We hope you find the following information helpful and interesting. If there is anything you’d like us to cover in future blogs, please let us know. It would be great to hear whether the frequency of updates is too little, too often or just about right. We don’t get much feedback!
Steve Ball, Ian MacKenzie
District Commissioners, Wiltshire North
In this blog:
- St George’s Day – what do you want for 2019?
- New legislation – GDPR
- What’s going on?
St Geroge’s Day
A huge thanks to those that put the effort into organising our St George’s day parade in Malmesbury last weekend and for the huge number of you who attended. As we look forward, now would be a good time to start planning what we might do this time next year.
What do you think? What would you prefer and what do you think the young people you volunteer would prefer? There are lots of things we could do – and each will require quite a lot of organising. Before making any decisions, we’d like to give you an opportunity to give your view.
Please could you spare a few minutes to complete this online survey. We’ll let you know how the feedback looks in our next blog.
New legislation – GDPR
Our last few blogs have referred to the introduction of the General Data Protection regulation and signposted you towards the toolkit material published by the Scout Association. We’re now less than 4 weeks away from the introduction of the new regulations.
This new legislation affects every part of Scouting – we simply can’t operate without holding information about our members, including sensitive details such as any health problems they might have. It’s very important that every Scout Group and Explorer Unit works on this. Each Executive Committee has responsibility for ensuring that the Scouting its responsible for complies with the law.
There are a number of things that need to be done. Each Group and Unit needs to make sure that someone it taking a lead and driving this forward.
- Raise with Executive Committee – understand their responsibilities…
- Read the guidance and watch the videos – what is GDPR anyway?
- Document the information you collect, process and hold.
- Think about the risks to that information and how you can manage them.
- Set policies so that everyone involved locally is clear.
- Publish privacy notice(s) which clearly describe what you will hold and how you will handle it.
- Plan for how to manage an information breach.
So that we can form a view about how well Groups and Units are preparing for the introduction of this new legislation, please can one person from every Scout Group and one person from every Explorer Unit complete the following form.
Please complete this by Sunday, 06 May 2018. Each Group Scout Leader and Explorer Scout Leader should complete the form, or be sure that someone else is doing so on their behalf.
What’s going on?
As we enter what are supposed to be the warmer months of the year, it’s great to see the number of overnight events increasing. Just a flavour of the sorts of things that are going on in the last few, or next few, weeks…
- Malmesbury Cubs at Woodhouse Park
- 3rd Chippenham Group Camp at Grittleton
- 3rd Chippenham Scouts expedition
- Sea Squad ESU DofE expeditions – Bronze and Silver
- Colerne Cubs to PGL at Liddington
- Neston and Box Scouts Survival Camp at Colerne Airfield
- 10th Chippenham Beavers sleepover at Boomerang, Melksham
- Neston and Box Beavers sleepover at Colerne Scout HQ
- 1st Corsham Sea Scouts clibming camp on Dartmoor
- 1st Corsham Sea Scouts narrowboating