What is the value of school trips? Is there one?

What is the value of school trips ?

If there is a value to school trips, then what is it? How do you measure the educational and developmental value of a school trip in a meaningful way? It’s a bit like trying to nail a raindrop to a wall…

In the coming weeks school budgets will be squeezed tighter; teachers will be asked to cut the cake into smaller slices and, it would seem, spend the same pound twice. Parents will face higher costs of living across the board. In this environment, school trips stand to be victims of a reduction in disposable income, reduced access to lower funding and a lack of school staff to cover both the classroom and ratios on a trip (a good discussion on this was held yesterday on Radio 5 Live).

As our costs of delivery rise, the spending power of a large part of our client-base declines. How do we add value to an experience whose value is hard to define?

1) Understand your value proposition more clearly.

We need to make more tangible arguments about the value of trips. Resilience, Teambuilding and Gaining Confidence are genuinely important outcomes but can easily become jargon to disguise a lack of genuine purpose. They roll easily off the tongue yet are ineffective arguments for pushing a school trip up the agenda in a highly cost-wary environment.

Instead, add value by linking your proposition clearly and simply to current issues or tangible outcomes – not just the curriculum. Tim Gill’s “Nothing Ventured…” is still relevant in talking about how we teach children to manage risk but remains largely under-utilised as a start point for lessons and sessions - it remains one of the most tangible start points for a genuine learning experience on every residential - more so now than ever.

Could school groups find ways to make your operation more sustainable? Might they develop and then participate in local conservation on your site? Is climbing really an informal biomechanics lesson? Are mealtimes merely a feeding break driven by food / staffing costs or an opportunity for nutrition, supply-chain knowledge and waste management?

The best operators do this already but I’d argue that most of us don’t maximize our potential in this regard. We need to try to and we need to tell schools about it. Measure the educational value of school trips more explicitly and more specifically.

2) Empower your staff

Training is an integral part of our industry but does it empower staff to provide high quality learning or merely a fun but safe session? Is there anything wrong with that? The level of staff empowerment and engagement in your organisation is one measure of the value your school trip can provide.

Pedagogy matters and doesn't require big investment or clever tricks. Spending thought instead of money is often fruitful, so naming the word out loud and pushing it to become part of the everyday vernacular of school trip providers adds huge value to every session delivered. Furthermore, it adds huge value to the toolkit of every employee, from senior manager to first-time seasonal instructor. Good instructors instinctively include elements of pedagogy, but naming it, actually using the word, empowers it further and provides an easy-win route for Continual Professional Development aimed at all staff.

A good concept is “Psychological safety” as it's something that isn’t discussed explicitly enough in most workplaces; if we want to empower our teams, then we should focus on our managers and anybody in a leadership position – including ourselves. Letting somebody feel like they can be themselves, have an opinion without being victimised or included despite a different point of view is a hard culture to create, but worth it. It's more than simply making people feel valued and translates directly to quality of delivery. Culture, as they say, eats strategy - so spend time on getting organisational culture right. It will add intrinsic value to school trips at low cost. Here’s a good place to understand it: psychological safety. Improve your ability to empower people more effectively.

3) Change your Risk Assessments to Risk Benefit Assessments.

This is an easy way to push point 1 by acting on point 2: giving teachers the tools to make different kinds of arguments to purse-holders. Choosing to continue with a residential visit or school trip means a teacher somewhere is championing you, us and the value of trips in general. That teacher will have to convince unseen and numerous others who are assessing where best to spend their money in difficult times.

Highlighting the benefits of each, individual activity alongside your measures to mitigate risks is a good way to encourage a constructive mindset to undertaking positive actions in hardship. We need to say explicitly why it's worth taking the risk. Dynamic Benefit Assessment should be a thing we teach alongside Dynamic Risk Assessment. The whole point of delivering excellent residentials is to actively identify and manage specific benefits, not just risks - this adds value to school trips.

The value of school trips is hard to crystallise without recourse to meaningless jargon and either pithy or “cheesy” analogies; a week in the woods cannot have the same, measured impact as 468 weeks of schooling between ages 4 and 16. That's true - but I think there's another way of looking at it.

In a largely academic framework, a residential trip stands out in stark contrast on every level imaginable.

It’s an unprecedented focus for each group of children that creates collective and individual hopes and fears beforehand. It provokes ongoing community-forming discussion afterwards. It challenges hitherto established social hierarchies by allowing children and teachers alike to observe and engage each other in a different environment with different rules. It’s a first taste of freedom for children and a first taste of letting go for many parents. For most, it is literally their first journey of self-discovery.

Various cultures around the world have rites of passage whereby children become adults – whether it’s walking alone in the wilderness or completing a first hunt successfully. In all cases it involves first steps away from a family or community nest. Residential school trips in the United Kingdom are the nearest most children get to something equivalent. Quite simply, they leave a mark – and the act of leaving that mark is of more value than measuring exactly what that mark is.

I believe that school trips and residential visits have a unique anthropological value and play a powerful anthropological role within our society – one that’s hard to replicate in our highly-sanitised, western-world.

Ultimately, trying to nail a raindrop to the wall is futile: you can't do it and nobody remembers the tiny raindrop! But when you look at the wall afterwards, you can see clearly the path it left in its wake.