As school leaders, we always have a lot going on. There are so many programs which now run outside the classroom from day excursions to multi-day camps and international trips. The skills required for effective school trip safety and risk management are often quite different from those inside the classroom.
The Classroom vs. Outside: Two Very Different Environments
On the one hand, we have a highly structured and controlled environment with clear and consistent parameters around the nature of classroom activities and definitive timeframes on how long a teacher is responsible for the students and those activities. If something goes wrong, you can either call the office for support or send a student to get help. Generally speaking, teachers are well-trained and prepared for the classroom environment.
Outside the classroom, however, is dramatically different. It's now a highly dynamic and uncontrolled environment without clear and consistent parameters. School excursions and activities can vary dramatically in length and nature. This means the type of supervision required and the skills and experience needed to conduct these activities is dramatically different.
Teachers usually are not specifically trained for and often ill-prepared for managing excursion risk outside the classroom.
The Complex Reality of School Excursion Risk Management
When you're dealing with students, staff, transport, activities, airports, foreign cultures and laws, medical concerns, mental health issues, disparate activities, remote operations and communications, there are no shortage of complex considerations which need to be made in relation to school excursion planning and risk management.
Student medical information, permission notes, emergency contacts, risk assessments, and duty of care obligations all need to be properly documented and accessible. Yet in many schools, these critical documents are scattered across filing cabinets, email inboxes, and various staff members' desks a recipe for disaster when minutes matter.
Consequently, the level of real risk involved in any sort of offsite activity and the exposure of school leaders to the liability which comes with this can be significant. When I was a head of school, this was something of which I was well-aware, not only due to my background, training and experience in outdoor education but added to this the first school I ever worked at had had a fatality a matter of months prior to my starting, after which safety was at the forefront of everything.
Learning from Tragedy: The Cost of Inadequate Risk Assessments
Having worked in such a broken organisation and devastated community, this shaped my thinking on risk management and managing school trip risk. That was over twenty years ago. Unfortunately, I've seen the contributing factors which led to the tragic death of that boy in 2000 occur again and again, mainly due to the disconnect between the reality of the skills and experience which classroom teachers have in the structured environment versus the skills and mindset needed for unstructured environments.
Often, it's a case that many schools only put training in place for their staff and focus on safety after they've had a significant incident, injury, or even a fatality on one of their programs. This should never be the case and yet we see it happen, time and time again. When looking at the tragic outcomes of these situations and the subsequent evidence presented in court, they are invariably easily preventable incidents if only the teachers had some basic training and experience in excursion risk management outside the classroom.
Every Teacher Needs School Trip Risk Management Training
Nobody is 'just a classroom teacher' anymore. The more our school programs venture out into the real world, the more important it is to have teachers with great risk management skills. Every time our teachers leave the school gates with a group, they're responsible for the well-being of that group. With the sheer volume of co-curricular programs, excursions, activities and overseas trips which now form part of a normal school life, it is now more critical than ever that teachers have training, skills and experience in both the classroom environment as well as outside the classroom.
Proper school excursion planning means having comprehensive risk assessments completed, student medical information readily accessible, permission notes collected and verified, emergency procedures documented, and all staff briefed on their roles and responsibilities. When these elements are missing or poorly managed, the risk profile of your activities increases exponentially.
The Real Cost of Inadequate School Excursion Risk Management
The reality is that if this skills gap is left unaddressed, this becomes a critical risk to every school and its leadership and something which could potentially sink you. If something like this ends up in court, on average, these sorts of cases take around six years to work their way through the system. That's six years of highly combative emotional trauma for school leaders, the staff who were on the program and the families involved. But we know the cost is always greater than that on so many levels.
The Solution: Better Systems and Training for Managing School Trip Risk
As an educator, activities outside the classroom have always been a huge part of my work and the benefits to a student's overall educational experience can be phenomenal. I never want to see these great programs which schools run cut back or cancelled due to fears that they're too risky. If staff are untrained in risk management outside the classroom, I would agree they are too risky and shouldn't be run. However, the fix for this is that with specific training and support in excursion risk management for those same staff, the risk profile of all these activities changes dramatically.
But training alone isn't enough. Schools also need robust systems for managing the logistics of school excursions from permission notes and student medical information to risk assessments and emergency contacts. When you combine well-trained staff with proper planning tools and systems, school trips can form some of the most amazing educational experiences which are memorable for all the right reasons.
The question isn't whether to run excursions and activities outside the classroom. The question is: do you have the right training, systems, and tools in place to manage school excursion risk effectively and keep your students protected?
