“What does the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award mean to you? For some of the millions of young people who have taken on the self-improvement challenge, it has brought truly life-changing opportunities.”
The following written content by Alice Evans
What does the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award mean to you? For many it will conjure memories of hauling a badly-packed rucksack across rainy British countryside in the hope of adding some sparkle to their CV. Yet for some of the millions of young people who have taken on the self-improvement challenge, it has brought truly life-changing opportunities.
Without the award, James says he’d “probably be in jail”. At the age of 15, James and his friend Nathan, then 16, had had more run-ins with the police than they care to remember. As bored mates growing up in Darlington, north-east England, they felt they had “nothing else to do” but to cause mischief.
Illegally riding motorbikes for a bit of fun in their early teenage years turned into a succession of petty crimes – theft, anti-social behaviour, criminal damage. James describes his behaviour as “causing mayhem”. Nathan adds: “Wherever I was, I was causing trouble.”
After being caught for separate offences, in 2018 the friends were both ordered to do hours of community service, or “reparations”. The stint the pair enjoyed the most was being taught how to fix bikes by youth offending officer Dave Kirton, for a community project.
Dave, who is also a Duke of Edinburgh leader, arranged with those on the reparations panel to strike a deal with the boys: if they did their Duke of Edinburgh Bronze Award, they’d get five hours taken off their community service orders.
“It was a little bit of a reward, a carrot incentive,” Dave says. “Both the lads were a bit reluctant at first, but they agreed and two or three weeks in they realised the opportunity they had – and they got stuck right into it.” Read more from BBC.
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