The Senior Section covers all Guides between the ages of 14 and 26 : Guides, Rangers, Young Leaders, and young Guiders of any section (you can hold a full warrant from the age of 18.) Although Guides are officially aged 10/11 to 14, you don't HAVE to leave Guides as soon as you are 14, and you don't HAVE to move to a Senior Section unit at any time.

Most Senior Section members are, however, members of Senior units - usually called Rangers although they can actually call themselves anything they like : the most usual alternative is to call themselves a "Look Wider Group."

Ranger units are self-governing : although they need a warranted Guider to take overall charge, the programme planning and meeting organisation is the responsibility of the Rangers themselves. Inexperienced units or groups with very young Rangers may need more or less direction from their Guider but the Guider's role is just that - to Guide and support. Very large units may also prefer to delegate to a committee as it may be otherwise impossible to ever come to a decision!

The official GA Senior Section programme is called "Look Wider," after a passage in one of Baden-Powell's speeches : "when you look - look WIDE; and even when you think you are looking wide - LOOK WIDER STILL. " The Look wider programme has recently been revised and offers a very flexible and up-to-date approach, with something to interest everyone. There is an excellent section about Look Wider on the NetGuides website so there is really no need to reproduce it here!

Like all other Guide sections, the Senior Section is a uniformed organisation. Guide uniform these days is very casual (and some would say no longer very "uniform" ) and easy to wear : jeans are acceptable for all but the most formal occasions, and there is a choice of uniform tops - a sweatshirt, polo shirt or teeshirt, all in a turquoisey-blue officially called "aqua" although rumours are flying around that "They" are about to update it all........
Metal badges are worn on "Badge Tabs" (like the Guiders' tabs) - Rangers are plain turquoise and Young Leaders have a white stripe down either side : usually the order is Promise badge (turquoise for a Ranger, white for a YL, although some girls like to wear their original brass Promise badge if they're old enough to have had one) County Badge (ours is a white rose) and any other badges entitled to be worn : World Badge, any trefoils earned, Queen's Guide, etc., and after six months' service, YLs are entitled to wear a white bar as well, (in theory, up to up to a maximum of five badges ......)


THINKING OF SETTING UP A RANGER UNIT YOURSELF? Then read on.....
 (from Holderness Rangers)
To start up a new unit there is (unfortunately) the standard red tape to get through : first of all you need a willing victim, sorry adult, who is willing to act as Guider. Technically an adult is anyone over the age of 18 and if you can find an 18-year-old who has a full Guiders' warrant (and they do exist, or so I've been told) then you're home and dry.
IF your County Commissioner/Ranger Adviser/Senior Section Adviser agree to your choice.
In actual practice beggars can't be choosers so anyone who is willing to take the job on should be welcomed with open arms (and the more experience she has of dealing with your county hierarchy, the better!)

If you can persuade your new Guider (or Guiders - you never know your luck!) to sort out all the paperwork and get the new unit registered while you sort out the details of the programme etc., so much the better.
You need to decide where, when and how often to meet. If you're a small unit, you may be able to meet in someone's house, or organise a rota of houses, etc. Those sort of details depend entirely on your unit and what you want. I know of one unit which only "meets" occasionally, by telephone, to arrange irregular outings together, but that's what suits them.

We build our programme round the Look Wider scheme (check out NetGuides for details) to give us a bit of structure but we're very flexible. We plan a term at a time and always include a bit of "formal" Guide-y stuff, several excuses to eat (Pancake Day....Chinese New Year..... Halloween..... everybody's birthdays...... and we always eat out at a restaurant at least once a term, sometimes more often) outside trips (cinema.... ten-pin-bowling....ice-skating) ....... camping and/or activity weekends/weeks...... community work (visits to the OAP home in the village - they like to play cards, Monopoly, scrabble and generally just enjoy a change of company - fundraising for various charities etc.) AND eight of the girls are Young Leaders too - we seem to supply most of the other units in the Division!

All the girls in our unit enjoy camping and some have a LOT of camping experience : they're a pretty mixed bunch, some have been in Guiding since they were Rainbows and others have come straight in as Rangers, but they keep coming back so we must be doing something right (we're up to 21 this September, which is a ridiculous size for a Ranger unit really......) Our unit meetings are pretty informal : controversially, we don't insist on uniform unless it's a formal "Guide" occasion (enrolments, Division events, official presentations etc.) ; depending on the off-site activity, we may or may not wear uniform : fundraising we do (it makes it clear who you are and you get more money out of the punters that way!) but visits to the cinema etc., and certainly restaurants, we don't. Basically, we "play it by ear" and it seems to work.


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