Explorer Personal Safety Activity Badge
Explorer Personal Safety Activity Badge
Staying safe means making smart choices and understanding the risks around us. Through real-life scenarios, expert insights, and practical tools, you’ll explore how personal safety is shaped by decision-making, peer influence, and everyday environments. This badge helps you build confidence, awareness, and the skills to protect yourself and support others.
Complete three activities. You could:
Discover - Compare how teenagers and adults think about risk and safety in everyday situations.
Explore how the teenage brain responds to risk, reward, and decision-making, especially when emotions or peer pressure are involved.
Experience - Show how to manage risk for an activity or event that young people take part in.
Learn how to identify potential hazards, assess the level of risk, and make decisions that balance safety with independence and fun.
Mobilise - Meet or shadow frontline workers like youth workers, paramedics, police officers, or rail staff to learn about real safety issues affecting teenagers.
Find out which incidents they deal with most often and what advice they give to help young people stay safe.
Solve - Learn and practise decision-making tools like exit plans, refusal skills, and knowing when to ask for help.
Use real-life scenarios like being offered a drink at a party, receiving a risky message online, or seeing a friend take a dangerous dare to explore how these tools can help you stay safe.
Create - Design a toolkit to help other young people manage risk and stay safe in real-life and online situations.
Your toolkit could include things like check-in routines, trusted contact lists, or tips for handling peer pressure.
Tips
Love storytelling? Create a comic strip or short video showing how to handle a tricky situation.
Into tech? Build a digital toolkit or app to help others stay safe online.
Pick a format that works for you—and help others stay safe, your way!To earn your badge, you can either try some of our example activities, or come up with your own with support from a Scouts volunteer or trusted adult. The activities should be challenging for you and take a reasonable amount of time.
You can offer flexibility in the activities and encourage Explorers to choose activities that reflect their interests and skill set.
We’d recommend an Activity Badge should be achievable within 3 weeks of starting the activities.
- When taking part in activities, remember to let someone know:
- Where you’re going.
- Who you’re with.
- What time you plan to be finished.
- A plan for communicating your progress.
- Ask for help if you're visiting new places or trying new activities.
- When volunteering with unfamiliar teams, make sure you have a key contact person to liaise with and understand what to do if you feel unsafe or uncertain.
- Complete your own risk assessment based on your plans and ask an adult volunteer to check it for you.
- Make sure you have a clear plan and have checked the area beforehand to confirm it is safe and appropriate for leading running activities.
- When taking part in activities, remember to let someone know:
- All activities for this badge must be safely managed and locally approved.
- Review and make sure that you understand the activities plan and support the young person to ensuring all safety considerations are addressed before it takes place.
- Volunteers must make sure they have completed a thorough risk assessment and taken appropriate steps to reduce risks.
- Use the safety checklist to help plan and risk assess the activity.
Badges will be available to purchase from Scout Store later in September, please check back for updates.
July 2026.
Requirements can be adapted to suit each young persons abilities. See our guidance on flexibility.