Duke of Edinburgh silver award costs

[Pandabee11]

My daughter is 15 has been working towards her DofE silver award since October 2015. We knew that she had two camping expeditions coming up at the end of the school year and was told in March 2015 that the costs would be £40 in total for the two trips. I have been slowly buying everything needed for the trip and I have the £40 put aside.

Unfortunately, we had a letter home from school on Monday say that the costs have increased to £340 and we have until 31st April (I'm guessing he means 1st May) to pay for it. I don't have it. What can I do?

That's ridiculous, how can they justify it? Ds silver and dd bronze have been around £120 including transport and hire of equipment.

Talk to school. If it's gone from 40 to 340 then I expect they will have a lot of disgruntled parents. You need to understand why the cost has rocketed and talk to them about your options.

From what I can work out the school has run out of money for the school year, they're actually asking the parents to donate money for extra curricular activities. That was the other letter that came home on Monday.

But wow, what a jump!

DD has spoken to the teacher organising the trip, her head of year and is speaking to the vice principle today. I am letting DD complain first, to see how she handles it. But I'm fully expecting to go down to the school, either today or tomorrow. I have also phoned the regional office of DofE asking what can be done and they're phoning the school today, but she seemed to think that nothing can be done.

It just feels so unfair for DD to do all that work for no reward/award.

If it is just the expedition could she do it through another local centre?

The lady at the regional centre didn't mention a local centre, but I didn't ask either. She did say that the new cost sounded about right, before it was subsidised by the school. But I will ask when she phones me back.

Will she be staying on at the same school for 6th form?
If not then she could put expedition on the back burner and pick it up in 6th form.

If they are using an outdoor ed provider, then I can see the cost.

We charge around £40 per expedition but that's because most of the staff on our expeditions are volunteers. If the school doesn't have this and needs to buy in staff or outsource, then it isn't cheap.

Your DoE expeditions that are run 'in-house' utilising your willing volunteer staff will cost less. Due to the demand/popularity if the award though, some schools just can't cope with the numbers. You'll probably find they are contracting an Approved Activity Provider (AAP). These are companies (private) who run everything for the students- usually the training, practice and assessment.

Any team that are out being assesesd must have a supervisor and an assessor (wages range from £80-150 normally)

If you feel that strongly about it, there's always the option of guardians going through the supervisors course and upskilling yourself. This way you can make sure the cost is kept low. Unfortunately, I gave up volunteering on DoE expeditions because I came across so many demanding students and parents expecting their sons and daughters to be passed just because they turned up. It's a shame but for me it simply wasn't worth the stress.