School visits abroad – Lessons for a trouble-free trip
You may think that you’re thoroughly prepared for that upcoming foreign excursion, but you can never be too careful, counsels Daniel Harvey…
You’ve met with parents, secured the cover and made best friends with the rep from the travel company. Yes, the day of the foreign trip is finally here.
Having fixed your teeth in a rictus grin when responding to comments from non-teacher friends wishing you the best for your all-expenses-paid ‘holiday’, it’s now time to get serious.
What are those final oversights and pitfalls you should plan to avoid, so that everyone can come back safe, sound and, frankly, sane? Read on to find out…
1. Don’t forget your passport…
The mantra here is check, check and check again. It’s a good idea to request photocopies of pupils’ passport information pages – ideally much earlier, at the signing-up stage. That way, you can check they definitely have a valid passport with enough time remaining on it to meet the entry requirements of your chosen country.
It’s important to remember that post-Brexit rules now mean that passports have to be in date for a certain amount of time beyond your intended date of return. Follow gov.uk advice to the letter for a smooth entry and exit. Don’t forget that obtaining any necessary visas is up to parents, so make sure that you get in touch and inform them of this in good time. No visa equals no travel – and whether or not a pupil has one is largely beyond your control.
On the day of departure, don’t let pupils look after their own passports or boarding cards at any point, except when actually passing security, boarding the plane or entering passport control. If you do, you can pretty much guarantee that someone will lose theirs, resulting in a situation that will cause you to enter a whole world of administrative pain.
Count the passports out and count them back in – and then lock them securely in the accommodation’s safe while you’re away. Only return them to pupils after your final stop on the way home. Job done.
2. Don’t miss the plane
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when trying to move 40 Y8 students through a busy airport, you can expect a rate of progress that’s comparable to an NHS waiting list – and that’s before factoring in the multiple toilet stops. By comparison, herding cats is a breeze.
The thing to stress here is that your allocated ‘time buffer’ is liable to disappear quicker than the average free lesson, leaving you contemplating the very real horror that is Missing Your Plane.
Don’t scoff, dear reader. This is no urban teaching myth, but a lived reality for a …. close friend. It turns out that there is, in fact, a protocol for when you’ve missed your flight due to reasons outside of your control (e.g. slow passport queues, airport strikes, poor security procedures and so forth).
If faced with this situation, the first thing is to remain very calm. There will be a solution. Deploy your staff to look after and amuse the students while you and a trusted colleague go and sort out the hot mess that your school trip is rapidly turning into.
Check in with your school so they can deal with the inevitable parental hysteria, leaving you free to deal with the airline in an attempt to find a solution that works for your students. Don’t be fobbed off with their first offer and try to stick to your guns. Even the most cut-throat budget airline won’t want to be on the front page of tomorrow’s papers for abandoning your little dears.
3. Mind the gap!
Back at the planning stage, when you and your colleagues were excitedly leafing through Lonely Planet guides, using public transport like the locals seemed like a great idea. Return tickets all round!
However, the practical reality of this is somewhat stark, since shepherding children on and off buses, trains and metro lines can be a hair-raising experience. Firstly, just as Sartre promised, hell really is other people. Every member of the public who uses the metro, in fact – blithely going about their business while paying no heed at all to your Very Important School Trip.
How dare they get in the way! Why are they all boarding the train at the same time as you? Don’t they understand that Kian (who gets cross very easily) won’t have a seat?
But here’s the thing – of course they don’t care. Public transport isn’t your playground, and the general public are obviously under no obligation to make your life any easier while they go about their entirely legitimate daily business.
If you must use the metro, tram, bus or train, divide the students into small groups, each with an adult in charge. Make sure each group leader knows where they’re going and brief the students as well, in case the doors shut before everyone manages to get on.
Your risk planning should always include a ‘What if?’ component in the event of worst-case scenarios. Ensure that your in-group communication is strong, see that all students have saved the relevant emergency contact numbers into their phones, and make they know what to do if things go awry.
Finally, if you’re leading a coach trip, enjoy the bliss that comes with having everyone accounted for and sat down with their seatbelts on at the end of a day’s sightseeing. The trip back to the hotel will give you some time to recharge your batteries while everyone is safe. Which brings us to…
4. 1,2,3,4 … 1,2,3,4!
People often assume that school trips abroad tend to involve heavy input and support from the MFL department, but it’s actually numeracy that most frequently saves the day – specifically, the ability to count.
Every adult on your trip should be au fait with the ‘Magic Number’– that is, the number of children you’re taking with you. Count them everywhere you go – onto the coach; off the coach; into the museum; out of the museum, and so on.
Split the whole group into smaller registration groups, each with a teacher in charge. Eight is a good number, as it’s possible to tally the count quickly, remember everyone’s name and take a register at speed, if needed.
If travelling by coach, instruct pupils to always sit in the same seats – this makes it easy to see if someone’s missing. Make the students active participants in looking out for each other, and tell them until you’re blue in the face to NEVER leave anyone on their own.
And of course, when preparing to leave a location and travel elsewhere, make sure two people do the final counts and check that both numbers tally.
There’s a now legendary tale of how the UK coastguard were once scrambled to attend to a suspected ‘child overboard’ situation, while the pupil in question sat forlornly abandoned by his party at a French motorway services 100 miles to the south.
It may be an apocryphal story, but I don’t want to risk that ever happening to me. And you won’t want it happening to you, either…
Daniel Harvey is a GCSE and A Level science teacher and lead on behaviour, pastoral and school culture at an inner-city academy
