Outer limits

Learning outside the classroom is an important part of children’s educational experience and a key part of this is taking pupils to a residential outdoor education centre. Jake Anders and Bill Brown outline key considerations to assess the quality of the centre

Organising a trip to an outdoor education centre should involve two elements: choosing a centre which offers a high level of educational value, tailored to your school’s needs and ensuring high standards in welfare, health and safety. It is also important that visits to outdoor education centres have an important emphasis on the middle word of this descriptor. There is a temptation to view them as a break from school life, but they should also be integrated into the curriculum.

The best centres deliver a tailor-made programme of activities that suits the educational needs of your school, fitting into your curriculum and reinforcing the work being undertaken in the classroom. Just as importantly, such centres will be able to use their knowledge of the activities on offer, the skills they help develop, and the relevant curricula, to work with you to produce documentation justifying the activity programme on educational grounds.

Furthermore, educational value should be in no way sacrificed where activities have to be substituted due to inclement weather. Alternative wet weather plans should always be offered by centres and offer just as much educational value, in the same curriculum areas, as the first-choice activities planned.

Up to scratch
The centre should be able to demonstrate that it is following comprehensive and up-to-date safeguarding children, child protection and safer recruitment procedures. All centres should be happy to discuss these procedures and reassure you of how they fit in with your school’s responsibilities, which continue even when working with another provider. Many centres are now going far beyond the minimum standards required of them to fit into a framework more like those faced by schools, undertaking management systems such as the single central record of all staff.

Most activities will have some element of risk and is an inherent, unavoidable part of many adventurous activities. There is, then, even more of a focus on minimising this risk where possible through high-quality risk assessment, monitoring and supervision. These risk assessments should be written by experts in the individual activities and created bespoke to each centre and each activity, not simply as a reliance on generic risk assessments written and distributed from a centralised structure: such a system simply cannot cater for the nuances of each installation. Centres should be happy to discuss with you all their health and safety management procedures to reassure you that they are complying with relevant legislation and best practice.

Additionally, schools should ask for details of external verification of the health and safety procedures, working practices and other relevant operating policies. Such external verifications may come from many sources and schools should consider precisely what each one verifies rather than seeing a single accreditation and assuming it covers everything. It is also worth checking if your local authority has inspected a centre and given it a positive report.

A close eye
Schools should also check what levels of supervision and monitoring centres consider appropriate. This covers two levels. First, ensuring children are supervised at what school risk assessments would consider an appropriate instructor to child ratio. Second, since instructors are often only young adults themselves, there should be clear monitoring and mentoring programmes to reinforce the training and assessment process.

Consider also other responsibilities you as schools face when deciding upon a centre. To ensure you are meeting any obligations under the healthy schools agenda you should be considering whether such requirements are still met on your outdoor education visits: ask about the catering, not just in terms of hygiene standards but also if thought has been given to providing well-balanced meals.

Ask about aspects of the visit which many forget. These often include the standards of the accommodation, checking when it was most recently refurbished; and policies on behaviour management and security.

As part of selecting a centre and preparing for the visit, members of staff should visit the centre, both as part of specific staff visiting days where these are offered, and when the centre is operating as each of these will give quite different insights into the centre. Firstly, specifically designed pre-visit days, now offered by many centres, allow several benefits to members of staff. It also offers the chance to get directly involved in the available activities and try them out. In addition, it gives opportunities to meet the centre staff and management to assess their attitudes towards safeguarding, welfare and outdoor education in general. Along with this, such a visit gives a chance to assess claims made by the centre on details such as standards of accommodation, catering and similar.

Meanwhile, visiting a centre on a usual working day is the only way to get a feel of how things run on a day-to-day basis. It is also important to ask the centre if they can provide testimonials from previous clients.

Undertaking these recommendations may seem like a large investment of time and effort to make, the fact of doing so will reassure you that a visit to a centre will be a safe and rewarding experience for your pupils.

Bill Brown and Jake Anders are, respectively, chairman and lead researcher at The Education Partnership (www.theeducationpartnership.org.uk). 

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