Planning a Whole Term with the Programme Planner

Planning a term usually means staring at a blank calendar, deciding what to do each week, and hoping it all adds up to a badge by the end. The Programme planner turns that around. You start from the badge you want your section to earn — "Cubs earn their Chef badge this term" — and Scoutworks lays out the weeks for you, one meeting for each thing the badge needs, with real activity ideas ready to drop in. When you're happy, you publish the whole term to your calendar in a single click.

Where to find it#

In the left sidebar, click Tools, then open the Programme planner card. It's available to leaders and group admins.

The main page lists the plans you've already started. Click one to open it, or use New plan to begin a fresh term.

Starting a new plan#

Setting up a term takes three quick steps.

1. Choose the section and the term.

Scoutworks fills in your usual meeting day and time automatically, reading it from the events you already run — so if your Cubs meet at 6:30 on a Wednesday, that's what the plan uses. You don't need to set it by hand.

2. Pick your badge goal.

Choose the badge (or badges) you want the section to work towards. Scoutworks then creates the skeleton of the term: one meeting slot for each requirement the badge asks for, spread across the weeks.

If you pick more than one badge, the requirements are woven together across the term rather than doing one badge and then the next. And if a term simply doesn't have enough weeks to cover everything, Scoutworks tells you plainly — for example, "needs 4 weeks, 3 free" — so you can add a week or drop a badge before you go any further.

Filling in the term#

Each meeting slot is tied to a badge requirement, and for each one the planner offers two or three ready-made activity suggestions drawn from the Scout Association's own activity library — around 2,000 real activities, each already matched to the requirements it covers.

The suggestions are chosen to fit, not picked at random. They're ranked to suit the length of your meeting, and each one shows at a glance:

• How active it is — so you can balance a lively week against a calmer one.
• What it costs — handy when you're watching the term's budget.
• The group size it suits — so it works for the numbers you actually have.

For each slot you can:

• Accept a suggestion as it stands.
• Swap it for one of the other suggestions.
• Search the whole library if you'd like something different — the same 2,000 activities are all searchable.
• Use your own — drop in one of your group's own custom activities instead (see below).

Using your own activities#

If your group has favourite activities of its own — a tried-and-tested game, a local visit, your own take on a badge task — you can save them once and reuse them across any term. When you save a custom activity, you can tag it with the badge requirements it covers, so it shows up as an option wherever those requirements appear.

Keeping track of badge coverage#

As you fill in the weeks, a coverage panel down the side keeps a live tally of which badge requirements your term now covers and which are still open. You can see at a glance whether the badge is fully accounted for, without cross-checking the requirements yourself — and it updates the moment you accept or swap an activity.

Rearranging the term#

Plans rarely survive first contact with the calendar. You can view your term as a stack of week cards or switch to a calendar view, and drag a meeting to a different week or date to reschedule it — half-term, a bank holiday, a swapped-in trip. The rest of the term stays put around it.

Publishing to your calendar#

When the term looks right, click Publish. Each meeting becomes a draft event on your calendar, with its activities and badge-requirement links already attached. From there, everything works exactly as it does for any other event — parents can RSVP, you can take the register, and you can award badges straight from the register as the requirements are met.

Publishing is safe to repeat. If you tweak the plan and publish again, Scoutworks updates the same events rather than creating duplicates — and any badges you've already awarded are kept.

Sharing the plan#

Want to talk the term through with your team before it goes live? From the plan you can download the whole thing as a PDF — good for printing or pinning up — or as a spreadsheet to open in Excel or Google Sheets.

What's next#

• Planning Your Event Schedule — fine-tune the timed activities on each meeting once it's on the calendar.
• Creating Events — how events, RSVPs and registers work, which is where a published term lands.
• How Badge Tracking Works — how requirements and awards fit together across Scoutworks.