The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (DofE) supports young people from all backgrounds to build lifelong confidence, resilience and skills. In 2025–26 alone, 345,900 young people started their Award, with 589,237 actively participating across 5,023 Licensed Organisations.
Behind that national reach is a network of 38,951 adult volunteers fulfilling vital roles, including Leaders, Managers, Expedition Assessors, Expedition Supervisors and Award Verifiers.
To support this network effectively, DofE needed to rethink more than how volunteers completed training. It needed to rethink how volunteers accessed the knowledge, guidance and support required to perform confidently in their roles.
By partnering with long-term learning partner Snowfish Learning and selecting HowNow as the core technology provider, DofE moved from a traditional training-led model to a continuous performance support approach — creating a more flexible, accessible and consistent learning experience for volunteers across the country.
Reasons for change:
Results:
Behind every safe, inspiring, and transformative DofE experience are teams of adult volunteers working in complementary roles. However, prior to 2023, DofE’s volunteer learning model, which had evolved organically over decades, encountered severe structural bottlenecks.
COVID-19 accelerated DofE’s move towards digital learning. During the pandemic, DofE transitioned its training to half-day and full-day online sessions delivered through Adobe Connect. This created greater consistency in the learning environment, with volunteers joining the same virtual rooms regardless of where they were based across the country.
However, delivery quality remained a consideration, with around 70 trainers delivering the sessions, many of whom did not have training as their primary role.
The experience highlighted an opportunity to rethink the model further. DofE subsequently moved towards self-directed learning through shorter learning nuggets, complemented by 90-minute live sessions. This approach made it possible to provide more focused, accessible learning while giving volunteers greater flexibility in how and when they developed their knowledge and skills.
Rather than simply replicating traditional training online, DofE began building a more flexible approach to supporting volunteers throughout their DofE careers.
With these challenges in mind, DofE partnered with long-term learning partner Snowfish Learning and selected HowNow as the core technology provider.
The project was built around a fundamental shift in thinking: learning should be treated as a means to an end, with the true goal being confident, consistent and efficient performance in the field.
The project team opened with a fundamental question:
"Instead of asking, 'What training do adult volunteers need?', we asked, 'What support do adult volunteers need to succeed?'"
Two core principles governed every design decision:
The resulting goals were to:
During technology selection, two traditional, heavyweight enterprise LMS vendors initially topped the shortlist. However, the project team made a deliberate, calculated decision to select a late entrant: HowNow.
HowNow’s architecture was natively designed around contextual search, resource playlists, and performance support rather than static course catalogs.
An integrated cross-functional team combining DofE staff, Snowfish Learning instructional designers, and HowNow technical engineers built, integrated, and launched the core platform and foundational pathways within an ambitious four-month delivery window.
To build a solution tailored to a non-contracted workforce, where volunteers cannot be mandated to learn but must want to engage, DofE partnered with Snowfish Learning and HowNow to create a flexible learning ecosystem.
Rather than relying only on immediate post-completion surveys, DofE also carried out a delayed evaluation in October 2025 across 559 volunteers who had completed their pathways at least six months prior.
Immediate surveys assess the learning experience, including the quality and coverage of topics, knowledge checks and final assessments, facilitated discussions, shared resources, and support from the training team — with satisfaction consistently around 90%+ rated excellent or good.
The delayed evaluation provided an additional perspective on how well learning was retained and applied in practice over time, helping DofE understand the longer-term impact of its learning approach.
Since launch, the platform has recorded more than 570,000 total content views across pathways, demonstrating the scale of engagement with DofE’s digital learning ecosystem.
Since the May 2023 launch, volunteers have completed 28,264 pathways across the platform, replacing inconsistent regional reporting with a more consistent national picture of learning activity.
The Foundations pathway has been completed by 14,350+ volunteers, establishing a consistent national baseline covering DofE’s guiding principles, safeguarding and organisational structure.
Role-specific learning has generated 13,914 total completions across Assessors, Managers, Leaders and Verifiers, giving volunteers targeted support aligned to their responsibilities.
The delayed evaluation found that 86% to 96% of volunteers were actively applying their learning six months or more after completing their training.
This provided DofE with evidence that the approach was not simply generating course completions, but supporting longer-term application in practice.
Between 94% and 99% of volunteers reported that they would actively recommend the learning pathways to colleagues.
89% of volunteers reported that they had no critical information missing when starting their roles, supporting DofE’s ambition to create a stronger and more consistent starting point for volunteers.
The implementation has fundamentally altered organisational behaviour and internal vocabulary.
Terms like "Pathways" and "Performance Support" have replaced "training sessions" in everyday DofE operations, reflecting a permanent cultural shift toward continuous development.
By eliminating physical scheduling delays and administrative onboarding bottlenecks, volunteers achieve confidence faster.
Scaling volunteer capacity directly safeguards DofE's national reach, ensuring over 589,000 active young people across the UK receive safe, consistent, and high-quality Award experiences every year.
Evaluation surveys produced overwhelmingly positive qualitative themes from both brand-new volunteers and decades-long veterans.
"Regardless of where someone joins the DofE network, they have access to the same high-quality learning experience and support, enabling them to become effective in their role much more quickly." — Jackie Bull, DofE Director of UK Operations
"The ease of use, range of materials, resources and support from existing DofE staff all add to the effectiveness of this experience." — Thomas, DofE Leader
"The learning process has brought me fully up to date with the ethos of DofE in the current day. Building on my 35 years of involvement, this recent training has been exceptionally positive."— Stuart, DofE Expedition Assessor & Supervisor
"The scenarios and knowledge checks helped me apply the learning to real-life situations. I now feel much more confident in leading and developing our DofE programme and supporting our learners to achieve their full potential." — David, DofE Manager in a post-16 SEN college
"I’ve been a DofE Manager for years, but still found the Manager’s pathway so helpful." — Caroline, Experienced DofE Manager
DofE’s transformation demonstrates that digitalising learning is not simply about moving training online.
The organisation used the opportunity to fundamentally rethink the role learning plays in supporting a large, distributed and non-contracted workforce.
By shifting from training delivery to performance support, DofE created an ecosystem where volunteers can access structured pathways, practical resources and ongoing development throughout their DofE careers.
The result is a more consistent learning experience, stronger evidence of long-term application, and a model that helps DofE support the people who make its mission possible — at national scale.
