We began working with The Stephen Perse Foundation of schools in 2019 delivering a full Bronze package. Their plan was to fully outsource the delivery of the expedition section of the award while utilising the skills of the school staff to support the expeditions. Roll forward a year and we were asked to expand our provision to support the foundation's delivery of their Silver and Gold programmes in a similar manner.
The Bronze cohort was huge. We were able to divide the teams into smaller, separate expeditions that were run over different weekends. this meant we could use a core base of staff who were well acquainted with the school staff and had experience of the participants being trained and assessed. The expeditions were kept local to school and easily accessible for a parent drop-off and pickup. this gave more flexibility to the school staff and their transport options. Our instructor to team ratio was kept as a 1:1 for the training and moving to a 1:2 for the qualifying phase of the section. This allowed for quality input from our instructors and the opportunity to better consolidate skills for the participants.
On the Silver programme, we have been able to develop a longer, 6 day expedition that builds in rest time and consolidation. It allows for the foundatation to keep their costs down for participants while providing a quality training and assessment experience.
The Gold provision is led by the foundation staff at practice level. We worked with the foundation to supply staff that would be able to support their training to a high standard.
Over the duration of our relationship with The Stephen Perse Foundation, we have now successfully completed over 30 separate expeditions with ever-increasing sizes of cohort. The delivery process has become tailored to the needs of the participants and the demands of the school calendar and we now have a model that meets the needs of all the involved stakeholders.
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