Scout Experience Survey
Take part in our Scout Experience Survey 2023. Have your say in what makes Scouts great and how we could be even better.
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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 30 prizes of £50 Amazon vouchers. Plus everyone who completes the survey will get a voucher code for 20% off at Scout Store (terms apply).
Your views matter
We use the SES results to demonstrate the positive impact Scouts has on young people and communities. Highlighting these positives really helps us secure fundraising, which allows us to grow the movement and give more young people skills for life. We also use your feedback to improve the work we do, to make Scouts as safe, easy, and enjoyable as possible for volunteers and young people.
Earlier this year we secured a £6.35M grant from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s (DCMS) to support our growth and improvement of Scouts. We couldn’t have done this without having research like the SES to show the impact Scouts has on young people.
Your voice allows us to grow the movement and improve what we do to make Scouts better for everyone!
We need your help
To make this all happen, we need your help. Over the past few years there’ve been less people taking part in the survey. In 2019, 12% of volunteers took part, which fell to only 6% last year. In 2022, only 0.3% of eligible young people took part. This means we might not be getting a true picture of how big our impact is on young people's lives.
We’d really appreciate it if you could fill in the survey and let us know your views. 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:
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!
A message from Ayesha Karim, UK Youth Commissioner
To watch in full screen, double click the video
About the Scout Experience Survey
If you’re aged 13 or older in Scouts, you can take part.
That includes young people (Scouts and Explorer Scouts), Network members, parents/carers of young people in Scouts (including Squirrels, Beavers, Cubs, Scouts, Explorer Scouts), and adult volunteers.
Complete the survey via the online link. The survey will be live from 25 May to 16 June 2023. 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.
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 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 and Insight team will have access to this information.
We do ask questions for you to provide information such as your postcode, age, gender, religion and ethnicity (though some of these questions are optional). 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 factors about it such as whether it is urban or rural.
If you have any concerns about how data is being used for this survey you can contact: Data-Insights@scouts.org.uk. For more information on how we manage personal data please see our Data Protection Policy.
We want to understand the impact of Scouting in different areas of the UK, especially in areas of deprivation. The full postcode gives us the ability to identify the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) score that’s applied to each postcode. Then we'll remove your postcode and will only keep what your postcode represents (i.e. urban/rural, region, social economic status (using Index of Multiple Deprivation for example), etc.).
Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD)
- The indices of multiple deprivation are the official government measures of deprivation for small areas. They are calculated slightly differently in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland but are broadly the same. The country is broken up into small areas known as a Lower-layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs). Each LSOA is given a deprivation score which is used to rank that area relative to the others. Read more information on LSOA.
Many of the questions in the survey help us understand what Scouts is like in your area and what type of experience volunteers have. Using the postcode collected to generate the IMD score will then help us understand whether there’s a difference in experience in different areas. This information is particularly helpful for us to understand how we can better support volunteers and the delivery of Scouts in areas of deprivation.
There are several sections to the survey. We ask each group different questions to find out about their experiences over the past 12 months.
We ask young people (13 and over) and parents/carers questions of their experience of Scouts; what they do, how they’re getting on and whether they enjoy Scouts.
Some questions ask young people how much they agree or disagree with a set of statements are designed to see how confident they are in a range of skills.
There might be some questions that feel personal. We only ask these to understand how Scouts is helping you to achieve your best in life. You don't have to answer any questions you don't want to, but please answer them as honestly as you can.
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 (including Young Leaders) and Network Members (prize draw)
- 10 x £50 Amazon vouchers for parents/carers (prize draw)
- 10 x £50 Amazon vouchers for adult volunteers (prize draw)
- Plus a 10% discount code for Scout Store for everyone who takes part
In 2022 you told us that the annual cost of Scouts is £232, which has increased by £23 since 2021. We want to make sure Scouts is still affordable for all, so we’ve created new support and guidance for volunteers to try and make Scouts cheaper for volunteers and families. We’ve also created a Cost of Living Support Fund, which provided a grant to 1,050 young people in underrepresented communities to help keep them in Scouts.
Results from previous surveys are helping us continue to grow, become more inclusive, to be shaped by young people and to make a bigger impact in our communities.