Year 10 students from Plymstock School celebrated achieving their Bronze Duke of Edinburgh’s (DofE) Award this week. Widely acknowledged as the world’s leading achievement award for young people, DofE programmes enable young people to strengthen their key life-skills. The DofE programme at Plymstock has been running for many years and complements the school’s mission ‘to empower young people, through education, to have the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in life and make a positive contribution to society’.

As DofE Manager, I was delighted to present the DofE Bronze certificates to the students this week. I want to reiterate how truly impressive and inspiring their achievements have been this year, and how well everyone has done to get back to some kind of normal. Over the past year, the DofE team has had the pleasure of recruiting, supporting, and guiding students in Year 10, year 11 and year 12 as they kicked off/completed their Duke of Edinburgh Award. Our students showed great resilience and determination and I’m proud to say that the majority succeeded in gaining their full Bronze DofE Awards.

The Bronze DofE award presentation was held on Tuesday 8th November 2022, and those students that were present represented a diverse cross section of this great group of young people. Many of Plymstock’s past DofE award winners have said that this has been a life changing experience for them. Personally, I hope that they will continue their growth in the increasingly challenging Silver award this coming year. While overcoming the challenges of this past DofE year, these students have embodied Plymstock’s core values of ‘Compassion, Collaboration, Creatively’!

Well done DofE students – you are fantastic, and I am very proud of every one of you! And thank you to the staff who have lent their support this year!

Mrs de Mora – DofE Manager

There are currently over 490,000 young people taking part in a DofE programme across the UK through a variety of centres including both state and independent schools, special schools, businesses, prisons, young offender institutions and youth groups.

To find out more about the DofE and how it enables young people to succeed, please visit www.DofE.org