Scout SuiteHow-to guide
Building a programme
From a shelf of activity ideas to a young person's badge quietly ticking itself off, here's the whole path, in the order a leader actually walks it.
Watch this on its own pageBuild your activity library
Leaders build up a reusable bank of activities: games, skills, crafts, expeditions, anything you run more than once. Each one can carry a description, a duration, and links to instructions or resources, so it's ready to grab again next term without rewriting it from scratch.
OutdoorSkillsWorldCreativeCommunityTag what each activity earns
Any activity can be linked to specific badge requirements: "knots challenge" tags against the relevant Skills badge criteria, for instance. This is the one bit of setup that makes everything later in the pipeline automatic.
Lay out your terms
Set up Autumn, Spring and Summer with real dates. Found a shape that works well? Copy a whole term forward as the starting point for the next one, rather than planning every term from a blank page.
Plan the term's meetings
Choose a term to see everything happening in it, section by section: meetings, camps and other events, in date order. Anything dated inside the term shows there, and meetings still appear under Events too, so you can copy one. Each meeting shows what it has planned: activities, badge requirements, adults helping and a risk assessment.
Meeting nights with nothing planned show as gaps. Add the weekly meetings puts a meeting on every empty night at the section's usual times, or add a single night from the list. A meeting that hasn't happened yet can be removed from the same list.
Running more than one section? The section filter at the top narrows the term to one of them. A Team Leader sees only their own sections' meetings and events, plus anything for the whole group.
Check the programme is balanced
A running tally shows how many activities you've got in each of the five categories, and flags any sitting empty, an easy way to notice a term that's gone all-outdoor, or is missing Community activities entirely, before you've run a single session.
Plan each session
Creating a session, you pull activities straight from the library. Scout Suite also suggests activities worth running, based on which badges the young people in that section are currently partway through, so a session isn't just fun, it's doing double duty toward real progress. Requirements can also be linked to a session directly, without going via an activity at all.
This step covers a normal weekly meeting. Camps and trips use the same event underneath, but bring their own signups, payments and consent, see Running an event.
Take the register, then sign off what actually got done
On the night, a leader just marks who's there: one tap on Present, Absent, Late or Excused for each young person, or Mark all present and change the few who aren't. More on a row holds notes and Left early. On a phone, Save stays at the bottom of the screen. Being present isn't the same as having finished the task, so sign-off is a separate step: Auto sign off ticks the linked requirement for everyone who stayed the whole session. Once every requirement for a badge is done, the badge itself flips to complete.
On a phone with no signal, the register is kept on the phone and sent when you're back online: see On the go.
Record the adults too, under Leaders and adults: Add an adult lists people with a login, adults without one (adult records and anyone invited to the Team who hasn't joined yet), and Someone else for a parent helper you type in by name. Everyone you add counts towards the adults needed for the young people there.
Not fully hands-off, by design. A completed badge still has to be awarded by a leader: that's a deliberate moment, same as handing one over in real life. The full sign-off path, including catching someone up later, is in Programme to badge.
Programme
More in this topic
Terms, badges, events, camp, and the reports that follow.