A new year: the story so far…
The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award provides some wonderful opportunities for character and skill building through team work, expeditions and community work. We have a long history at St Augustine’s Priory of our pupils participating at all three levels of the award, Bronze, Silver and Gold, and our most recent batch of Duke of Edinburgh’s Award students have had a busy and very productive term.
Ms Cross, who leads the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award here, reports that ‘the Bronze cohort passed their qualifying expedition on their first weekend back this term with fabulous efforts by all the girls who participated’. Congratulations to all those involved!
On Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th September, in a weekend filled with good weather, the new Bronze Duke of Edinburgh’s Award group attended a weekend of training with the largest number of girls going through the Bronze award here – 73 girls in total in a mixture of Upper IV (41 students) and Lower V (32 students).
On Saturday the training was held here in the grounds and the Silver award students joined in with the Bronze award students, 89 girls in total, in a day filled with training in camp craft, cooking on trangias, packing rucksacks, map reading and navigation. On the next day, Sunday 24th September, the entire Bronze award cohort spent the day in Richmond Park in a walking and navigating session.
This may seem like a full weekend, but for some it was even fuller with eight of the students dashing off midway through the Saturday training to run in the Ealing Mini Mile and then returning to resume their Duke of Edinburgh’s Award training!
Ms Cross commented, ‘The girls loved the new experiences and opportunities the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award brings them. It was great to see them interacting with other year levels and making new friendship groups and working together with excellent team work over the entire weekend’.
Next to look forward to is the Silver practice expedition which runs from Friday 13th to Sunday 15th October. We look forward to hearing all about it.
