DofE Expedition services for schools and youth groups.

We can help you run your expeditions
or take them off your hands completely

The Expedition section of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award comprises of three elements.

• Training
• Practice Expedition
• Qualifying Expedition (including assessors)

In a nutshell, if required, we can provide the complete program for the Expedition section of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award at Silver and Gold level from training through to qualifying expedition. However, if you have trained a group yourselves then you can hire us to simply provide qualified Mountain Leaders, experienced in remote supervision, to supervise the safety of the expeditions.

Our standard programs have been designed to meet all the requirements of the Expedition section of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Expedition.

The prices for our complete programs can be found on our Costs and funding page.

Training.

We can run a full training course or simply cover the bits that you require help with.

If you are local to West Yorkshire we can train your teams in short blocks at regular intervals (possibly throughout the winter months). For groups based elsewhere in the country we can run an intensive weekend of training either away in the countryside or at your premises, whereever you are. We provide training for expeditions on the following areas:

• Route planning.
• Navigation.
• First aid.
• Emergency procedures.
• Danger identification and avoidance.
• Menu planning.
• Camp-craft.
• Camp cooking and hygiene.
• The country code and highway code.
• Equipment choice and procurement.
• Deciding what to take and how to carry it all.

Practice and qualifying expeditions.

If we are supervising practice expedition groups that we have not trained ourselves we will spend the first half day walking with the group discussing various aspect of navigation, the country code and emergency procedures. Once we are happy that the group is competent we will switch to remote supervision for the remainder of the expedition.

If we are required to supervise groups that are unknown to us on qualifying expeditions then we will need to have a half day before the expedition starts to assess their competence.

Once we are happy that all the teams are competent we can either work alone or in conjunction with your staff and volunteers to safely supervise the groups to the level that each group requires.

When on expedition we will supervise the group by identifying and covering areas of potential physical danger and complex navigation. We will not necessarily walk with the group (especially on the assessed expedition), they may not even see us, but rest assured they will be being supervised. We will meet up and chat to each group at least once per day during their walk and once on the camp site at the end of each day to perform an assessment of their well-being.