of how we're changing.
And please share the survey with other volunteers, parents / carers and young people as well. We want this year to be our biggest response yet!
About the Scout Experience Survey
If you’re a young person aged 13-18 in Scouts (Scouts and Explorer Scouts), you can take part. You can also take part if you’re a parent / carer of young people in Scouts (including Squirrels, Beavers, Cubs, Scouts, Explorer Scouts), or an adult volunteer.
You can complete the survey via the below online links. Please make sure you select the link that applies to you (i.e. if you are a young person, volunteer, or parent / carer). The survey will be live from 20 October to 16 November 2025. Please make sure you complete it before then.
Please only complete the survey once, even if you’re a parent with more than one child in Scouts, or both a parent or carer and volunteer.
If you could share this link with other Scouts, parents or carers, and volunteers you know, that’d be great.
Take the survey for volunteers
There are several sections to the survey. We ask each group different questions to find out about their experiences in Scouts.
We ask volunteers questions about their overall attitude towards Scouts, including the impact Scouts has on them and whether they enjoy it. We also ask more specific questions about different parts of their volunteering journey, including joining, training, and support they get in their day-to-day role.
We ask young people (aged 13-18) questions about their skills, behaviours and attitudes to understand whether taking part in Scouts has an impact on certain life outcomes. We also ask young people whether they enjoy Scouts and the types of activities they do through Scouts.
We ask parents just a few of key questions about whether they like Scouts, how they heard about Scouts, and how much it costs them.
The data you provide us is securely stored in our internal encrypted servers and online in the Alchemer survey tool, in line with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law.
The only personally identifiable information we collect in this survey is your email address for the purpose of the prize draw and if you have agreed to be contacted about future research. All of the personal information you provide will be anonymised by removing your email address from the dataset once it has been extracted for the prize draw, and only the Scouts Data & Insight team will have access to this information.
We do ask questions for you to provide information such as your postcode, gender, religion, ethnicity and whether you have a disability, however these questions are all optional. The reason we ask these questions is so we can understand if there are any differences in experiences of young people and volunteers from different identity groups.
As a safeguard against individuals being identified from this data, we do not provide analysis for responses lower than 20 to any questions response options. We also remove your postcode from the dataset once it has been used to identify geographical factors such as which decile in the Index of Multiple Deprivation you are in.
If you’ve any concerns about how data is being used for this survey you can contact the Data and Insights Team on [email protected]. For more information on how we manage personal data please see our Data Protection Policy.
Everyone who completes the survey can be entered into the prize draw. All you have to do is fill in your email address. The prizes are:
- 10 x £50 Amazon vouchers for young people aged 13-18 (prize draw)
- 10 x £50 Amazon vouchers for adult volunteers (prize draw)
- 20% discount code for Scout Store for everyone who takes part
Discover what we found out in the 2024 Scout Experience Survey.