Trip anxiety – How to put students and parents at ease

by Daniel Harvey

Digital learning director, behaviour, pastoral care & school culture lead

Share

Despite the clear benefits, some young people find the challenges of a residential visit away from home simply too much. Trip anxiety affects them so much that they don’t want to take part.

Here are some steps you can undertake before your residential to support and reassure all participants that the trip will become a highlight of their school experience.

By following these steps, you can make sure that your school trips are inclusive. You can also ensure that students can better understand how to overcome their anxieties when away from home.

Support for trip anxiety

All schools naturally want their trips to be inclusive to all students. I can barely recall any cases in which students were effectively excluded from participating in a trip from the outset.

At my own school, this has only ever happened once, after key staff assessed a student’s behaviour. They concluded that their standards of behaviour couldn’t be relied upon when away from the familiar school environment and their parents.

For many students affected by mental health or anxiety issues, however, going on a residential trip could actually be an excellent way for them to achieve some notable successes.

The following can all go a long way towards helping participants make suitable preparations:

• Careful staff selection
• Consistent communication with parents and students
• Clarity as to the activities and demands that the trip will involve

Occasionally, it might be necessary to organise separate meetings with certain parents and their children. This is so that they can build up sufficient trust and confidence in the idea of being away from home, and potentially facing some deep-seated worries.

Trip leaders should actively liaise with colleagues overseeing safeguarding and wellbeing so that a clear understanding can be built of different students’ needs. What provisions might help them when they’re away from home?

At the same time, those colleagues can also be telling the students they work with about the various benefits and upsides of going on such trips.

These strategies and recommendations can then be shared with parents and students ahead of time.

Pre-trip activities

Ski trips in particular can often benefit from pre-trip activities that will help students to prepare. A visit to your nearest snow dome will give students some first-hand experience of the temperatures they can expect once they’re there. They can also attempt some practice skiing and potentially build up their confidence.

Similarly, if the trip will entail some significant physical challenges – such as climbing or abseiling – try to organise some practice sessions based around those disciplines with the help of a local provider.

Liasing with the activity centre

It’s extremely important that you get to know the staff at the centre you’ve chosen for the residential and their preferred ways of working.

My school has been organising regular trips to the same centre in North Herefordshire for some time. This means that there are now excellent lines of communication between the centre and our trip leaders.

We’ll give the centre prior knowledge of students’ abilities before each trip. This is so that the staff there can build a bespoke set of activities.

Under some circumstances, they can even provide a small group of students with specific challenges just for them.

Working with the right people always makes a huge difference. Look for centres where staff get to know their guests well. This means they’ll be able to adapt their work to better support the specific needs that some students will have.

What if things go wrong?

Just as you would for any activity that’s planned in advance, make sure you know what you’re going to do if things don’t work out. Share those contingency plans with the staff you’ll be taking with you.

This will help staff feel less anxious and more confident at the prospect of having to deal with such situations.

For students receiving regular support from school staff, knowing that phone calls can be made to key support staff – trained individuals already familiar to them – will give them welcome peace of mind.

Planned contact with home

Organising any school visit or residential should always include clearly outlining to parents how and when students will be able use mobile phones.

For example, one secondary school local to us that runs a regular Y7 residential outward-bound trip decided that students would be only be able to use their phones on the trip between 6pm and 7pm each evening.

More anti-anxiety trip strategies

• Be clear as to the benefits of outward-bound trips for students’ mental health, self-esteem and confidence levels. Relay these to the students themselves and their families.
• Before the trip, discuss how specific wellbeing and mental health goals can be achieved with centre staff. The best teams will build time for personal reflection and achievement recognition into your itinerary.
• Know your students before travelling. Speak to parents and school staff to gain a good understanding of who might be affected by anxiety during the visit.
• Plan specific strategies for those most likely to be worried or anxious. Share these in advance with students, families and centre staff.
• Maintain a positive and supportive culture while you’re away, so that students can meet the challenges planned for them.
• Devise a clear and consistent policy around smartphone use during the trip, and then stick to it.

Daniel Harvey is a GCSE and A Level science teacher. He leads on behaviour, pastoral and school culture at an inner city academy.