Energy Sparks launches new Duke of Edinburgh’s Award volunteering programmes
If any of your pupils are struggling with what to do for the volunteering section of their Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, why not suggest that they take a look at our new programmes? We provide ideas and suggested activities to help them complete their award while taking meaningful action on climate change.
We’re excited to announce the launch of our new Duke of Edinburgh’s (DofE) Award volunteering programmes that allow schools and pupils to use Energy Sparks to undertake their Bronze or Silver Award (with Gold Award to follow at a later date).
Tackling the common challenges that pupils face when looking for volunteering opportunities
As a former teacher and DofE manager within a secondary school, I found that the volunteering section was challenging for many pupils to complete.
It often requires the DofE participant to find an external charity or club to support, and this in itself can sometimes take longer than the volunteering period.
Also, some pupils are still developing in confidence and find it challenging to undertake face-to-face volunteering (particularly those who are neurodivergent).
External opportunities too can be limited due to safeguarding concerns (with many placements restricted to those aged 16+) or when there are many participants trying to secure volunteering from only a few charities.
Our new programmes address these challenges, by allowing pupils to take advantage of their school’s existing Energy Sparks account. We also recognise that young volunteers have many existing demands on their time – so our approach offers students a slightly flexible programme that should make it easier for more participants to complete this section.
Support your pupils – save energy. It’s a win-win for schools!
The great thing about our new DofE programmes is that they not only help you support your pupils – they will also help you to turbo-boost energy saving efforts at your school.
Signing up for Energy Sparks is a great first step in cutting energy, costs and carbon at your school. But turning enthusiasm into action can be challenging for school staff who are already over-burdened.
We always say that students can be your best asset in energy reduction. So having DofE participants take a leading role in planning and implementing energy saving actions can benefit both them and your school – especially when it comes to actions that require a whole-school effort.
What’s available?
For Bronze participants, we have developed two different programmes to reflect different interests and capacities of participants – one is more focused on individual action that a student can lead on, the other is more focused on how your DofE student can encourage wider action at your school by engaging their peers.
Our programme for Silver participants offers more flexibility to explore a range of activities or combine the activities featured under the Bronze programmes. It is suitable both for students who have previously completed one of our Bronze programmes (allowing them to build on their previous work or to choose a new range of activities) and for students who are new to Energy Sparks.
Programmes are based on using many of the activities on our website. To support participants, initially they are encouraged to follow some key steps before inviting them to select and choose a focus such as leading a campaign or taking responsibility for new monitoring. We hope this is where their engagement and volunteering efforts will focus and hopefully benefit both them and the school.
Assessment, and recording progress
Energy Sparks users are already able to record their actions and activities on our tool. DofE programme participants can make use of this functionality to record their activities, which will help them report on what they have done.
Although Energy Sparks is not able to act as an assessor, we have developed some guidance for DofE leaders and assessors to support them.
Feedback welcome!
You can learn more about the programmes here.
We’re currently piloting the programme and would really like to hear how your pupils get on, but we’ll also see from their engagement with the activities.
We’d like to extend a special thank you to those schools who contributed their expertise and insights to help us develop the programme so far. We’ll be adding more programmes over the next year so please do let us know if there is anything else you would like to see: education@energysparks.uk
