Reassuring Scouting – Are we Scouting safely?
Insights, tools and support to help make sure Scouts is safe and well-governed
To give young people and volunteers the best experience in Scouts, we need to make sure our policies and practices are not just well-designed but actually put into practice.
It’s important we can prove they’re making a real difference. This helps us keep young people safe, meet legal requirements, and maintain trust.
Our goal is to create a simple, clear assurance system that helps everyone in Scouts know where we’re doing things safely, and where we need to improve.
This brief video explains our basic approach to assurance.
To watch in full screen, double click the video
Are we Scouting safely? That’s the key question we need to ask ourselves to understand where we’re doing well, and where, based on real evidence, we could do better.
To answer the question – Are we Scouting safely? - we need to ask four smaller questions.
1. What could go wrong?
If we don’t know what the biggest worries are, we won’t know where to pay the most attention. Looking at everything we do across the Movement, we’re constantly reviewing what could go wrong, so we can Be Prepared. That leads us to ask:
2. What are we doing to stop things going wrong?
Informed by our biggest worries, we look at what we’re doing to make sure things are less likely to go wrong. Thankfully, we’re not starting from scratch. We already have lots of things in place, like the Yellow Card for reporting safeguarding concerns, Nights Away Permits for overnight events, and much more. Though – those things are only helpful if they work in practice. So, we need to ask:
3. Do you, our volunteers, know what to do – and how to do it?
If the rules, tools, and guidance to help you aren’t good enough, you can’t find them and they’re not easy put into practice, we’ve got a problem to fix. And we need to fix this before we go to the last question:
4. How do we know it’s working in practice?
If you tell us the, rules, tools, and guidance are right, practical, and accessible, we need to check they’re actually having the intended impact.
We must check they make the difference we expect them to. Checking whether they genuinely help make sure we’re Scouting more safely.
If they do – great, we can move forward with confidence and share best practices.
If not – it's our cue to change and improve, together.
To answer these questions, we all need to work together to make sure we’re always Scouting as safely as possible, and that we can prove it.
By asking the question ‘Are we Scouting Safely?’ we’re shaping a future that’s safer for everyone by recognising our risks, knowing what’s in place to address them, checking those things work, and making things better where we need to.
Our focus
We’re committed to working closely with volunteers to make sure our policies are more than just paperwork. By providing insights, tools, and support, we’ll help local volunteers understand how to check and make sure we’re Scouting as safely as possible.
Our reassuring Scouting principles
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Co-designed and practical: We involve volunteers in creating and testing solutions, making sure they work in practice and aren’t just things to check off.
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Build on existing systems: We develop what we already have to keep things simple. Our rules, policies, and resources will be clear, easy to follow, and supported by practical guidance.
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Trust and partnership: We trust that volunteers want to keep young people safe and uphold good governance. Together, we’ll work at all levels to do our best.
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Continuous improvement: We use data and feedback to learn and improve, making sure we keep making Scouts safer.
Staying safe and safeguarding
Check out our staying safe and safeguarding guidance for volunteers to learn more about how we keep young people safe.
Discover our guidance for volunteers