What evidence do I need for my ALQ?

If you’ve heard rumours that you’ve got to speed up your Adult Leadership Qualification, I’m afraid it’s true. If you’re using the old book, you have to finish by September. Lean hard on your fellow leaders, lean hard on your Mentor and you can do this!

Perhaps what’s slowing you down is writing it all up, though. A couple of leaders I know are coming to the end of their qualifications and are now worrying about how to evidence it, so if you’re all done and you’re just “writing it up”, no need to worry. This is a really quick and easy job. You’re supposed to be demonstrating to your Mentor that you’ve done all the things you said you’ve done, you’re not supposed to be writing and referencing a PhD thesis. Keep it short and easy!

Timetable/programme

The absolute best thing you can put in your folder for a huge chunk of module 1 is a copy of the programme for the term. Grab a highlighter or coloured pens and you can show where you’re using the Five Essentials, Skills Builders and UMAs, annotate it with who’s planning and carrying out which activities and otherwise scribble all over to show you’re doing all the things with the programme that you should be doing with the programme.

Get other people to sign it off

If you’ve done something, get someone who was there to write you a little “review”, explaining what you did and how it went. Three or four sentences, max. that’s all you need. Anyone who witnessed it can sign it – your other unit leaders, your local commissioner, your Young Leader, a parent or even one of the kids. Especially one of the kids! Mentors and verifiers like to see Brownies and Guides signing things off and they like doing it because it makes them feel important.

Photos

Everyone loves a photo. Be careful about photo permissions or cover faces if you need to before printing them out for your evidence folder (I know, it’s 2023 and here I am recommending printing things!). Show your unit doing the thing, show you running the thing, do a group photo at the thing, get in lots of photos! It’s true that a picture tells a thousand words and they make wonderful evidence.

Copies of activities and crafts

When I did my Guide qualification, I put in copies of activities and crafts we did. For example, we did an evening of Promise activities and two of them were on flat paper which went nicely in an evidence folder. I’d cut out the lines of the Promise and the girls had to put them in order, so I took the crumpled strips and stuck them on a piece of paper, and they had to draw a Promise tree where they wrote each section of the Promise on a branch and came up with ways to carry them out which they drew as leaves. At another event, we did scraper-art dragons so one of those went in. If your activity or craft is too big (maybe you made an eight-foot tall monster out of the rubbish everyone in the unit has generated in the past week), then take a photo of it.

Forms

I know, consent forms are the most boring things! But popping them in – the bit with the event info, not the bit that the kids return with their personal information on – shows that you’ve done something and you’ve communicated with the parents. Here’s where, when and what happened, here’s where I’ve thought about what the participants need to know and need to bring, here’s where I’ve requested relevant emergency contact details etc (as a tangent, please make sure your parents understand the concept of “emergency contact details”. We were running late for a pickup once and called the parents, only to discover a good chunk of them were at work or were out or just generally weren’t available. It’s not just the closest next-of-kin, you need someone who’s available at the time of the activity!).

Planning notes

If you’ve planned a thing, maybe you have a page of notes about it? They don’t have to be tidy or orderly but a page of notes will show your planning and your thoughts really well. In my Guide qualification evidence, I planned a Look Wider-themed District Thinking Day, so I’ve got a list of the octants with an activity next to them all, the name of the person running that activity and at the bottom, lots of smaller boxes noting what we need for each activity. Things are circled, things are scribbled out, it’s not going to win any aesthetics awards (and it’s on a page of some kind of A4 medical diary, so at the bottom I’ve written “8x big octants” next to “pharmacist name”) but it shows that I planned it.

You’re supposed to hold a planning meeting with the girls. You can make your own notes from that but if you’ve given them a piece of paper and asked them to randomly write their ideas all over it, that looks even better. I like to get a big piece of wallpaper so everyone can write on it at once but if you’re planning to put it in your evidence folder, maybe divide them into Sixes and Patrols and give them A4 just this once, for your own convenience. They don’t have to be neat either and I’m tempted to say the more outlandish ideas they’ve had, the better.

Certificates

I don’t know if the elearnings produce them anymore but when I was doing my Guides qualification, it spat out a certificate for completing the “Being a Guide Leader” online learning module. If you’ve been to a face-to-face country/regional training session, they might have a certificate – my county presents you with a little A6 piece of paper, signed by the trainer, that certifies that you attended the session.

Anything else

Your evidence is unlimited. Literally anything that demonstrates what you’ve done, that a Mentor and later a verifier can look at and say “ah yes, I can see she did this”. A couple of clauses might require you to write – I’ve got a few paragraphs on the subject of observing two girls and their progress over a term or so but mostly, go for “things” rather than essays. It’s easier on you and frankly, it’s more compelling as evidence.

As for the amount of it, as a broad rule, this might end up in the post so you don’t want a folder six inches thick. The pictures here are only from my module 1 but genuinely, it’s at least 80% of my evidence. You don’t need to go over the top. If you got the plastic folder with your book, you should mostly still be able to do up the folder when all your evidence is in it. When I redid my module 1, I used a plastic punched pocket and it all fitted in there no problem. Put it in broadly the same order that it is in the book (I’ll do a post on referencing later this week) and that’s all there is to it.