Welcome to 1st Chew Stoke Scout Group! Whichever section your young person has joined, this brief guide will hopefully point you in the direction of all the information you need to know. If you have any questions, please get in touch.
If you are a potential new member, please register your interest via the Contact Us page.
Meeting Times/Locations etc
For information about a specific section visit the relevant section page: Beavers (age 6-8), Cubs (age 8-10½) or Scouts (age 10½-14).
Sometimes we meet at a different location or, infrequently, at a slightly different time. We often meet at the usual place but then spend the session outdoors. Your leaders will be in touch, usually by email, whenever specific instructions are necessary, but it’s generally best always to send your child with a coat in case we do go outside. Please also send your child with their own labelled water bottle.
The first two weeks will be free for your young person to attend while they settle in, and they are welcome to wear normal clothes for these sessions if they do not yet own uniform. If they enjoy those two weeks and want to continue, then it will be time to follow the emailed instructions on how to join up – otherwise, please get back in touch with our Membership Secretary.
Uniform
Scouting is a uniformed movement and we expect our members to attend meetings in their uniform when practical – see the Uniform page for info.
Investiture
After a new member has been attending for a few weeks, they may be ready to be invested into Scouting.
At the investiture ceremony, wearing their new uniform, the young person will stand up and make the scout sign with their right hand. They will repeat their promise after the leader and will shake hands (left-handed, as per the Scouting tradition). This marks the moment of them joining the Group, and the worldwide Scouting family. Afterwards, they are presented with their necker and core badges. Parents are welcome to attend and to take photos (taking care, please, not to share photos of any other young people on social media).
Note – Investiture ceremonies can sometimes be fairly irregular in timing. If your young person has been attending a while but has not yet been invested, they are still considered part of the group and will be earning their badges.

Fees
We ask for a regular subscription (“subs”) payment that cover the cost of running almost all of our Scouting activities – hall hire, equipment, insurance etc. We sometimes arrange or attend outside events – we try to subsidise some of these, but we may need to pass on the costs. Details on the Fees page.
OSM
Online Scout Manager (OSM) is an online tool we use to hold data about our young people. As parents, you have access to this data via the “Parent Portal”, which allows you to view details of the upcoming programme, the personal details we hold for your young person, their progress towards badges etc. From the portal, you can also easily set up regular payments for subs (see Fees above) and sometimes make payments for one-off events eg camps.
To access the Parent Portal, you will be sent an email containing a unique link to a webpage where you can create an account. If you have another child already in the group, please still click on the link in the email but just sign in as usual on that page, and this should add the new member to your existing account.
At the start, we need you to review your young person’s “Personal Details” section. It is vital that we hold correct details – particularly contact details and medical conditions / dietary requirements (or lack of) – before we can accept young people into our care. Please add or amend their data where something is missing or incorrect, especially the emergency contact and medical information. Please can you enter “none” (or similar) in the relevant fields if there are no medical/dietary etc issues of which we need to be aware, to make this important information very clear. Remember to hit the update button at the top of the page when you are finished.
Gift Aid
As a charity we are allowed to claim Gift Aid on our subs. We need to obtain a declaration from the person paying the subs to say that they are eligible for Gift Aid – to make this declaration (or to opt out of getting reminders) you can follow the OSM link in the email we send you, or you access the relevant page from the Parent Portal menu. Gift Aid effectively allows us to claim an extra 25% from the UK Government, which comes to a respectable amount over the whole group. It takes just a few seconds, so we’d be very grateful if you’d be willing and able to make that declaration.
Census
The Scout Association requires us to complete an annual census of our members, as an anonymised aggregate of the data we hold in OSM. Part of the required information involves gender, ethnicity, religion and disabilities, which we do not hold in any personal details. To capture this data anonymously, we will send an email containing a link to OSM where you can quickly enter this in a way that cannot be viewed by anyone except as an aggregate of the group. Although there is a “prefer not to say” option on most questions, it causes issues for the Group if this is used too often – as there is no way that anyone can view the data individually, we hope you might be willing to enter the information fully.
Volunteering
The running of the Group is done entirely by volunteers. If you (or anyone you know!) have any time available to help the Group, we would be grateful, especially as part of the Section Leadership Teams who plan and run the sessions for each section. Each section has a strong team, but additional volunteers are always welcome to help share the load. It’s a great opportunity to help the young people and to see your child in action – many leaders say it is a highlight of their week. See the Volunteering page for more details.
Terminology
Scouting, as with many forms of life, has its own terminology which can sometimes be hard to decipher – our Terminology page will hopefully help.
Questions
If you have any questions, please get in touch with us: for queries about the running of the section, contact your leaders; for queries about joining, leaving or moving up, get back in touch with our Membership Secretary; for anything else, or if you’re not sure, please email the Group Lead Volunteer. We’ll do our best to answer them.