Duke of Edinburgh’s Award volunteering

As a Club we are enthusiastic about supporting our riders through their Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, either as part of their Volunteering or as their Physical challenge element. It is important that DofE participants engage fully in the programme and meet its expectations, therefore we do need to set down some guidelines.

Volunteering: 

We now track DofE volunteering attendance using the Coacha system. To register as a volunteer, please ask your coach to add you to the DofE register. Then when you help out at a session, the coach running it will mark the attendance register for that specific hour of volunteering. The only requirement is that you cannot use your own regular session as volunteering evidence, it must be for one of the other groups.

It is important that you keep your own evidence log on the DofE website up to date, and that you ask your coach to sign that off. The coach will use the Club's DofE attendance register in Coacha to verify that you have met the requirements as set out by the Duke of Edinburgh Award guidance (see bottom of this page). Generally this is that the start and end volunteering session are the pre-requisite period apart, and that sufficient hours have been logged as per the guidelines.

Physical Challenge: 

Riders are asked to discuss the goals of their physical challenge with their session coach. Our coaches will be delighted to assist the rider with their challenge, including identifying a suitable and achievable target goal, and they can then help by monitoring the rider and assessing progress towards that goal.  

Again participants are asked to log their goals on the DofE website ahead of starting the challenge, and discuss it with their coach, in order for it to be signed off at the end of the challenge - retrospective requests may be turned down.

Duration /number of hours volunteering required

Please also refer to the DofE webpage that sets out expectations on the number of hours/duration of the different activities, which Scorpions coaches use to assess sign-off of the elements:  https://www.dofe.org/do/timescales/