Hi,

I am writing to you to introduce myself.

My name is Stuart Ball, I am the Growth & Development Lead for Milton Keynes Scouts. With recent changes to the Explorers Team and the District Explorer Scout Commissioner changing, Stuart Bailey, District Commissioner and myself started looking at ways we can reach our goals of 3 Young Leaders per section, which equates to about 240 Young Leaders in Milton Keynes.

That's our goal, along with 6 adult volunteers in the Section Teams supporting their Young Leaders development.

First we need to ensure our data is accurate, so we've created a little 'census' form to capture if your young person is Young Leadering at a Scout Group, and a reminder of where they are, and what section they are working with. This will enable us to update our records.

We're also asking what modules they think they have done, again to ensure our records are accurate.

There is also a section for those who've left the scheme before completing their Young Leader Belt, so we can improve things based on the feedback.

We've reviewed the way that we can deliver the Young Leaders Scheme to ensure that opportunities to complete the scheme before aging out, are improved. This has included reviewing the way other areas of the country deliver theirs, and nicking some of their ideas.

We realise some our Young Leaders are close to aging out, so we're keen to make available to them the Young Leader Scheme training to enable them to complete it as quickly as possible.

One of the key ideas we've implemented, with their permission, is the Hampshire Scouts online Young Leader traning modules. We've added some, we think, improvements to make it easier to engage with and track your progress with.

It's being trialled at the moment, so if you would like to help us finalise it, and make it better, please drop us a note [email protected] so we can make sure we're available to support and make changes as we go along.

We will continue to support Bucks County organised face -to-face training, and if enough of our Young Leaders register to attend a County young leader training event, we'll look at ways of consolidating transport.

Our Young Leaders are our leaders of the future, whether that's an exciting role in Beavers, or a Mountain Leader taking young people to far out places.

The Young Leaders Scheme is part of that building process. We are expanding the development of our Young Leaders, for those interested.

We'll do this through a combination of offering external qualifications through the CVQO and working with others to offer adventurous activity skills development to enable them to gain competence to train others.

We're not the first Scout organisation to offer CVQO, it's working well in Cheshire Scouts.

So please make sure you complete that section of our Census/registration form, as that will help us gauge demand, and feed into planning those elements.

As adult volunteers we keep our scouting communications separate from our personal emails by having an MKScouts email address.

We are also encouraging our Young Leaders to have an MKScouts email address to help them compartmentalise their Scouting from their personal lives. This enables Groups to share communications with them, for them to access District resources, such as Microsoft Teams.

If your Young Leader doesn't have a MKScouts.org email address, then please email [email protected] and we'll get that sorted out.

This ensures that communications to our Young Leaders are never 1:2:1 to personal email addresses.

Supporting your Young Leader getting to where they go to support Scouting enables our volunteers to do more with the young people in their section. The District Commissioner, Stuart Bailey, and myself are very grateful for what you do as parents & Carers to support your Young Leaders.

We hope these changes will excite and reward our existing cohort of Young Leaders, and make Young Leader-ing in Milton Keynes an attractive proposition.

To those who are aging out, and hopefully joining Scout Network, we will be working with the Network Commissioner, Danni Smith, to explore opportunities to gain Adventurous Activity Permits, for those who want to develop those skills within Scout Network.

Milton Keynes is an exciting, and rapidly growing city. Growing Scouting in MK long term, sustainable, and exciting manner, starts with giving our Young Leaders opportunities.

Many Thanks for making it this far down the email. Please complete our Census/Registration/feedback form, as this will help us massively.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Kind Regards,

Stuart Ball
Growth & Development Lead
Milton Keynes Scouts
[email protected]
[email protected]