Are School Trips Really Worth It?

Schools have been feeling their way back to normality through the gradual easing of lockdown restrictions here in the UK, but one thing that most teachers have left for September (i.e. indeterminate future planning) is the educational visit. TENsquared spoke to a group of teachers about the value of school trips, the challenges faced delivering them and whether these blockers are really just a Covid blip…

Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:School_trips.jpg

Why do teachers bother with school trips?

With what is to come in this piece, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that educational visits are the bane of a teacher’s life, more hassle than they’re worth. Yet from my own experience, and talking to teachers about this, school trips are definitely not just for the kids. Similar to the push for the mastery of maths, seeing children out in the real world, experiencing learning in a tangible, joyous manner wipes (most of) the memories of collecting permission slips and sorting adult volunteers. Yet is it becoming more difficult to take children out of school, or is this just a repercussion of a global pandemic? We’ve picked out five factors that cause teachers a challenge to leave the classroom.

Outside Influences

Though academies might well be the order of the day, local authorities seem to still be holding onto a vestige of power when it comes to educational visits. Be it through sweeping bans on visits, the signing off on risk assessments or actually opening up venues, bureaucracy beyond schools can be a real blocker for teachers. This one does feel like a fairly temporary challenge though.

Planning Ahead

For many teachers, their planning process is pretty ad hoc. Yes, you have that fairly broad long term overview, and maybe some hopeful ambition to recycle last year’s planning, but in reality, the needs of this year’s cohort means that you’d be lucky to know what next week looks like. Yet when it comes to educational visits, we heard how these need to be signed and sealed by September in order to confirm places and drive down the cost. In many cases, planning and even the choice of learning content is based around the availability of the local museum, rather than the needs of the children. Residential visits only exacerbate this; as these tend to be booked in for years at a go, you end up with these ‘expected events’ that happen in certain year groups. Great for something that children wouldn’t experience otherwise, but when this trickles down to ‘Year two’s trip into town to count the traffic’, well, something’s amiss. I wonder how many teachers have mastered the art of the spontaneous school trip?

A Lack of Teaching

Following on from the idea that some educational visits just become a marker in the school’s calendar is understanding just how valuable the learning experience is that they bring. Some school trips far outlive the time that a teacher spends in a year group, or even at a school. In many cases, it could easily be mentioned in the interview, such is the trip ingrained into the fabric of the school. This is no big deal if the visit continually adds value to the learning, but if the teacher is contributing little to the organisation of the trip, then surely the value of taking children out of school is drastically reduced? Worse still, situations where teachers are having to entertain long-established visits mean they’re having to reduce the quality of their teaching just to accommodate them.

The focus group did highlight that some of the best trips planned were those that still enabled the teachers to teach. Simple visits to parks, where the activities were led by the team that planned them resulted in some deeply satisfying outcomes. Yes, a good visit can spark some high-quality work back in the classroom, but shouldn’t a successful school trip be able to deliver outcomes out in the proverbial field?

Parental Justification

A fundamental problem identified with trips that has been thrown into sharper relief during these times of pandemic has been the support of parents. The idea of an educational visit is fine, when it requires little more than the signing of a consent form. But that’s rarely the case. Accommodating earlier starts and later finishes can be seen as an avoidable nuisance in the daily routine of families, as can the requirement of a packed lunch — especially when parents give into reminiscence and construct a box with triple the amount of food (and sugar/salt content) than they would normally send their child to school with. Those changes to routine only reinforce the frustration brought about by the cost of the trip. So conscious of this are schools that in many cases, visits only happen once a year so as not to upset the applecart. Keeping the costs low by staying local opens up a school to cries of ‘they went there with us, only last month!’ or ‘it didn’t cost that much when we went’. Trying to find the sweet spot by adding additional value through attending workshops, without driving the cost up too far, or ceding too much pedagogical control is sometimes just too fine a balance for teachers to deal with, on top of everything else.

Transport

Last, but by no means least; a pain that has become truly unbearable post-lockdown: transport. Planning, booking, paying for and the actual act of travelling — there is no element of this process that is simple or enjoyable. More often than not, the whole trip has to be organised around the availability of transport. Going after the buses have finished the school run and returning before they head out again in the afternoon cuts down the length (and therefore distance) of any trip. Going further afield is prohibited by the increased cost. In the hopes of saving a few quid (and guaranteeing availability) schools will often block-book transport in September, removing any hope of spontaneity born out of a class’ interest in a topic. Even the travelling itself is harrowing; armed with sick buckets and the fear-of-god installed by the ardent bus driver, the teacher prays for a forgettable journey with no breakdowns or loo stops. It wouldn’t surprise me if the teachers welcome their destination just for a chance to take a breath. With so much energy exhausted on simply getting to the location, summoning the levels of energy required to enthusiastically talk about whatever historical diorama lies in wait for the class will in many cases, seem a task too far.

Yet, with all these hurdles to jump, teachers and their schools are still keen to get involved in the faff of an educational visit. In fact, most teachers would actively do more, a lot more, of them, if some of the barriers could be easily navigated. That suggests to me then that schools, teachers, educators have found solutions to some, if not all of these challenges. I wonder whether we can collectively bring enough of these solutions together to design and deliver the perfect school trip…