Duke of Edinburgh's Award Volunteering

Energy Sparks offers a range of programmes to help you meet the Volunteering requirements of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award. Your volunteering activities through these programmes can make a difference to your school's energy consumption and carbon footprint. We currently offer a choice of a Campaigner or Change-Maker programme for the Bronze Award, and a combined Silver Award programme. A Gold Award programme will follow next year.

Each programme is divided into sessions that include activities that can help you to make a difference in your school and community, and to encourage others to make changes in your school to reduce energy use.

The programmes are flexible and you can select activities that you are most interested in doing. This might mean taking responsibility for investigating how energy is used and taking action yourself. Alternatively, you may prefer to engage and encourage other pupils and staff to take action. Some may be easy wins, others might take a bit more time and effort.

We recommend that you speak to your teacher in charge of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and also the member of staff leading Energy Sparks efforts in your school. Energy Sparks cannot act as an assessor for the Volunteering Section so find out who will be your assessor as part of your planning and talk to them about your ideas and plans to complete this section. 

Explore the different programmes below.

This is a good programme for you if you are keen to encourage more sustainable behaviour by:

If you prefer to focus on taking action yourself and supporting school efforts, then why not explore the other Bronze programme instead. If you’re not sure, have a read of each programme and also feel free to create your own programme, by selecting the activities that you want to do, and copying and pasting the activity hyperlinks into the programme template.

Download the Campaigner programme and more information here.

This is a good programme for you if you would like to:

This is one programme with more flexibility to explore a range of activities or combine the activities featured under the Bronze programmes.

If you are new to Energy Sparks or didn't do your Bronze volunteering using Energy Sparks, you can still complete your Silver volunteering section. The first sessions in the programme will help you understand how Energy Sparks works and which energy reduction activities you might be interested in doing to support your school. 

If you’ve already volunteered your time for your Bronze volunteering section, you’ll have some understanding of the kind of activities you can do as part of this section. Our programme enables you to both carry on with some of the activities if you want to build on these or choose a new range of activities to focus your volunteering efforts on.

Download the Silver Programme and more information here.

This free programme aims to help Duke of Edinburgh’s Award participants to identify and develop a series of voluntary activities to support your school community in reducing energy use. It is suitable for Bronze and Silver participants but can be adapted for Gold Award participants, especially if they have not already completed their volunteering section using this programme. The programme signposts to activities that can be selected from the Energy Sparks’ website, with participants free to choose what they would like to invest their time in. These activities can also be adapted by participants to work in pairs or groups, with some suggestions to participants as to how to ensure that they all can demonstrate and evidence their volunteer hours. 

Energy Sparks may already be well used in your school, and participants’ own efforts should be able to complement or reinforce the wider school work. Equally, limited student activity may have occurred to date and this is an opportunity to embed their role into school sustainability initiatives.

More detailed guidance can be found here.

Introductory webinar Dec 25

These documents can be found in the programmes and guidance but are available here for quick reference.