Government promotes safer school trips

Teachers will find it easier to take pupils on school trips with more help and advice, less bureaucracy and quality badges for popular destinations, according to the Department of Children, Schools and Families who have just launched the ‘Staying Safe’ Action Plan on school trips.  

The government stresses the fact that it believes that learning outside of the classroom brings benefits to pupils such as deeper subject learning, increased self confidence and raised achievement. It can also help young people to understand and manage risk. The new guidance, they say, makes it much easier for teachers to take their pupils out of the classroom.

Organisations that host school or other youth group visits such as museums, historic houses, field study centres and farms will be encouraged to qualify for quality ‘badges’, which will help teachers identify places that provide high quality learning outside of the classroom, and are managing safety effectively. This will help reduce the bureaucratic burden of risk assessment on teachers.

The measure was included in the ‘Staying Safe’ Action Plan, launched by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. New measures outlined in the report include: • A new Child Safety Education coalition

• New guidance for professionals on bullying in non school settings like children’s homes and FE colleges
• New guidance on safeguarding and on protecting children with disabilities or special educational needs from bullying
• A new safeguarding unit for the Third Sector
• New guidance on child employment
• New guidance on cross-border issues
• Publish research on joint working between children’s and housing services (with the Department for Communities and Local Government)
• Publish a review of safety education materials for Personal, Social and Health Education
• Carry out a Priority Review of local area accident prevention
• Put forward safeguarding theme for the local authority beacon award scheme The Out and About guidance on school visits will be available from May 2008 and the quality badge in September 2008.

The new ‘Staying Safe’ action plan sets out how government will deliver the new Public Service Agreement on improving children and young people’s safety. The Departmental commitment to this was confirmed in the Children’s Plan, which was launched in December 2007.

The plan reflects the cross government nature of the Public Service Agreement and includes plans and actions for a number of departments including: Home Office, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, Department of Health, Department for Transport, Department for Communities and Local Government, Ministry of Justice.The Staying Safe Action Plan is available at http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/stayingsafe/

The Children’s Plan is available from http://www.dcsf.gov.uk The Out and About guidance will build on the widely-used, long-standing Health and Safety Of Pupils on Educational Visits; it will emphasise the enabling effect of sensible risk management as advocated by the Health and Safety Executive and others. No more than three A4 forms should be necessary for most off-site visits.The badge scheme is voluntary.

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Tony Attwood

This entry was posted on 11/02/2008 at 01:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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