Now this is a good effort. OK, so he comes from Norwich and there's nothing better to do there, but gaining all the scout badges at the age of 10 is some achievement.
I'm not a big personal fan of the scouts myself, having dropped out as soon as I hit cubs (not much younger than this kid, then, but without a badge to my name), and I certainly don't see it as the all-important national institutuon it seems to be. Also, the myth that scouts all over the world are the innocent, God-fearing asexual kind that help little old ladies across the street is one that perhaps needs dispelling, or at least contextualising: I met them when Chelmsford hosted the World Scout Jamboree last year and to cut a long story short, most of them were chasing the busty girlscouts from Sweden and some were throwing knives at each other.
Still, as a concept the scouts are a good way to teach young children such practical tasks as, uh, skating. I do think the scouts should continue in a similar vein to the way they do now, albeit perhaps more secular (with the sex discrimination of Scouts vs. Brownies gone, we can probably drop the badge in 'my faith', can't we?). So yes, keep the scouts. But...
Are the badge categories still appropriate? They've moved smoothly from the whole 'surviving in the wilderness' focus to something more general, which is not all that odd, and they've adapted to the modern world quite well with badges in global conservation and martial arts and the like.
A lot of the badges, however, are very strange. 'Air activities'? 'Entertainer'? 'Communication'? That's a university degree, isn't it?
Since we've got a brigade of scouts dying to be useful, let's use them. It's probably time to drop some of the less useful and irrelevant badges. In a way, that suggests a return to the traditional ways as much as the newer ones - the new record holder Ben Spratling liked most the good old 'adventure' badge because he felt he could help people in an emergency.
And you can't get much more useful than that.