When Prince Philip created the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme in 1954, the aim was to give British boys a good dose of ‘grit’ between school ending at 15 and their national service three years later. It’s safe to say that these days the programme is unrecognisable – not just in how it has expanded (luckily for me, girls were admitted pretty early on) but in what it offers today’s young people.
With a growing reputation as the ‘chronically online’ generation, schemes like DofE aren’t just a convenient way to boot us teenagers out of doors – they’re sometimes the only way. The programme has three different sections – Physical, Skill and Volunteering – and while these are great for getting us into the public sphere, it’s often the expeditions that are the big draw. At Bronze level, this is a fairly tame one-night camp, and for Silver, that increases to three days of walking and two overnights. For the athletic and eager, none of it might seem that testing.
But Gold, as I have found, is where Prince Phil’s original ‘grit’ comes back in...
For me, the Gold expedition was always what the DofE scheme was building towards. Back in late 2024, when Gold sign-up opened for my year group, the opportunity of a five-day trek in early summer felt unmissable – almost enough to make the required 12–18 months of commitment to the other sections seem worth the effort.
I’ve always loved hiking since my parents marched me up Ben Nevis when I was ten – but more important was the chance to do something like this with my mates. In our daily lives, which are so focused on our laptops, A-level coursework and social media, we’re constantly over-stimulated in a way that makes connecting with ourselves – let alone the outdoors or each other– almost impossible.
Putting my name down might have been an absolute no-brainer, but the reality of the expedition felt a lot more complicated. In particular, a practice expedition in April forced me to think carefully about my kit choices. We were on familiar territory in the Yorkshire Dales, and while the trip went by without any major hitches, the weather dealt us a tricky hand. When we arrived at one of our camps in Keld, Swaledale, we were sweltering in 21-degree heat and regretting our lack of summer clothes. However, we were just as unprepared for the sub-zero temperatures the following morning, unclipping frozen tent clasps with numb fingers. We were surprised by how much the physical struggle of walking in both hot and cold climates hit our energy levels, and we also got through much more food than we expected.
Come early July, as I laid out my gear for the real thing, memories of the practice run had me doubling my breakfast portions and obsessively checking the weather. As you might expect, the kit in front of me was an interesting mish-mash of old and new, some borrowed or repurposed – my dad’s decades-old Therm-a-rest sitting alongside my own power packs and Nike sports gear.
But this came to be a concern when I rested the full rucksack on the scales, and realised it weighed, with full water bottles, over fifteen kilos. Worse still, this didn’t include the group kit like tents or stoves that I’d be given on day one. It looked like I was going to have roughly four more kilos on my back for the real thing than I had carried back in April. An intimidating prospect which, looking back, reflected my feelings about the whole experience.
The criteria for passing the practice expedition had been relatively simple – especially since my group had been at the size limit of seven people, so even when some dropped out, the rest of us were fine to carry on. Now our seven girls had shrunk to the minimum party size of four – meaning that all of us had to finish or none of us could. The notoriously difficult terrain of the Lake District was also going to be a different game to Yorkshire. But what’s any challenge without a little pressure?
We began without any hiccups – none of us were fazed by the rain or the midges – and celebrated our first day with an easy eight miles, ending at Buttermere. As our route plan reminded us, this was essentially just a warm-up for what was to come, but it still felt good. As we traipsed the last mile from Crummockwater, we looked up at the peaks and visible ridges around Robinson (737m) – which we had planned for the next day – and remarked recklessly how ‘doable’ it all looked. Sadly, we’d failed to notice the enormous cloud that enveloped the top half of the landscape, but at least this blissful naivety gave me a good night’s sleep.
The ascent began around 8.30am, and we met it with plenty of bounce in our legs, intent on tackling the elevation with enthusiasm. Spurred on by having got away before all the other groups (there's an old saying about how Duke of Edinburgh isn't a race, and it couldn't be more wrong), the four of us hopped up the snaking path with short-lived excitement – which soon faded as the clear track vanished into a steep boulder field. Not only that, but Robinson quickly turned out to be one of those peaks with endless false summits, and leg-sapping bursts of effort towards what we thought was the ‘top’ were met with increasing frustration.
An enduring impression of that day is of gripping clumps of heather and rotten wooden fenceposts to heave ourselves and our enormous bags ever upwards towards yet another false summit. But the scramble holds happy memories too. The morning mist burned off as we climbed, and soon the full outline of the lake below was visible, looking deep black next to the vibrant green of the fields and fern that surrounded it. A glance backwards at the landscape behind worked wonders for our morale… as did frequent Fruit Pastille breaks.
We rode out the pain for over an hour, until we reached a so called ‘happy point’ on our map (a spot where our location was easy to identify). Here, our planned route turned off down the side of the fell – but less than a hundred metres in the opposite direction was the cairn that marked the summit of Robinson. A second-long shared look was all it took for us our bags and head for the top. Wobbling Bambi-style on tired legs, none of us cared about the extra climb or the fact that the curtain of cloud would prevent us from getting a decent view. One of our group was ticking off Wainwrights, another two were desperate for a cairn selfie, and I was just happy to be there. We touched that stone with a massive sense of accomplishment. It was a good feeling.
The rest of the expedition followed in a similar fashion – that happy mountain mix of suffering and celebration. What we hadn't been expecting was the intimacy that forms during a group experience like this. At mealtimes we sat in a small circle with our boil-in-the bag dinners – to which no Michelin-starred meal could ever compare after a long day on the hill – and the conversation meandered off down the most unlikely alleys. For a group of people who were only vaguely friendly in the corridors at school, the closeness would have seemed odd to our other friends back home, but the expedition fostered new bonds, entirely absent of phones, that made it all feel natural.
Even more surprising was an encounter we had on a piece of barren moorland between Wasdale and Boot, towards the end of our fourth day. Spirits were sagging and morale was low, until we spotted another cluster of hi-vis jackets and unwieldy rucksacks ahead – recognisable as another group of DofE expeditioners. We didn't know them (and in fact they came from Coventry, hundreds of miles from us), but when the ten of us came together on the path, they greeted us like age-old mates, chatting about our respective walks and experiences so far. We were united over our status as DofE participants, and this brought a comfort that kept my legs moving for the last four difficult miles towards the campsite.
As I walked, I recognised with absolute clarity that there was something incredibly valuable in what I had signed up to back in September.
And I'm far from being the only one to enjoy this experience. In the academic year of 2024–5, a record 572,802 young people were participating in a DofE programme, the highest in the charity's nearly 70-year history. Significantly, the Gold level saw a 7.5% increase in participants, a greater number than at either Bronze or Silver.
There's a lot of media discourse that seems intent on making my generation seem a little averse to real world connection with people and nature, but more young people than ever are determined not to let that original DofE ‘grit’ become irrelevant in modern society. Perhaps, then, the scheme hasn't really changed much at all – it's still a key way to produce the adults that we want, and that young people are capable of being.
