Extra Curricular >
Duke of Edinburgh
Duke of Edinburgh
Since it began in 1956, The Duke of Edinburgh’s award has been dedicated to the personal development of young people from all backgrounds.
Here at Leighton Park, we actively encourage students to take part in this programme. There is a group of staff who dedicate themselves to helping the students to achieve awards up to and including the Silver level.
All students in Year 10 are able to work for their Bronze award and currently 54% of the year group are working towards this. L6 students work towards the Silver award.
What is involved
To achieve an award, each student must complete a personal programme of activities in four sections (5 for Gold), the sections are; Volunteering, Physical, Skills and Expedition.
A minimum of 3 months activity is required for each of the Volunteering, Physical and Skills sections, an additional 3 months activity is required in one of these areas and a 2 day, 1 night expedition.
To achieve the Silver award, the sections are the same although 6 months activity is required on each and the expedition will require a 3 day, 2 night trip.
Elements
Each of the sections offer lots of choices and alternatives for the student's personal development and is broken down into the following sections;
-
Volunteering: Helping people, community action and raising awareness, coaching, training and leadership, working with the environment or animals, helping a charity or community organisation;
-
Physical: Individual sports, water sports, racquet sports, fitness, extreme sports, martial arts, team sports;
-
Skills: Performance arts, science and technology, care of animals, music, natural world, games and sports (not physical), life skills.
Expedition
The practice expedition consists of a 12km trek on day one, then setting up camp, preparing and cooking their food before settling down for a night of camping and completing a further 12km trek the next day. This prepares them well for the assessed expedition which will require them to complete a similar task but independently and meeting up at set points with an assessor.