School excursions and trips are often enjoyable activities, that can provide a welcome break to a school’s normal routine for students and their teachers.

Whilst they might be fun for those involved, school trips and outside activities are becoming recognised as a key risk for schools. A recent survey on this site ranked school excursions among the top ten risks for schools in 2014.

The consequences of a serious accident or incident on a school trip can be traumatic for a school community and very damaging for the school involved.

A school will have less control of the risks posed to students outside school grounds, since most of them are outside its control. Nevertheless a school and its teachers still have a duty of care to take reasonable steps to protect students from injury on school trips. Even with the consent of parents, schools need to ensure that they address all of the foreseeable risks on a school trip.

So what can a school do to protect its students and itself?

Firstly, a school will need to develop a policy and a set of procedures that should be followed in order to help it manage the various risks associated with regular off-campus activities, day trips, overnight excursions and international/interstate trips.

The policy should outline a set of general principles to be followed in the planning of excursions in order to minimise the risks, such as the requirement for a management plan of each excursion to be completed beforehand. The management plan should identify the risks posed by the particular excursion and outline the strategies to mitigate each of the risks. Final approval of an excursion will only be granted by a Principal if they are satisfied the risks have been appropriately identified and addressed in a management plan.

Steps a school should take in developing an excursion management plan include:

• Consulting with students, staff, parents and external providers regarding the nature of the excursion and the potential hazards.
• Providing full details of the excursion to students and their parents/carers.
• Ensuring all students have suitable clothing and safety equipment for the excursion.
• Developing a supervision strategy and ensuring there are supervisors with appropriate skills and experience (including first aid).
• Ensuring there are appropriate emergency response procedures in place.
• Conducting due diligence on all external providers involved in an excursion to ensure their competence and compliance with WHS regulations.
• Requesting from parents/carers up-to-date details of any medical conditions which may provide a heightened risk to a student on an excursion.
• Ensuring the skills required for a particular activity are appropriate for a student's capacity.
• Ensuring appropriate insurance coverage is in place.

The management of excursions should include debriefings following school trips, where staff can outline areas of risks not previously considered which may be factored into future management plans. Schools should keep records from each school trip, from the management plan; names and contacts of students, staff and teacher in charge; contracts entered into with any third party organisations; risk assessments; and records of any incidents that may have occurred on an excursion.

Lending support to the argument for schools to have well-articulated risk management excursion plans and policies is some research conducted by La Trobe University Associate Professor Andrew Brookes on “Outdoor education fatalities in Australia”.

Brookes, who reviewed a range of incidents reported over a 42 year period where 128 students or staff died on school-related excursions or camps, noted: “These often harrowing accounts serve to emphasise that however unnecessary or ‘over the top’ fatality prevention may seem prior to a tragedy, in the aftermath of a tragedy what matters to those affected is whether the possibility of death could be foreseen, and whether it could have been prevented.”

The deaths Brookes reviewed included a suicide following a school camp, traffic accidents, fallen tree branches, drownings, hyperthermia and food-induced anaphylactic shock.

“There is no reason for outdoor education not to aspire to be the safest part of a school’s overall program,” he concluded.