Planning a session

Here are a couple of videos to help Leaders use OSM to plan and Risk Assess a session of Beavers, Cubs or Scouts

Creating the session plan in OSM

You can do your session planning however you like – just remember that, to encourage great teamwork, you’ll need to share your plan with the team early enough for them to have time to read it 🙂

Adding a Risk Assessment in OSM

Assessing the risk of activities has always been a necessary and important aspect of planning our fun. Since January 2021, it has been mandatory to make a record of the risk assessment of significant hazards. We are not aiming to eliminate risk as risk is a great learning tool. We are, on the other hand, aiming to eliminate significant harm.

Again, risk assessment is useless unless it is shared with the team – so we need to make sure that people have the risk assessment in enough time to read through it. Also – it would be good to talk through safety at the leaders’ briefing before each meeting. If neither has been completed successfully, then you may have to cancel or delay the event!

Communicating to your team using OSM mailing lists

Anyone who has ‘Leader Access’ with at least Read privileges for the Personal Details of the members (beavers, cubs and scouts) can send emails to a few email addresses and they will be distributed to useful groups of the Section. That means you can communicate with your team or young leaders directly from your phone/computer without having to log in to OSM. These are the three email distribution lists that OSM provide for each section:

  • Adult Leaders
  • Young Leaders (in your email, remember to remind them that they need to add their parents email address to any reply they send – safeguarding rules!)
  • Members (beavers, cubs or scouts) – I don’t suggest you use this one, see below

To find out what the specific email addresses are – go to OSM Leader site > Members > Email Mailing Lists where you will find the 3 email addresses that you can use.

Tell the parents what’s happening

It is best to use OSM to email the parents because we can then use the ‘pretty’ templates. Here is a video tutorial from the creators of OSM.