To think D of E is a massive swindle

What?!?!
Ours is FoC!
But DS1'S school is brilliant with the extracurriculars- possibly because we are not in a rich area. It's run by teacher volunteers, and there are no transport costs because they start and end the expedition at the school. They have plenty of gear to lend out, but DS only needs to borrow a big enough rucksack ,and a Trangia for the group.

(Oh, tell a lie, I think we have to contribute £6 for the campsite).

For those who are shelling out £100s for new kit....have you never heard of Vinted/eBay/ Facebook Marketplace?? DS's new walking boots were £20 from Vinted.

My daughter still using the boots at nearly 30 so for us good value They all took homemade good, took it frozen and it defrosted. For last day pasta and pack of sauce with plenty of grated cheese.

Nothing is for free. You either need volunteers to provide their time or you need to pay people who are qualified.
Tents, stoves etc cost money.

In the past, LEAs and schools had budgets to pay for DofE group membership, training some teachers to be mountain leaders and buying rents etc which could be lent to applicants. Paperwork requirements were less.

These days, everything needs to be heavily risk assessed, insured and run by qualified people. Large voluntary organisations like Scouts can do this. Individual schools don’t have the funds to train their staff and teachers don’t want to give up countless free time training to get qualified and running these trips for free, when already they are so stretched due to schools being underfunded.

Like lots of things, DofE has become a luxury. It wasn’t meant to be like this, but when schools are cut to the bone in resourcing, they have to prioritise books and teachers and it’s DofE which goes, or every cost passed onto parents. And then not everyone can afford it.

I’d say there’s still a lot to be got out of it and many find themselves doing activities they wouldn’t have done otherwise and being pushed outside their comfort zones. But of course it all costs and you might decide you can get those experiences cheaper and elsewhere. But lots won’t actuallly be self starters and do the stuff without DofE.

Loads of things are becoming less accessible. School trips have risen in price. Schools need to use specialist providers for insurance purposes and they have to make their profit. Schools aren’t cashing in, but the prices they then need to charge put the trips out of reach for many. The standard of living is dropping and more stuff is inacccessible to more people. It’s another sign of the times we live in.

and yet my dc did his Gold expedition (and practice and training) with a young man in his group who has autism. Obviously all people with autism are individuals who have different strengths and needs, just the same as all people who don't have autism have different strengths and needs.
There was another person in their group who had a physical disability.
Adjustments were put in place for both of the people in the group with disabilities, and those who didn't worked as a team to offer what additional support that they could so that all the group achieved the expedition part of the award.

The DofE scheme is very flexible to enable people of all abilities to achieve it. It is all based around improvement, individual challenge, getting out of your comfort zone and achieving new things.
Those whose needs are so significant that even with reasonable adjustment they would not be able to attempt it, can look at the Gateway Award.

Obviously you know your dd and I don't, so I can't talk about one individual, but I can testify that people with Autism can definitely achieve their bronze, and some go on to achieve their Silver and Gold. Obviously many don't, as in the population as a whole. It isn't meant to be easy, it is meant to challenge youngsters, and, when done properly, those that achieve the award should be proud of what they have achieved.

I'd love to know what adults buy those special wayfarer things. Tins and pot noodles for us.

Adults that regularly walk carrying all their kit. Walkers, climbers, even wild swimmers who consciously look at the weight of everything they are carrying and take things that are as lightweight as possible.
The most basic expedition training being given 50 years ago started with "no tins of anything" - that goes against any training in how to pack an expedition rucksack.

My kids are in the army cadets and will pay £20 per level of award.
Kit cost are 0 because it's all either part of their regular kit or leant to them by the army cadets.
Meals are army ration packs cooked in mess tins all supplied by the cadet platoon.
Oh and they line their bergens (big backpacks) with bin bags for all their field exercises whether it's regular field camp or DofE and it does the job perfectly well 😆

It's only a fantastic opportunity and building life skills if lead correctly - with the young people taught how to make appropriate nutritional decisions, rather than "buy this, buy that". That's the point the OP is making. Some organisations are insistent that the participants have specific brands of meal/ kit/ etc, rather than teach how to make informed decisions about such stuff.

It is a fantastic opportunity and really helped with life skills. For safety they need staff and vehicles etc which all costs. You don't need to buy special food my daughter made homemade tomato sauce froze it and took pasta. She also took pesto and canned corn. Add fruit, cereal bars etc and they don't starve.

When my daughter did her Dof E’s ( bronze and silver) via secondary school, it was up to them to plan their meals and what to take! The only thing I bought her was a decent rucksack and boots. And I sure as heck don’t remember paying anything like that amount of money, because there’s no way I could have afforded it at the time!

Afaik the income from the Crown estates goes straight to the government which give them 25% back to live on. But to get people frothing it makes more sense to make something up.

If you are going to use your rucksack in the future a lot then a proper liner is useful and will last.

But a decent binliner (or even two) is fine for a one off expedition.

I don't know why schools are getting the blame either! Unless you have good citizens willing to volunteer to train youngsters in map-reading, first aid, etc and run practice and qualifying expeditions then what do you do? Either not offer it at all or get in paid outsiders. Our friends have volunteered for years as a husband and wife team even though they have no link to the school any more. They are giving up now because they are fed up of being taken for granted. At the end of one expedition instead of being thanked they were sworn at for the bus being back an hour late. (Their bus, their petrol etc). Feel bad for them and also the students that will miss out now.

I use the orange survival bags inside my rucksack to keep everything dry. They last for years !

My original DoE rucksack has been all over the world now !

The fact is the royal family is to be served not to serve, to keep all their money and assets away from scrutiny and taxation but happy to receive more form the tax paying commoners.
They don't contribute money to any charity or to the needy in society.
They take pictures with/at charities and with a handful of needy but never given even 0.001% of their money to them.
I know many will bring out their swords but it just shows the extent of the brain washing together with the BM, the RF have been able to carry out on the British people.
So yes, after taxes are deducted from your earners you pay for the privilege of sleeping in the field under the sanction of the richest in the land.

YABU to blame this on DofE. D of E scheme is about the entire thing being affordable!

The cost is down to the school. Our school run D of E, and the costs are an absolute minimum e.g. parents drop of kids, they bring (and plan) their own food etc... we have a supply of second hand kit if kids need to borrow something etc...

The D of E website says:

@jgw1 my autistic daughter simply wouldn’t cope with the expedition part.
So disability is definitely a barrier.

As discussed up thread disability is no barrier to completing the expedition section.

No sadly not. Perhaps it does need modernising or for the new duke of edingbugh to fund that bit somehow.

@Spendonsend but can it be done (and you get the award) without the expedition part? Because that’s the part that I think would be a barrier for many teens (costs, health reasons, disability reasons). The rest sounds great.

get the biggest dry bag you can for a rucksac liner - sports direct do very big, quite cheap ones. I'd also recommend a couple of smaller ones for sleeping bags and clothes.

Pot noodle if definitely not a sufficient meal for someone hiking miles and carrying all their kit, and the wayfairer type meals are the easiest thing to ensure no spills/ leaks, and no food poisoning if not cooked properly. Go Outdoor do some of their own versions (DofE participants also get a further discount on top of the discount card price - ask in store about it). I'd also recommend porridge if they have time to cook breakfast, and flapjack, tiffin etc as snacks.

The costs likely include a company with trainers and examiners to run the sessions, which will be the bulk of the cost, campsite fees, a contribution towards the school issued kit (assuming tents, rucksacs, trangias etc are all provided by school), which would be something most scout units would be running on volunteers and already have the equipment to lend out which had been paid for and used several times a year, with everyone paying a minimal cost for upkeep.

If you're keen to keep costs down for everyone, how about volunteering to get trained up to take a group out every year? If you can rope a few parents from other year groups in, you could definitely help the school to keep those costs down! Similarly, if you school doesn't have a mini bus or teachers to drive it, could you offer a lift to others to help keep everyone's petrol costs down?

If you did it through scouts, don't forgot you'd also have scouting subs to pay, as well as any additional fees aside from DofE (I know someone who did it through scouts for a similar price, but when it was broken down, parents were also paying for the meals, and a separate fee (£20 ish) for each expedition which covered campsite fees etc, and the initial fee just covered the scheme cost).

I didn't mention pot noodles so not sure why that's addressed to me. I was talking about the weight of tins and jars. For gold the amount they have to carry for 4 days is heavy enough without tins and jars.

You take the pot noodles out of the pot and put them in plastic bags.

You keep one in the pot. That's your eating container which you can wash out. Saving you buying expensive mess tins. Or carrying them. It's not limited to pot noodles - super noodles are a possibility as well.

I think you can also get paper pots these days. But I would do the plastic bag trick.

I agree with pp that porridge is excellent food, nutritious and cheap. Like pot noodles though it is difficult to eat dry in an emergency. Which is why I always carry dex tablets (or mars bars if you want to do it on the cheap as dex tablets can be pricey).

Its to give them a broad experience.

There are several sections to the award, volunteerung, skill, sport and the expedition.
so they do volunteering lots will support a food bank, work in a charity shop, help at guides etc for this section and they have to do a certain number hours of it.

Then there is a skill where you show progress, so some learn sign language or first aid or an instrument.

Then sports so they set a goal like couch to 5k or join a netball team all for a certain number of hours.

Then the expedition which is about team work, planning and taking them outside their comfort zone as some kids never leave a city or havent been away from home before.

Obviously all these things can be done outside of the scheme but i definitely think a lot of groups get some good volunteers because of it.

Cheap ways to get a lot of calories that do not involve high expense, heavy tins or pot noodles:

Breakfast: 150g porridge with 60g butter (520 + 430), in 2 x reusable Chinese takeaway containers
Lunch & snacks : cereal bars & biscuits
Supper: multiple bowls of plain pasta (1 kg bag to suffice for 2x 15 yr old boys over 2 days, silver)

I suggested DS add powdered milk to the porridge, and bring salt packets for the pasta, maybe bring some small carrots. "I'll be so hungry that I won't care what it tastes like." was his decision.

I am curious - was the DofE scheme dreamed up as some sort of potential post-nuclear war survival scheme (freeze dried food, navigating through the wilderness, camping in the woods)?
If it’s meant to be about volunteering, working as a team, organising food etc wouldn’t it be a better scheme for the 21st Century that the organising food part is creating meals that can be given out to homeless people or community kitchens. Create actual meals rather than some noodles and pepparami sticks. This would also cover the team work part, the volunteering part.
Rather than going for a hike and a bit of camping (with apparently expensive kit that won’t be used again) perhaps it should be about something more productive like helping in a community garden - growing food, building a fence. Actual useful skills with a useful end goal.
I just don’t get the point of the camping bit.