Tag: Duke of Edinburgh

  • DofE 2024

    DofE 2024

    Where I probably walked more miles than the children, and everyone got very very muddy.

    Last weekend was the annual Duke of Edinburgh silver expedition, and once again I was herding children around the Yorkshire Dales. There wasn’t any snow this year, but it was raining and there was plenty of boot-sucking mud.

    Normally I spend the weekend bored, sat in a car watching kids roam the countryside using a Spot tracker in each groups’ bags.

    This year, they decided they wanted to go off-piste and discover the wilderness by themselves. And I got to do my steps stomping about trying to find them.

    Some of these miles were earned simply walking around the campsites, or trekking off from a convenient carpark to find a path junction where I’d planned to meet the kids. You can do a lot of steps if your toilet is a five minute walk away. It kind of shows how sitting still at your desk really isn’t a healthy lifestyle. You don’t need to stride off across the countryside to get some exercise, just put things out of arms reach so you have to get up and move a bit more.

    You also see some quite amusing things on your wanderings. I wonder what the story behind this road sign is…

    These lot probably know… They know everything. They’re probably reading this blog post right now.

  • DofE 2023

    DofE 2023

    It’s late April which means once again I enter the national cat-herding competition. The challenge – set 13 students off on three days of camping and walking to complete their silver Duke of Edinburgh.

    Since this is no longer the 1980s and simply kicking kids out of a minibus and saying “see you on Sunday” is frowned upon things are more precise and organised.

    We kick the kids out the minibus with a GPS tracker in their bag and say “see you at the camp!” instead. We then follow them about the countryside using the GPS trackers to see where they’re going and checkpoints to .

    If the trackers can’t get a signal or our phones have no mobile broadband we then start having to do it old school, predicting how far along their routes they are and finding the closest road to that point to go and wait.

    The kids think it’s magic that we just appear seemingly from nowhere. I appear to have perfected the art of arriving at a checkpoint exactly as they do. Almost like I’ve been sat in my car just the other side of a wall waiting, looking at the trackers. Although sometimes it is just good timing and coincidence.

    Risk assessment – Risk: Students might get lost. Mitigation: Watch students with tracker, drive around country lanes like a local trying to catch them when they go off course.

    Risk: Tracker doesn’t work. Mitigation: Estimate where they probably are, go a bit further along, begin a determined Fitbit pleasing route march/jog up the route until you meet them. This never works, but does guarantee that once you’re about 10 minutes from your car the tracker does update and the kids are stood by your car looking puzzled.

    This is a spring/summer activity, so obviously it was snowing on the practise expedition wasn’t it.