It wasn’t while out in the remote wilderness of Iceland that David Bartles-Smith realised how much the expedition there had transformed one autistic boy - it was in London, months later.

Bartles-Smith, a social worker and youth worker from Durham, is one of the leaders of a 16-day trek run by the British Exploring Society aimed at helping some of the most disadvantaged young people find routes back into education, training or work. The boy in question, who had a severe lack of confidence and reclusive habits, had been on the verge of dropping out after the first day’s training, before the expedition had even reached Iceland. But months later, at a reunion in London, he was travelling independently into the city, standing up before a room full of people and recounting how the exploration had changed him. “That, to me, underlined the power of what we do,” says Bartles-Smith.

It was only after some intense one-to-one support in the initial training weekend that the student had started opening up to staff. They’d coaxed him on to the expedition and there, in the wild landscapes of Iceland, a boy who had been “more and more isolated, more and more of a recluse”, as Bartles-Smith puts it, began having the time of his life.

“He just had one big smile on his face all the time,” Bartles-Smith recalls, “because he suddenly found that all the things that were expected of him back home, in college, in school, in the place where he lived, were no longer relevant.

“It’s almost like starting with a clean slate and learning how to interact - because everybody is doing the same thing, learning how to cope in this environment. He suddenly found, I think, that he was restarting that race on equal terms. In the race through secondary education and college, he’d been left behind years ago.”

The British Exploring Society - founded by George Murray Levick, a naval surgeon who accompanied Captain Robert Scott on his final Antarctic expedition - has taken children on 100 scientific expeditions spanning all seven continents over the past 85 years. But with a requirement to raise around £3,000 for an expedition, it can be out of reach for some teenagers.

NEETs are given priority places

The Iceland expedition, known as the Dangoor Next Generation programme after its sponsor, property tycoon David Dangoor, is different. It’s free to 16- to 21-year-olds referred by social services, schools and partner organisations such as Catch22, which offers alternative education provision, apprenticeships and support for children in care. Priority goes to children who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) or who are at risk of dropping out.

“It’s about working with an identified individual who is perhaps disengaged from education, perhaps leaving care, perhaps involved with mental health services, or just generally struggling to make that transition from adolescence to adulthood,” says Bartles-Smith.

Attempts to legislate NEETs out of existence have reduced their numbers but not eliminated them. Despite an official requirement for all young people to stay in education or training until their 18th birthday, 57,000 16- and 17-year-olds were NEET in September last year, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics - up by 6,000 in the past 12 months. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, 800,000 were out of work or education.

Many of these young people find themselves in what British Exploring Society patron and adventurer Bear Grylls describes as a “comfort pit”, an unfulfilling existence where the biggest challenge they face might be an Xbox game.

On the expedition that Bartles-Smith (pictured below) runs, participants are selected partly for their willingness to prove themselves or increase their self-belief. “We deliver a very intense programme where young people feel far out of their comfort zone,” he explains.

But can dragging teenagers away from sofas and screens and into the wilderness really transform their education and employment prospects? There is reason to think so. The British Exploring Society says that, in recent years, 96 per cent of young people returning from the expeditions have gone back into work, school or college within three months. Admittedly, it’s a small group - in a good year, they might have 40 young people on the programme - and at £5,800, funded without public money, the expedition doesn’t come cheap. By comparison, a government intervention prior to the raising of the participation age managed to help 49 per cent of 25,000 young people back into studying or a job.

But are there tips that schools can glean from the expedition approach without having to gather a group of students and trek into the wilderness? Certainly, there are aspects of challenge and environment that can be learned from.

The leaders begin the induction weekend with one-to-one talks aimed at understanding each participant’s past experiences. Then the young people learn basic skills and work on team-building exercises before spending five days in Dartmoor to prepare for life in the wilderness. “What’s really going on is strong emotional engagement,” says Bartles-Smith.

Desolate landscape

The area of northern Iceland chosen for the expedition is about 65 miles from the Arctic Circle, a desolate landscape that is one of the largest deserts in Europe and was used for training the astronauts on the Apollo moon-landing programme.

“The most important thing about Iceland is that it provides an environment that really is difficult to match anywhere in the world in terms of its feeling of isolation, remoteness, wilderness,” says Bartles-Smith.

The expedition transforms young people by offering them no distractions, he suggests. Unlike outdoor education programmes, which aim to offer exciting experiences such as abseiling or rafting, this can be a monotonous lifestyle. Over the 16 days, they cover about 160km on foot, including a five-day hike up the 1,510m Askja volcano. Each day has a basic routine: get up, wash, prepare food, pack a rucksack and walk. Then, at the end of the day, you put up a tent and cook some food.

Tricky problems

But in the wilderness, simple matters become tricky problems: when do you wash your clothes? And how can you dry them when it’s hardly ever above freezing? The young people learn to seize opportunities, such as the rare sunny day, and to make decisions collectively through their group’s daily meetings. “They’ve got to learn to live together, which is the bedrock of society, isn’t it? Learning to live together and to solve problems together. And you can’t walk away from it,” Bartles-Smith says.

Some students do want to leave. Others are confrontational. “Their life history can sometimes mean they bring quite aggressive attitudes to how they would participate in a group,” says Bartles-Smith. “We work with a lot of teenagers who, on the face of it, are very outspoken, very lively, very outgoing - they exude confidence, but the reality is they’re extremely vulnerable as well. And a lot of those vulnerabilities inevitably come to the fore on expeditions.”

Expedition leaders are experienced in working with challenging young people as well as challenging environments. They might take a teenager back to base camp in the Land Rover for one-to-one support. There are also opportunities for reflection built in, but Bartles-Smith says many of the breakthroughs come in informal chats as the young people walk with each other and the leaders.

When the expedition is over, the young people reunite in London weeks later to consolidate what they have learned and rekindle friendships. Then the leaders create an action plan with the referring agencies to try to translate their expedition epiphanies into the kind of change that will help them return to school or college.

But for Bartles-Smith, that’s secondary to the personal changes, which he says are bigger than anything he’s seen in more than 20 years as a social worker. “When people open their hearts, that is a pure and real sign that you’ve made a difference. And so many young people opened their hearts on this expedition.

Joseph Lee is a freelance journalist