School trips are one of the most valuable things any school can do. Whether it's a quick visit to the local court, a week-long camp or an international tour, learning outside the classroom builds skills, confidence and memories that no worksheet ever will. However, the moment you step outside the school gates, you take on a significantly higher duty of care, often with fewer resources and far more variables than you'd ever face in a classroom. Until recently, how well schools managed this was largely left up to a patchwork of local guidelines, generic policies and, in far too many cases, plain old good luck. As I've said many times before, relying on good luck as a risk management strategy is idiotic.
That's where ISO 31031 comes in.
The Standard
ISO 31031:2024, Managing Risk for Youth and School Trips, is the international standard published in October 2024 by the International Organization for Standardization. It was developed by ISO's technical committee for risk management (ISO/TC 262), the same committee responsible for ISO 31000, the global benchmark for risk management, and ISO 31030, which covers travel risk management for organisations. In other words, this isn't a document dreamt up in isolation. It sits within a well-established family of international risk management standards and applies decades of collective expertise specifically to trips involving children and young people.
The standard provides practical guidance on managing risk for youth and school trips, covering both domestic and international travel, and everything from a half-day local excursion through to a multi-week overseas expedition. It gives specific attention to minors and their particular vulnerabilities, because as any experienced trip leader knows, kids are not just small adults. They have different needs, different risk profiles and they rely entirely on the adults around them to have done the planning properly.
One important point of scope: ISO 31031 defines 'youth' in line with the United Nations definition as anyone who has not yet reached their twenty-fifth birthday. So this isn't just a primary and secondary school standard. It's equally relevant to universities, gap year providers and any organisation running programs for young adults.
Who Does It Apply To?
The short answer is: if you take young people on trips, this standard applies to you. ISO 31031 is written for any organisation, institution or group that provides activities, visits or trips for children and youth outside their usual place of operation. That includes schools, colleges and universities, but also community youth groups such as scouts, guides and cadets, language colleges and summer schools, sports clubs, tour operators, adventure and expedition providers, and the third-party companies schools contract to run their programs.
That last group matters more than most people realise. A non-delegable duty of care means you cannot contract out your responsibility for student safety to a third party, no matter what the provider tells you or what's written in the agreement. If you're taking a group away, you and your school remain responsible for everything that happens. ISO 31031 now gives schools a clear, internationally recognised benchmark against which to conduct due diligence on providers, and gives providers a clear framework to demonstrate that their systems are genuinely up to scratch.
What Does It Actually Cover?
Unlike some standards which are broad, vague and about as useful as a chocolate teapot, ISO 31031 is highly specific and practical when it comes to trip planning and operations. It provides a structured approach to understanding the context of your organisation and each trip, identifying, assessing and treating travel risks, safeguarding children and young people (as well as the staff who accompany them), planning supervision, staffing and competency requirements, communicating with parents, students and other stakeholders, and preparing emergency response plans so that if something does go wrong, everyone knows their role and can respond swiftly and effectively.
What I like most about the standard is its emphasis on culture. One of the stated aims of ISO 31031 is to promote a culture where the risks involved in running trips for children and young people are taken seriously, resourced adequately and managed effectively. This has been my mantra for over two decades. Risk management is a cultural attitude within an organisation, not a check-box compliance process. You can have the most beautiful paperwork in the world, but if your staff haven't read it, don't understand it and can't implement it, all you've got is a well-formatted liability. Documentation and implementation must reflect each other, and ISO 31031 is built around exactly that principle.
Is It a Certification? Do We Have To Comply?
ISO 31031 is a guidance standard, which means it provides recommendations and a framework rather than a set of mandatory, auditable requirements. There's no legal obligation to adopt it, and no certificate to hang on the wall. However, don't let that lull you into thinking it doesn't matter.
Here's the practical reality. Now that an international standard exists for managing risk on youth and school trips, it becomes the benchmark. If a serious incident occurs on one of your programs, your planning, your risk assessments, your staff training and your emergency preparedness will inevitably be measured against recognised good practice, and ISO 31031 now defines what that looks like globally. Being able to demonstrate that your systems align with the international standard puts you in a strong, defensible position. Pleading ignorance, on the other hand, has never been much of a defence, and it certainly won't be now.
More importantly, though, this isn't about covering yourself legally. Following the standard means you've genuinely taken the most appropriate steps in planning and running your trips, which is the whole point. Well-managed trips mean fewer incidents, more confident staff, reassured parents and better experiences for your students. The legal protection is a by-product of doing things properly, not the goal.
What Should Schools Do Now?
Start by taking an honest look at what you currently have in place. Not what your policy documents say you have, but what actually happens when a teacher plans and runs a trip. Do your staff have any formal risk management training? Are your risk assessments living documents prepared by the people running the trip, or generic forms that get printed, signed and filed without anyone reading them? Do you have a genuine emergency response plan, and has anyone ever practised it?
From there, conduct a self-assessment against the key elements of the standard, then get hold of a copy of ISO 31031 itself and drill down deeper. For many schools with established programs and a strong safety culture, the standard will largely confirm what you're already doing and highlight the gaps worth closing. For schools that have been running on luck and recycled paperwork, it will be a wake-up call, and a very useful one, because it lays out a clear pathway to fix things before an incident forces the issue. There is absolutely no reason why it should take a critical incident to change the culture within an organisation, yet sadly it so often does.
This is exactly why we've built the Xcursion Planner platform and our ISO 31031 support and training around the standard: to turn it from a document on a shelf into practical, everyday planning, risk assessment and operational tools that any teacher can use. Whether you're running sport, cultural immersions, camps, history tours or overseas expeditions, aligning your systems with ISO 31031 means every trip goes out with prepared, confident and situationally aware staff.
School trips are inherently riskier than anything you do on site, but that's no reason to stop running them. It's a reason to run them well. ISO 31031 finally gives every school and youth organisation in the world a common framework for doing exactly that. Get started today with a self-assessment against the standard, build your systems and training around it, and keep giving your students the incredible experiences that only learning outside the classroom can provide.
