When I was at school, I did the Bronze level of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. It was introduced at my school in my last year so we were the guinea pigs for it. I didn’t know I could continue it at uni or through Girlguiding or through local groups, otherwise I would at least have Silver. Unfortunately, there’s an upper age limit on DofE, which is about 26.
In the last few years, at least three other similar schemes have sprung up for adults. None have the prestige – or rather, none have the recognisability – of DofE but if you’re an adult looking for a challenge which is rewarded by a badge, these might be for you. By now I’ve done the Bronze level in all of them and I’m working on three lots of Silver but I thought I’d compare Bronze for you.
The awards in question are:
The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (age: year 9 (the school year you turn 14) until your 25th birthday)
You already know this one. National – probably Commonwealth-wide – award scheme for teenagers and young people, widely recognised, although less people probably know the details. It’s prestigious enough that your Gold Award might be presented at Buckingham Palace by a member of the royal family and there will be celebrities in attendance. At Bronze, you have to do each of Volunteering, Physical and Skills plus an extra three months for one of your choice and you have to do an expedition which lasts two days and one night. In my day, if you picked the “on foot” option, which the vast majority of people do, you had to cover 10km each day. Nowadays all you need is 6 hours of planned activity. It’s all run by your local leader/coordinator/whatever they’re called. You’ll have someone watching over you pretty closely.
The Voyage Award (no age limit but you have to be 18 to join Trefoil)
This is a Trefoil Guild scheme, which is Girlguiding for adults. You don’t have to be a Girlguiding leader or a retired leader or even be female to join the Trefoil but it does have a bit of a Guidey slant to it. Each section needs a mentor – this can be a different person for every section. They don’t have to witness whatever you do; they just have to agree your plan, offer advice and sign that you’ve done it. To be honest, even within Girlguiding you’ll have to explain it because as a general rule, Girlguiding and Trefoil keep themselves far more separate than they should, in my experience. The sections are 40 hours of Service and of Myself, which can pretty much mean anything, 20 hours of Skills and of Explore My World and then there’s Team Work, where you work with a team to organise an event. This one was apparently decided by someone who’s never planned an event – it’s supposed to take ten hours, of which the event must last at least two. And actually, although back then you only needed to do six months for Bronze, it didn’t matter if you did your hours all within the same week, it was just that the thing couldn’t be signed as finished until six months after the start date!
Maverick (no age limit but by and large, you’re supposed to be an adult to join the Rebel Badge Club)
Maverick is to DofE as the Rebel badges are to Brownie interest badges and they’re part of the same club. Having got what we wanted with regard to interest badges for adults, we muttered about DofE for adults until Charly invented that too, which was June 2022. There’s no mentor here. You make all the decisions yourself, although they can be peer reviewed in the Facebook group and when you’re done, you send Charly your logbook. She’ll then arrange a video call to talk about what’s in your logbook and for you to present on two of the five sections. Over six months, you have to complete 30 hours of My Community, 30 hours of My Skills and My Challenge. My Adventure must take you away from home for at least two nights (and must not be Brownie camp) and My Beliefs involves a project.
Elemental (18+)
The youngest of the four – Maverick was launched in September 2022, I think, following a small pilot group, and it’s by far the smallest and least known. Elemental also has five sections. There are two admin-types who sign off your plan for each section and part of the plan is how you’re going to evidence what you’ve done. You have to spend three months doing Give, Move and Learn, you have to do an Explore which takes you away from home for two days and one night on a human-powered expedition of some kind and you have to do something for Protect. There’s a Facebook group that’s never quite managed to gain traction, but I did go to a Zoom session to talk about problems & difficulties we were having and got some help with Protect.
So, numbers-wise, DofE is the easiest in that it only has four sections where the others have five. On the other hand, you can complete Elemental in three months, whereas the others are a minimum of six months and Maverick is possibly the hardest because three of its five sections have to last six months. Written out side by side, I see that all four have a voluntary service element, all four have an element where you learn something new and all four have an element where you have to do some kind of outdoor adventure. On the other hand, they all have something extra. DofE and Elemental both require you to do something physical, Voyage demands teamwork and something for you personally, Maverick wants you to complete a personal challenge and a project based on your beliefs or passions and Elemental also wants you to take action to protect the planet.
Let’s compare the three comparable elements.
Volunteering/Service/My Community/Give (DofE/Voyage/Maverick/Elemental)
I’ve been a Girlguiding volunteer since I was about fifteen so this is nice and easy. I was a Young Leader when I did DofE, I specifically used “a new role” for Voyage, which was taking the girls to Sparkle & Ice, our first camp without a “real” adult. For Maverick, I did six months as a leader, which included my existing role imploding and finding two new ones within a week. I overshot the required 30 hours by quite a lot – I finished on 101. For Elemental, I took on the opening of my new Ranger unit and keeping it going for three months.
Skills/Skills/My Skills/Learn (DofE/Voyage/Maverick/Elemental)
I think I did most of my DofE skills in one weekend right before my expedition. I made toys. I remember making a soft camel from a Hobbycraft kit, I made an eggbox dinosaur and I think I made a puppet of some kind. Toymaking was a valid choice and it was signed off but I think I’d do it “better” if I redid it. Well, I am redoing it, in a way.
For Voyage, I used my archery qualification. I had 20 hours to fill. The weekend training, really annoyingly, added up to 19 hours so I included my first taught session six months later to finally fill in my missing hour.
I did Finnish for both Maverick and Elemental. Maverick was by far the hardest. I had to track 30 hours over the six months, which meant I had to set a timer every time I opened Duolingo and somehow, that was far more exhausting than just learning the language. For Elemental, I set my challenge as continuing Finnish over the three months, finishing the section of Duolingo I was in and continuing into the next one if I had time. I think I said I wanted to do it at least four days a week and as long as I turned the date orange on the calendar, it didn’t matter if I did one minute or one hour. It felt a lot more chilled.
Expedition/Explore My World/My Adventure/Explore (DofE/Voyage/Maverick/Elemental)
DofE expedition is always a long walk and a camp, although it doesn’t actually have to be on foot. I’ve written about both my practice and real expeditions right here on this blog. For Voyage’s Explore My World, I used my 2017 trip to Norway. My Adventure for Maverick was last summer’s trip to Iceland, centred on the volcano hike and I did two days on the South Downs Way for Elemental.
The other bits
DofE
DofE’s extra is Physical. This is one of the three-monthers – or six, if you don’t do your volunteering for six. I did caving for mine. Our leader gave me the choice of joining a local archery club “or there’s this man up my way who runs caving trips”. At the time, I’d tried archery and not been very good at it so I went for the caving. We did three trips over the three months, which really feels these days like the bare minimum for covering three months of physical activity.
Voyage
Voyage has two extras, Myself and Team Work. For Myself, I did forty hours of learning Norwegian, mostly from Duolingo but also using Mondly, which I quite liked as a teaching app. For Teamwork, I had to spend ten hours planning an event to last at least two hours. Alongside the other leader, who was working towards her camp licence, we planned our first ever Guide camp without a “proper” adult – ie someone qualified and experienced in leading camps. In hindsight, it was really pretty stupid to not just do my own camp licence, since I was the more experienced one and since here I am seven and a half years later still muttering “… yeah, I haven’t done that yet” to my new districts.
Maverick
Two extras here too. For My Beliefs, you have to do a project related to a belief or something you feel strongly about. I made eight heart-shaped cushions for a local breast cancer charity, which my Trefoil Guild was partnering with that year, and which was 10% of our total aim of 80 of everything for Trefoil’s 80th anniversary. For My Challenge, I finished the first draft of my Iceland book, which had been sitting in kind-of-started status since 2017.
Elemental
And the last one. Elemental also has two extras. For Move, you have to do something that gets you moving for three months, kind of like DofE’s Physical. I upped my monthly walking target from 84km to 100km and that’s particularly hard in the winter. Even in March, when I did the South Downs Way, I was looking at my spreadsheet and my Strava on the 31st and figuring out just how much I had to add to my daily walk to hit that target. For Protect, there’s no time limit, it just has to equal the effort you put into the others, and do something that benefits the environment. For me, that was making beehouses at Rangers – protecting nature, bees because it’s my leader name and the Elemental people really liked the new skill and confidence the Rangers acquired from it.
Next question, because it felt like something relevant, is evidence. How do you prove that you’ve done what you say you’ve done?
DofE
Back in my day, I had a little paper book, I think. A folder, maybe? I guess for Volunteering my Guide leader had to sign it off. My Physical was arranged through the DofE leader so she’d know I’d done that and I guess I brought in the toys I’d made. These days it’s all online and I have no idea how it works but you have someone overseeing each section who signs it off in whatever way you do that.
Voyage
You get a little paper book which goes right through from Bronze to Gold. You pick a mentor for each section, which can be one person or five people, and you evidence each section to your mentor who then signs it off, so you don’t need to send evidence with the book – the people who ultimately sign it off trust to your mentor to make sure you’ve done it properly. The mentor doesn’t have to be an expert in whatever you chose; they just need to have an interest in it and a willingness to check that you’ve done it properly.
Maverick
You get a little paper book per level. For some sections, you just write what you did and log it using the log pages. For two sections at Bronze and three at Silver, you have to prepare some kind of visual presentation which you show to Charly, Chief Rebel, at a Zoom assessment when you’ve finished. For my Bronze Skill, Finnish, I made a video diary so “presenting” was simply a matter of pressing play. For Beliefs, I made a Powerpoint presentation and briefly talked her through it.
Elemental
This one is all online. When you submit your plan for each section, it asks how you’re going to evidence it and then when you submit your completion of each section, you upload the evidence. Now, that’s a bit tricky because the form only accepts certain file formats and Powerpoint is not among them. I converted my Learn from Powerpoint to a dozen plain photos, I learned to do most of the others in photo format from the start and I did a video of my Explore. Someone then verifies it and sends you an email to confirm.
Let’s talk cost, because I went to sign up for a Silver and was horrified.
DofE
DofE is currently £28 for Bronze & Silver and £35 for Gold, which as far as I can see, includes the badge and certificate and Gold award ceremony for you and a chosen guest.
Voyage Award
Voyage is £7 per level, which includes your logbook and your pin badge & certificate. Of course, you also have to pay your subs to be a member of the Trefoil Guild but if you’re doing that anyway, this is by far the best value of the four awards. If you want to buy the cloth version of the badge, they’re an optional extra and £1.50 each.
Maverick
Maverick is £35 for Bronze and £45 for Silver and Gold, which includes your logbook and a contribution towards a fund for disabled Rebels to make the outdoor/adventure elements accessible. On top of that, it’s £24 for the badge pack on completion, which is the kind of optional that’s not terribly optional, on account of each book coming in for verifying gets numbered and a badge pack assigned to it. It means if you don’t buy your badge pack, it just sits there costing Charly money, unable to be sold to someone else.
Elemental
Elemental is a lot less transparent. It’s £40 to sign up for Bronze, including the badge and certificate and access to the digital logs but you can’t see the price of the next level until you’ve completed the previous one. Silver is £60 and because I haven’t finished (or indeed started) it, I can’t see how much Gold will be.
And finally, let’s compare the rewards. You get a certificate for them all, A5 for Voyage and A4 for the others, so let’s look at the badges. Oh yeah, it’s all about the badges.
DofE
You get a little Bronze pin badge. It’s actually dark red but the device itself is in bronze. At Silver, the badge is green with silver detail and at Gold, you get a choice of a pin badge, which looks like the others but is white with a gold device or a very shiny gold brooch. Even though I did DofE at school, I wear it on my Girlguiding badge tab. I do have a cloth DofE badge too but I think it’s a Scout one (although it has no Scout logo) rather than an official DofE one. It’s a dark grey diamond with rounded corners and the DofE device in bronze on it.
Now might be a great time to explain that I finished my DofE just about the week that I finished school. The badge and certificate got sent to school after I’d gone off to uni and by the time I returned to pick it up, it had gone to a different teacher who’d then gone to a different office at the other end of the school and the upshot was that it’s never been seen since. In 2017 I got in touch with the county DofE people, explained the situation, explained where I’d done it and when and with whom, and they reprinted the certificate and sent me a new badge, apologising that it might be different from my original one. Never having seen it, I really didn’t care. I finished DofE in 2003, so it took fourteen years to actually get the badge.
Voyage Award
You get a round pin brooch to wear on your tab. They’re all the same – a yellow ship on a blue sea, with Trefoil Guild above, Voyage Award below and a circle around it all in red – but the background sky changes colour and Bronze is actually a nice rose-gold. You can buy a cloth badge for your blanket too. Literally, you just buy it from the Trefoil shop, there’s no controls over it, no checks that you’ve earned it. They’re similar to the pin badge – a yellow boat on a blue sea but the sky is red and the border changes colour depending on level. My cloth badge is on my blanket, obviously, and my Bronze pin badge spent some time on my Girlguiding badge tab, moved to my Trefoil badge tab, moved again to my Trefoil jacket or t-shirt, depending on the whether and now lives on my desk because I’ve finished my Silver. That now lives on either my Guide polo shirt or my Trefoil t-shirt, depending on where I’m going because I want to show it off on all possible occasions.
I will say that I got my Bronze DofE badge a year or so later than my Bronze Voyage badge but the DofE badge is pristine, whereas the Voyage badge is quite battered. I do wear the DofE badge on my tab every single time I leave the house in uniform but I guess it doesn’t bang against other badges and it doesn’t get moved around or fussed with… but maybe the DofE badge is just better quality than the Voyage one.
Maverick
You get two badges! I mean, I’ve got two badges for the other two too, but you buy the cloth version as an optional extra for both DofE and Voyage. In Maverick’s case, they come as a pack when you’ve finished. There’s a rose-gold rectangular pin badge and a rectangular cloth badge. Both are the orange-bronze of the award level with a slightly darker border and the Maverick logo across it, and the pin is numbered on the back (mine is number 13). I’d like to wear it more often but it makes no sense to wear it to Guides so it just lives on my Rebel hoodie and gets worn to events, although I do often wear that hoodie just around the house.
Elemental
You get a cloth badge. I kind of wish there was a metal pin one here too but on the other hand, I already have no idea where to show off my Maverick pin and all my important badges are on my camp blanket, so it’s quite fitting to have that where I can see it and show it off too. The Elemental badge is an iron-on one, much flatter than the other three but also bigger than the other three. It’s black and orange with BRONZE in nice bronze letters.
Which is best?
It depends what you mean by “best”. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is the only one that’s nationally recognised, the only one that will make employers say “ah, this is a well-rounded dependable person”. I’ve had to explain even to most Trefoil members what Voyage is. Maverick is unknown outside the niche Rebel Badge Club and virtually no one knows what Elemental is.
In terms of what it’s like to do – well, I definitely put the most effort into Maverick. Elemental felt quite easy in comparison but I did those two back-to-back, whereas I did DofE in 2002-03 and Voyage in 2016-17. Yeah, I probably enjoyed Elemental the most. Honestly, though, I think Maverick is probably the one that I’m most proud of.
It’s also the only one where I’ve really felt like there’s a community supporting me. To be fair, I did my entire Bronze Voyage and 4/5 sections of my Silver Voyage as a member of the Internet Guild, which basically means a lone member. Elemental is still so small that even the Facebook group only has 47 members, and there are only two or three people who ever post, so there’s no flow of ideas and encouragement yet – and yes, I’m part of the problem! I think 6 people have finished Bronze Elemental and 2 Silver, so we’re an elite club. In contrast, there are 343 members of the Maverick group and while it’s not busy, there’s plenty of “this is what I’m doing” and “can I do this?” and “this is what I’ve done”. If my list is up to date, we’re up to 48 Bronze Mavericks finished and 4 Silvers.
If you’re over 25 and not a member of the Trefoil, join the Rebel Badge Club and do Maverick. If you don’t fancy joining a club (it’s all very informal; “joining” means going to the website and buying the Bronze logbook, therefore allowing yourself access to the Facebook group; or you can join the whole RBC by buying the first badge book and joining the RBC Facebook group), then go for Elemental. If you’re under 25, absolutely go for DofE first. It’s the one that will give you the most back – apart from the recognition, you’ll get a discount card which you can use at lots of outdoorsy suppliers, which is something none of the others offer.
And now for Silver! Well, I’m too old for Silver DofE so I’ll never do it. I’ve finished Silver Voyage. I’m signed up for Silver Maverick but have barely touched it in two years. I’m working through my Gold Voyage by now. I probably won’t do a comparison but maybe I might tell you about each one as and when I finish it.
I Am A Polar Bear 