We all like to think our planning and preparations for school excursions and international tours is excellent. After all, we have a huge pile of really good-looking paperwork, risk assessments, policies, diagrams, matrixes and procedures that no doubt everyone’s read. With so much planning and paperwork, what could possibly go wrong?
If anything the decades of work in education has taught me, running countless outdoor education programs, sports activities, and international tours is that no matter how carefully you plan and no matter how many pages of paperwork you’ve amassed, no plan ever survives contact with the real world.
As we know as teachers and educational leaders, whenever we’re doing something outside the classroom with staff, students, vehicles, equipment and group travel, not everything will always go to plan. Most of the time, things that do go wrong won’t be insurmountable problems and are well within our resources with which to deal. As a result, we always need to ensure we have the right staff on our programs to be able to make good decisions and resolve issues before they escalate into major ones.
However, sometimes no matter how good our staff and plans are, incidents happen which are way outside our control and well-beyond the resources available. Thankfully, I can count on one hand the number of times this has happened on my programs over twenty years.
For some of these incidents, the staff was well-prepared and we were able to collectively respond quickly and effectively to the situation at hand. One was a brown snake bite, the second deadliest snake in the world, one was a bus crash, and one was a snows sport incident. Thankfully, they didn’t happen all at once with snakes on a bus in the snow!
All of these incidents were responded to quickly and effectively and ultimately resolved with a positive outcome. For each of these programs, the staff members were all well-trained, and we practised incident responses for complex incidents throughout the year.
However, other incidents at other schools where the majority of staff had little or no training or experience with incident management, the responses were very poor to say the least. These incidents ended up with other unintended escalations and costly consequences, including significant injuries and irate parents on the verge of taking legal action. It was a stark reminder to me that not everyone has the level of training that I was fortunate enough to have over a career in outdoor education, international travel, school administration and boarding. We also noticed that it was not common practice in schools to test complex scenarios, but more often than not were testing reasonably straightforward on-site scenarios, such as fires, lockdowns and other emergencies, where emergency response and care is generally only a few minutes away. However, when we have agreed on an excursion or travelling internationally, emergency response maybe hours or days away and being prepared to respond to an incident on one of these programs is dramatically different from something that happens on site.
Having spent my entire career in education running programs offsite and knowing firsthand the challenges faced by groups on the ground and back at school when an incident happens, we decided to design some specific role play training to help put school executives and their critical incident teams to the test.
We called this the Stress Test for multiple reasons. No, we don’t stand next to people yelling “Are you stressed? Are you stressed?” at them. Rather, we put people into a realistic scenario in which they must respond in their set roles as a team under time pressure, with limited resources and competing priorities. No matter how good you think your systems are, this really puts them to the test in a meaningful way, as you never want to test these systems and processes as you go through a real incident.
How did we approach this? Firstly, our stress tests were customized. We looked at the programs the schools were running, and designed scenarios based upon one of their actual programs. We then applied localised environmental and activity risks to that scenario and came up with a progression of events. As in a choose your own adventure book, these events can change depending on the decisions which are made. We then divide the school executive into two teams. One team is back at school responding as the executive level critical incident team, while the other team is on the ground and responding to the incident at hand.
Sounds pretty straightforward so far? Well, it doesn’t stay that way for long. With any incident, there’s activity chaos and uncertainty and after about three minutes as the team settle in with the idea that this is going to be easy, we throw the first spanner in the works adding a complication which either takes away a resource or overwhelms part of the team to the point that they have to start using their critical thinking skills to triage the problems at hand. Throughout the incident, we continue to add in more chaos, confusion and uncertainty. You never know who’s going to arrive at the school demanding a meeting with the principal, who’s going to be calling in desperate for information and how staff members are going to react under the pressure as it builds. We often take the most senior executives out of the critical incident team as well and put them in the field to test the response of others. This is a great way to test what happens if the principal is uncontactable during an incident.
Throughout this process, we throw in red herrings, spanners, media chaos, social media madness and just about everything else we can think of to really test a team under pressure. Then, just when you think it’s safe to lift your head above the boardroom table, something else random and unexpected is likely to happen and pressure increases even further.
Having people to respond quickly, calmly and effectively to any incident is important, so that when something does happen, the team can draw on those learnings and experiences from their scenario training and apply this to the situation at hand. Being prepared for an incident in this method, can mean the difference between a really positive resolution for your staff and students or a disastrous one that ends up in court and continues to drain your time, energy and resources for years to come.
The first school I worked at, was dragged through the courts for 12 years over an incident which happened the year before I arrived. In many ways, it took this fatal incident to prompt the school into long-term action on training and safety, from which I learnt a lot about running great programs and keeping staff and students safe. However, no school should have to go through an incident to get to this point and instead train their staff up to ensure this never happens on one of their programs.
Training in this way is not hard and can be completed within as little as ninety minutes. Each training session for executives has been something which we found to be highly engaging, powerful and one of the fastest ways to identify strengths and weaknesses within any critical incident response team and incident response systems. You can have all the paperwork in the world that says everything about risk and risk mitigation in minute detail and it means nothing compared with good staff training and putting people to the test under time and resource pressures to make decisions on the fly as an incident evolves. By building stress tests into your annual training practices, you can ensure that if something doesn’t go to plan on one of your programs, your team has the skills, practice and confidence to respond quickly and effectively support and protect your staff and your students.
