Spotlight – learning outside the classroom
School trips have been surrounded by a
growing culture of anxiety about safety. However, few would deny
that learning outside the classroom is crucially important to a
sound education for children.
A safe, indoor space dedicated solely to supervised education
sounds like an ideal learning environment. But if there’s one thing
we can guarantee about life both before and after leaving school,
it’s that it will be full of unexpected and sometimes risk-laden
situations, and pupils need to learn how to handle these.
Experiences outside the classroom are vital to teaching our
children how to deal safely with risk. But over recent years,
schools trips have been surrounded by a growing culture of anxiety.
There’s anxiety about how safe each experience will be, about how
to risk assess each activity, about the likelihood of litigation,
and about being held personally responsible if something goes
wrong. And in some cases, that anxiety leads to a reluctance to
organise any school trips – with pupils losing out on valuable
educational experiences.
“On balance, we’re not doing enough to let young people
experience risk,” says Judith Hackitt, Chair of the HSE. “These
young people will one day enter the world of work, and if they come
into it completely risk-naïve, with no experience of how to deal
with risk, they’re going to get hurt in the workplace. They’ve got
to learn about risk while they’re at school, and it’s got to be one
of the life skills that form an important part of their education.
If children are exposed to risk and taught how to behave around
risk, they will learn how to deal with it and become safer because
of it.”
The Learning Outside the Classroom
website, supported by the Department for Education, makes clear
that “all young people should experience learning outside the
classroom and its benefits, not as a bolt-on to learning but as a
central aspect of their learning experience.”
That learning experience includes an endless range of
possibilities. Activities can take place indoors or outdoors, in
the countryside or the city, and at premises such as youth centres,
workplaces, religious institutions, sports centres or parks. The
HSE estimates that around 30 million people take part in outdoor
activities every year, and seven to 10 million days are used for
school trips across the UK. But it’s also widely acknowledged that
many pupils could be learning more from trips outside the
classroom.
Clearer guidance needed
In 2009, the Countryside Alliance Foundation (TCAF) commissioned
the National Foundation for Educational Research to include
questions in its Teacher Voice survey. Of the 1,400 teachers
surveyed, 97 per cent thought it was important for pupils to learn
about the countryside within the National Curriculum. However, 49
per cent said that “fear of litigation in the unlikely event of an
accident” was a major barrier to organising school trips to the
countryside, and 76 per cent cited “concerns about health and
safety”.
Further research by TCAF found little basis for these concerns.
To find out more about litigation resulting from school trips, TCAF
requested information from local authorities under the Freedom of
Information Act. It got responses from 138 local authorities,
relating to school trips in the 10 years between 1998 and 2008. Of
these, only 364 had led to legal action, and schools had been found
culpable and ordered to pay compensation in fewer than half of the
cases. Compensation amounted to £404,952 – or £293.44 per year, per
local authority. So why is there so much room for
misunderstanding?
One problem is that, with such a variety of activities on offer
for school trips, many teachers don’t feel confident conducting
risk assessments. Before taking up her responsibilities as manager
of human resources and health and safety at the Wildlife Trust for
Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Peterborough
(BCNP), Su Jenkins worked on the organisation’s educational
projects, which include forest schools and countryside classrooms.
“Health and safety responsibility often falls to head teachers and
school secretaries,” she says. “Many of them don’t feel they have
the experience to conduct an effective risk assessment, or they’re
receiving confused messages about safety. Unfortunately, in some
cases that means it’s tempting for them to simply minimise the
number and variety of school trips.”
Su tells the story of a conversation she once had with a teacher
about a proposed pond dipping trip for pupils. “The teacher called
me to ask me about my qualifications,” she says. “I asked her
whether she meant my safety qualifications – which were more
relevant to the situation – but she said that she needed to know my
academic ones, because she’d been told by the local council that
pond dipping was a high-risk activity and that she must know these
details.”
Su asked the council for clarification, and was told that they
certainly didn’t see pond dipping as a high risk activity –
particularly when supervised by the experienced staff at the
Wildlife Trusts centre. “It was a genuine misunderstanding, but it
underlined how confusing the issue of risk can be for teachers, as
well as the need for better communication between the council and
its schools,” she says.
It’s clear that there’s a great deal of confusion among school
staff when it comes to organising school trips, and clearer
guidance is needed.
Taking the fear out of risk assessment
Risk assessing a school visit doesn’t have to be a nightmare –
but some school staff don’t know that yet. “I think teachers are
badly advised,” said Judith Hackitt. “One of the things we’re
trying to do in HSE is get better advice to teachers. The risk
assessment is a good example. It doesn’t have to be 18 pages. If
you look on our website at some example risk assessments –
including ones for schools – they’re pretty simple documents, and
we say that’s good enough. We need to be clear what the rules are,
because there are a lot of myths about rules that don’t exist.”
According to the HSE, risk assessments should “provide the
fundamental intelligence on the hazards, risks and precautions for
carrying out an activity.” That might seem a pretty wide remit, but
it looks much more manageable once it’s broken down. For example,
the HSE says that the overall risk assessment for an adventure
activity would need to cover:
- generic risk assessment – the risks inherent in the
activity
- site-specific risk assessment – the risks associated with the
site
- dynamic risk assessment – the risks occurring at the time.
As long as they’re reviewed regularly to take into account any
changes in the activity or site, the first two elements of that
list can be done fairly far in advance. In fact, many centres that
provide learning outside the classroom already have generic and
site-specific risk assessments prepared for each of their
activities. Using these as a foundation, teachers can focus on
planning for dynamic risk management, including everything from
possible transport issues to changes in the weather or a child
being taken ill.
“We do risk assessments nearly every day,” Su explained to
Connect recently, following our visit to a busy family day at the
Wildlife Trust BCNP’s Ramsey Heights countryside classroom. “We
know the risks of our various activities, but we also have to
consider factors like the weather and the needs and abilities of
different groups. One day we might have a group of young children
visiting, and the next it could be adults with learning
difficulties. We also take into account how different backgrounds
and cultures might affect people’s learning needs – for example, if
you live in the UK you might take it for granted that plants such
as nettles can sting you, but if this was your first visit to the
country, it might also be the first time you’ve come across
them.”
The HSE website provides guidance
on risk assessments, and lists 10 ‘vital
questions’ that it says everyone, from parents to teachers to
school governors, should ask about an off-site visit. These
questions stress the need for forward planning, including the main
objectives of the visit and a “Plan B” in case these can’t be
achieved. There’s also a focus on communication, including
providing information for parents and giving them a chance to ask
questions, as well as arrangements for the visit itself.
IOSH believes that learning outside the classroom is essential
if today’s children are to become the confident, risk-intelligent
adults of tomorrow. It’s crucial that we educate children about how
to manage risk, and to do that we need clear, simple guidance to
encourage school staff and parents to embrace learning outside the
classroom.
We recently welcomed the opportunity to contribute to Health and
Safety Outside the Classroom (HASLOC), guidance which sets out a
new framework for schools, children’s services and employers when
organising and carrying out learning outside the classroom
activities. HASLOC aims to replace a range of previously published
documents with accessible guidance, including new materials that
weren’t available before. Work on HASLOC is still in progress, and
it’s important to get it right if the guidance is to achieve its
goals of reducing red tape, introducing sensible risk management,
and providing legal assurance about the fair treatment of staff if
anyone is injured despite their care.
Toward a risk-intelligent society
To get the best from learning outside the classroom, we need to
engage parents and pupils in thinking about risk. Teachers aren’t
the only decision makers here. Parents are often unsure about the
safety of proposed trips, and if they can’t be convinced, they
simply won’t allow their children to take part.
Many parents will have seen high-profile media coverage of
tragedies on school trips. They might not understand how rarely
this happens, or the measures that are now in place to make sure it
doesn’t happen again. By involving parents in the planning stages
of school trips, we can help them understand why the benefits
outweigh the risks – and that learning to manage those risks is
itself a huge benefit.
Learning outside the classroom embraces endless possibilities
for activities to be enjoyed, risks to be addressed, and lessons to
be learned. But one thing all these activities have in common is
that they teach pupils to deal with life outside school – whether
at work or in their leisure activities. It makes sense, then, to
involve pupils in preparing for those experiences by thinking about
their own safety at the risk assessment stage – in other words, to
begin outside-the-classroom experiences with preparation inside the
classroom.
IOSH’s free Workplace Hazard Awareness Course
(WHAC) for Year 10 pupils is one way to achieve this. Focused
on the management of workplace risks, WHAC encourages pupils to
think about a range of activities – including some of the things
they already do for fun – and translate their risk intelligence
from those activities to the workplace.
“It’s about working with kids and with their parents,” added
Judith Hackitt. “My experience with my girls when they were at
school was that the parents were involved in the decisions before
they went on the trip – ‘this is what’s going to happen, this is
what we can do, this is what we can’t do, we can’t make any
guarantees’ – and if you have that conversation before the fact,
you don’t get into these horrible messes where you get into
litigation and so on, because you have a good understanding of the
real exposure that they’re going to find, and what the benefits
will be. That’s what we need more of.”
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