About
Merseyside Scouts supports a community of around 6,500 young people and 2,500 adult volunteers across the Liverpool City Region, spanning 125 Scout Groups and Tawd Vale Adventure Centre.
Tawd Vale is an 80-acre woodland site with a dozen buildings and hundreds of trees, creating additional safety considerations alongside day-to-day activities and events.
Matt Jones, Support Team Leader and County Safety Advisor, is a Chartered Safety and Health Professional (IOSH) and helps ensure that all activities are delivered safely.
Challenge
Proving safety with paper
Merseyside Scouts’ biggest challenge was assuring safety was happening and being able to clearly evidence it.
The team felt confident the site was being operated safely, but needed a stronger way to demonstrate this if regulators ever asked to prove it.
At a large outdoor site like Tawd Vale, paper checklists weren’t practical. They could be lost or damaged in wet weather, and they didn’t always create a reliable record of what had been checked, when it was checked, or who completed it.
Volunteer-led operations
The volunteer model also created additional challenges:
- Consistency: Duty roles rotate, and a volunteer may only be responsible for checks one weekend every three to four months, which makes it harder to stay familiar with the exact procedures between shifts.
- Ease of use: Volunteers bring a wide range of experience, but most aren’t health and safety specialists. Safety isn’t their day-to-day role, so the process needed to be simple, clear, and easy to follow without adding extra admin.
Merseyside Scouts needed a more reliable approach to audits and inspections that would provide clear evidence and help volunteers complete checks consistently and accurately.
Solution
Matt had used Notify in a previous role and led the rollout with Merseyside Scouts, replacing paper-based checks with a mobile app and cloud-based software.
Robust, reliable evidence
Notify’s Audit Software and purpose-built mobile app enable the team to carry out audits and inspections with timestamps, location details, and photos from anywhere across their site. This speeds up completion time and creates a centralised audit trail of completed checks.
Additionally, this gives leaders confidence they can demonstrate what’s been audited across the site to ensure the safety of everyone involved with the Scouts.
Standardised templates also ensure inspections are carried out consistently, improving the quality and reliability of findings regardless of who completes them.
Scheduling consistent checks
By scheduling inspections and checklists, Notify helps ensure checks happen consistently, even when duty wardens rotate shifts or use the system less frequently. This reduces the risk of compliance gaps caused by human error or competing priorities.
Clear action tracking and accountability
A key improvement has been the ability to raise actions from weekly and monthly checks and track them through to completion. Notify supports clearer ownership and faster resolution.
Improved visibility for leadership
Real-time dashboards and reports provide county leaders with visibility of risks, trends, and recurring issues. This supports more informed decision-making and empowers leaders to effectively manage risk across their sites.
Merseyside Scouts has increased the number of audits completed by 6x since implementing Notify. This has closed a compliance gap and strengthened safety performance across Tawd Vale and the wider network.
Merseyside Scouts use Notify for: Audits and Inspections, Incident Management, Action Tracking, and Safety Intelligence.