The School Visits Market - Change or Decline?

The school market: how much it changed!

For a total of 15 years the author has worked as a full time teacher, first entering the profession in the late1970s. Thirty years on and schools are very different in the way they are organised, managed, financed, and in how and what they teach. These trends are clearly manifesting themselves in the dramatically changed attitude of teachers towards the educational visits which they organise.

Addressing the most important of these trends and their implications for the tourism and leisure industry in Britain is the focus of this article. The information presented here is derived both from personal experience of the author and many years of research into the travel patterns of schools and other institutions of higher education. These issues will be discussed here, in the context of the following societal trends:

• As British society is becoming increasingly litigious, teachers have grown more risk averse.
• The composition of the teaching profession has undergone significant transformation over the last 20 years.
• The attitude of parents towards the role of schools and teachers has also changed.
• The concept of that which constitutes a ‘good education’ is not only different but also more quantifiable, and the measurement of these results has implications for the job security of those who are responsible for them.
• The means through which young people can gain information about and perceptions of environments beyond their own has dramatically changed, to the point that ‘going there’ is not always a pre-requisite of learning about it.
• The majority of teachers retain a belief that learning beyond the classroom remains a good thing. This view is particularly strong among teachers working in schools in poorer areas.

The strategic importance of school visits to the tourism and leisure industry

The principal benefits of school visit organisation may be summarised as follows:

Day or part-day visits

These are most commonly made to visitor attractions and leisure facilities that benefit from:

• off-peak cash flow – seasonal in the case of visitor attractions and daily for leisure facilities, such as swimming baths and sports centres;
• fulfilment of an organisation’s chartered function – its educational role;
• an ill-defined and untested notion of seed corn marketing. [1]

Residential visits

Both domestic and overseas destinations benefit from these visits. The thriving outbound school travel market includes late-season ski trips during school holiday periods, exchange visits, and an increasing number of field study trips to destinations as widespread as Florence, the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, and the Nazi-era concentration camps.

At a domestic level, the primary beneficiaries of such visits are budget accommodation providers, field study centres, outdoor activity/adventure centres, and the local economies in which they are located. The extent to which visitor attractions benefit from these visits will depend on their willingness to be open at times when schools undertake them. This tends to be more common in urban/metropolitan areas of Britain.

The trends in school visit organisation

At this point it is important to return to the six trends identified in the first part of this article but to look at them from the teacher’s perspective:

• Teachers may want to organise visits but the events over the last decade have taught them that, in case of an accident, their promotion prospects may be jeopardised, their security of employment lost and, at worst, they may face imprisonment.
• Whatever else they might be, the majority of today’s teachers do not conform to the traditional hybrid of devoted community figure and self-sacrificing servant of the young.
• Increased parental influence in schools, such as parent governors, and greater freedom in selecting schools means that teachers’ activities could be challenged or rejected by the parent body.
• The performance of schools and their Local Education Authorities is increasingly monitored by central government bodies, such as the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and OFSTED. The first monitors the measurable outcomes of the educational process in individual schools with tests or examination results, the second examines schools’ teaching and organisational methods. When an OFSTED report puts a school in the ‘failing’ category, its teachers face future employment uncertainty, and an instant ‘stain’ on their curriculum vitae.
• The knowledge component of the National Curriculum can be gained through a range of means, access to many of which – text books, recorded TV programmes and Internet sites – is far less stressful and carries less risk than travelling away from the controlled environment of the school.
• But, the view of the majority of teachers remains – visits are a good thing to undertake. Moreover, many of them conclude that if they don’t carry them out – who will?

Legislative changes

Health and Safety Guidelines

In 1998, the DfES published Health and Safety of Pupils on Educational Visits, generally known as HASPEV. The document was, in part, a response to rising public concern following a series of accidents, involving pupils engaged in curriculum-related activities organised by their schools/colleges but outside their confines.

HASPEV was also a response to a rising concern within education regarding educational visits. At all times during the school day, teachers are acting in a loco parentis role and, therefore, have a professional responsibility for the health and safety of their pupils, a responsibility which applies wherever a school-organised activity takes place. Schools and Local Education Authorities also have a similar employer liability for the health and safety of their teacher employees.

HASPEV is, in effect, a Code of Practice in the organisation of educational visits of all types. Written in the form of advice to teachers, it was generally received as a timely and practical reminder of good practice. In 2002, a three-part supplement to HASPEV was produced with more detailed guidance to LEAs, teachers and other group organisers and to organisers of adventure activity visits. [2&3] Copies of these guidelines can be downloaded from www.teachernet.gov.uk/visits. [3] Note: this is not the case for schools in Wales, where the National Assembly Government has yet to publish any guidelines to schools in regard to the HASPEV document.

The spirit of HASPEV and its supplement is supportive of learning beyond the classroom and is a form of reassurance to teachers – if their visit organisation procedures meet its criteria then they are following good professional practice.

Impact of HASPEV on tourism operators

Status

Any tourism operator hosting a school visit for pupils under the age of 18 is now regarded as a sub-contractor to the school, supplying part of the educational programme. Businesses seeking such contractor status must, therefore, meet all Health & Safety requirements imposed upon schools. It is as if they have become part of the school for the duration of the visit.

There is no legal obligation on tourism operators to meet these requirements but failure to provide documented proof that they do so simply means that school governing bodies and LEAs are not in a position to sanction visits to them.

Risk assessment procedures

When a school organises a visit of any kind it must follow procedures laid out in HASPEV. Many of these are of an internal management nature, such as contact with parents, adequate briefing and preparation of pupils etc. A much larger component of the procedures involves risk assessment concerned with visits, and falls into the following three categories:

1. site/visit-specific – risks associated with the specific choice of destination for the visit, the journey to it, the characteristics of the pupils being taken on the visit and the visitor management procedures at the venue or destination;
2. generic – these risks vary depending on the nature of the activity undertaken at different destinations, eg a day visit to an art gallery as opposed to a day’s abseiling.
3. ongoing – these are the worst-case scenario risks (‘what happens if?’) and assessment of the likely effectiveness of the procedures in place to cope with them.

Site-specific risks

The operator has to provide proof that an assessment of the risks faced by any visitor in all aspects of the site or activity has been undertaken and risk management procedures implemented accordingly. Of particular concern to schools here are such factors as pedestrian movement through traffic congestion from drop off point to venue entry, and meeting points within the venue.

Teachers are required to make pre-visit inspections of any destination to which they are organising a visit for the first time, to assess the risks in regard to the individual character of the group they are planning to take there. The Profile, therefore, needs to supply details of when they might do this and what the programme for such an inspection will be.

Generic risks

The operator has to provide the proof that:

• the facilities at the site meet all the requirements of The Health and Safety Executive for use by the public and that all fire certificates are current,
• the site has adequate Public Liability Insurance,
• First Aid facilities are available and that emergency/accident procedures are clearly defined, known to all employees, and made available to teachers.

Ongoing risks

The operator has to provide evidence to show that there are functioning channels of communication between school group leaders and the site management throughout the duration of the visit and a line of communication between site management and the group’s school. (This is worst-case scenario provision – you host a visit of 15 pupils in a mini bus with two teachers accompanying them. An accident occurs which hospitalises both teachers. How do you get the children home?)

For the majority of tourism operators the provision of such a portfolio of evidence will mean little more than photocopying a collection of existing documents which are then supplied to the school. A sensible and low-cost practice already adopted by many operators – creation of a Pdf file attached to a website which can then be downloaded by the teacher organiser – is equally acceptable.

Visit co-ordination procedures

HASPEV suggests that it is good practice for all LEAs to have an outdoor education adviser (where outdoor should be read as ‘off site’), who takes responsibility for ensuring that visit organisation of all its schools is in line with both LEA policy and its own guidelines. In practice, this role has usually been allocated to an adviser with other, related, functions and is not a discrete post in itself.

Schools are encouraged to appoint an Educational Visits Co-ordinator (EVC), with a similar role within the school and a liaison function with its LEA. In practice, however, it has been attached to the job specification of a senior staff member, frequently the headteacher.

The teacher organising a visit, therefore, must supply the Risk Assessment Profile of the chosen destination to the school’s EVC in order to gain approval to proceed. Two factors need to be noted in regard to what is now a system of good practice in visit organisation:

• Whenever the DfES makes recommendations to LEAs and schools in regard to good practice, it always allows for local practice. There is, therefore, no one, common system, and procedures will vary across LEAs. Gaining what may be termed approved contractor status is not, therefore, about being on some magical list, held by all LEAs. It is much more a matter of knowing that you have the status because your business operation accords with the guidelines issued through HASPEV and you can readily supply proof to this effect.
• Outdoor education advisers at LEAs and EVCs in schools are not good targets for enthusiastic marketing officers in the tourism industry. Their task is not to sell individual businesses to their schools or teachers but to oversee a code of good professional practice, designed to ensure that the health and safety of pupils is not put in jeopardy when part of the education programme is put out to contract in the tourism and leisure industry.

Child protection legislation

While the first change to school visit organisation came in the form of a recommended Code of Practice, the second was a legal document – the 1999 Protection of Children Act. Issued in May 2002 by the DfES, Child Protection: Preventing Unsuitable People from working with children and young persons in the education service required that all adults having significant contact with pupils were to be vetted.

The consensus interpretation is that when children go on a school visit they are, in effect, still at school. Tourism and leisure businesses which host school parties must, therefore, consider which of their staff have contact with pupils, contact which could be described as significant, and then ensure that such staff have been vetted by the revised system. One of the truly heartening developments in recent years has been that of observing just how readily certain sectors of the tourism and leisure industry, notably adventure activities, welcomed the new procedures and worked quickly and hard to comply with them.

If a school is to visit any establishment where employed adults could have significant contact with pupils, then a Risk Assessment Profile must also include a statement that these adults have been vetted as suitable according to the new system. The meaning of ‘significant’ hasn’t yet been defined but some common sense guidelines suggest that RAP applies to the personnel at:

• visitor attractions/museums/theatres:
  • Education Officers – best regarded as teachers on a supply basis,
  • guides (paid or volunteer) who are in close proximity of pupils, whether or not a teacher is also present,
  • anyone who enters an area in which children need to change into costume,
  • cleaners who may be required to clean facilities during periods when they could be used by pupils.
• centres providing residential accommodation for schools
  • probably all staff, including cleaners, but with the possible exception of those working entirely in kitchens,
  • any ‘outreach’ staff who visit schools and make presentations to pupils.
• adventure activity centres/sports centres/swimming pools: clearly all instructors and, where accommodation is provided on site, the guidelines apply as for residential centres. Note, too, that the practice of arranging accommodation for schools for the duration of a residential stay at third party residential centres carries with it the responsibility to ensure that staff at such centres has been vetted as in the preceding guidelines.

Enhanced Disclosure – Criminal Records Bureau

Anyone working in the schools and colleges which educate young people has to obtain an Enhanced Disclosure statement from the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB). As schools sub-contract part of the education process out to tourism and leisure operators, their staff, subject to the guidelines above, must comply with this procedure. Application for a disclosure is made by the employer on behalf of employees and job applicants.

To apply for disclosures involves registration with the CRB and then a fee is charged per application. It is not necessary for small businesses to pay the registration fee. The CRB has made arrangements for certain registered users to become so-called ‘umbrella bodies’ who can make application on behalf of third parties. Details of such umbrella bodies can be obtained from the Disclosure Service website www.disclosure.gov.uk.

Changes to the parent-school contract

Today, an increasing proportion of pupils come from families in which both parents or the only parent work full time. A greater parental choice of school also means that pupils’ journey to and from school can be longer and more complex. Parents have to make secure provisions for their children for the school journey, and they are usually focused around the conventional times of a school day – broadly 08.30 – 15.45. They are not so willing or able as they once were to make changes to these arrangements to accommodate ex-curriculum school activities.

School day visits, in particular, are being affected by this. Time available within the day is restricted to 6 – 6.5 hours. Visits cost both parents and schools significant sums of money – the parents paying the lesser costs of entry fees and transport, whilst the school faces the disruption and increased teaching costs, considered in greater detail below. If that money is to be well spent, then the majority of the time must be in the environment considered worthy of visiting and not on Britain’s unpredictable motorway system.

The duration of journeys which schools are willing to make in order to make visits has fallen and journeys to the coastal or Celtic fringes have become less appealing. This has occurred at a time when Britain’s metropolitan areas, in or around which the majority of schools are located, have seen their economies shift away from manufacturing to service industries, such as tourism. Various forms of public sector funding have helped to preserve industrial heritage (a major curriculum topic at Key Stage 3), and aided the development of many new, high quality attractions with a marked emphasis on science and technology – two of the sacred cows of 21st-century government ambitions for education.

Impact on the tourism and leisure industry

There is little evidence to suggest that the average number of school day trips is falling. However, they are more likely to be taken locally and at easily reached destinations, rather than at those distant from the school. Given that the vast majority of schools are in urban conurbations, this means a redistribution of school visits away from rural in favour of urban locations.

This trend has different implications, therefore, according to location. It gives urban visitor attractions the opportunity to establish what can be termed as learning partnerships with schools in its immediate environment, of which there will be many. Such partnerships will not be developed through conventional, promotional advertising tactics but through business-to-business, direct and face-to-face contact with schools.

Such a contact has to be honest and expressed along the following lines: “I wish to become a sub-contractor to the educational process for which you are responsible. How best can I service a learning need which cannot be fulfilled by you within the confines of this school?” Such a contract can be developed by visitor attractions in rural areas but the potential business benefits are smaller. In many rural areas of Britain, the plethora of visitor attractions results in an attraction to school ratio as low as 1:5. Clearly, too, for the providers of residential accommodation, field study centres and activity pursuits, local schools are an insufficient market. The task facing them becomes one of creating more schools’ visits to a rural area, which could be achieved by attracting urban schools to rural areas on residential visits.

Changes in the nature of the teaching profession

The financial constraints imposed by the government on school budgets in the 1980s had a direct and instant impact on teachers. Since the teaching salary budget was the single largest component of a school’s costs, it was an obvious target of cost-cutting measures. The incremental salary scale of teachers makes them more expensive as they become more experienced.

The offer of early retirement in the 1990s to a cohort of teachers in their 50s was gladly taken up by a generation of the profession who felt themselves to be drowning in the monsoon of change. Many of the teachers who left at that time were in the middle management strata of schools, with a lot of experience in organising visits for pupils. They were replaced by cheaper, younger and often newly-qualified staff, a high proportion of whom were retained only on a fixed, short-term contract.

The organisation of a visit is a long and detailed process for teachers and not something expected of a new entrant to the profession. A headteacher is also unlikely to encourage a member of staff to devote time to such an activity when they know it is possible they will not be able to retain that person until the time of the visit.

Implications for the tourism and leisure industry

The main issues in this context are to do with the targeting of marketing activities aimed at schools and the confidence with which schools can purchase educational visits.

To take targeting first: it has already been stated that senior members of school personnel are not good targets for marketing initiatives. It must be remembered that the senior management team of a secondary school and the headteacher and deputy/ies of a primary school are very busy professionals and are not visit organisers and, therefore, do not take kindly to being inundated with a mass of literature from individual tourism operators.

Senior teachers in any school do, however, have responsibility for their school’s visit policy, along with their governors. The decision to organise a visit no longer belongs to the individual teacher but rather it is an all-school decision. An approach to a headteacher, which is introductory by nature, seeking permission to approach individual members of the teaching staff is more reflective of the stakeholder style of modern school management. The school is, after all, receiving not a request to simply organise a visit somewhere but rather to sub-contract out part of the educational process to a third party. It can be seen, therefore, as not a question of who you target but more a matter of how you do it.

Clearly, too, it is senior management of schools that has the greatest understanding of the complexities and risks inherent in visit organisation. Gaining their confidence in considering the possibility of entering into what may be a long-standing business arrangement is the marketing platform one has to first build. This is more likely to be achieved where an initial marketing approach emphasises quality, third party accreditation, or verification and recognition of the importance of the decision to the school. Moreover, only the largest tourism and leisure organisations can accomplish this on their own and for the majority some form of collective marketing approach, on a regional basis or by type of tourism interest, will be necessary in the future.

Changes in the nature of teaching

Teaching method

As the younger teachers gain their experience, they draw upon a different form of initial training. Led by the pioneering teacher training establishments in higher education, there has been a move away from training new teachers to know what children should learn and towards a more detailed understanding of how children can learn anything if they have the skills to apply to the task.

The National Curriculum itself is not just a body of knowledge which young people must ‘know’ by certain chronological stages in their young lives. It is also a statement of what young people should be able to do – skills which they can transfer into and deploy in further study and later life. Allied to this framework of Attainment Targets is a menu of recommended study topics which might best promote these skills, whilst also reflecting the nation’s expectation as to what constitutes worthwhile or essential knowledge. The menu itself is not totally prescriptive but more a la carte, with limited provision for choice of study topics.

Education more than just knowledge

This concept of education as not being about knowledge per se but also about the skills and understanding promoted through acquisition of that knowledge has had a major impact upon the style of classroom teaching. It has moved, and is still moving, away from what may be termed didactic methods – telling pupils, making them read, listen to or copy down what they have to know in order to pass an examination. Like their parents, the teachers of today’s children know that children learn best when, in educational jargon, they are active – ‘on task’.

Again we return to the notion of sub-contracting. When pupils go on visits it is part of their education and, therefore, teachers will look favourably upon those venues where the style of presentation reflects the current teaching style. Youngsters who have been encouraged to find out, work independently or in groups on prescribed tasks will find it difficult – and certainly boring – to be subjected to a style of presentation at a visitor attraction in which their part is purely that of passive recipient in an audience.

Of critical importance here, too, is once again the attitude of senior management in schools. Formal, researched evidence that children learn best – or anything at all – by visiting is scant. The risks associated with it as a teaching method are now significantly higher. The questions in the collective mind of the school will be – is it worth it? Does it work? Furthermore, even if it can be shown to work as a teaching method, what are the costs of it relative to other methods of learning?

Costs of school visits

These are all too often simplistically dismissed as being the costs of transport and those of venue entry, activity purchase or overnight accommodation charge. Except in circumstances of financial hardship, such costs are paid by the parents, not by the school. If one takes as an example a decision to organise a visit to a visitor attraction for the day for 40 pupils in two classes and assumes an entry fee of £3 per head then, with the day hire on a coach costing in the region of £250, the cost per pupil becomes approximately £9.

Teacher escort staff

When children are taught in a school, the teacher to pupil ratio can be as low as 1:30. The DfES has issued guidelines to schools in which the minimum teacher to pupil ratio when on visits outside the school is 1:20 and as high as 1:8, depending on the age of the pupils. In days of yore, this increase in the number of adults accompanying a school party could be subsidised through parent volunteers.

Increased economic activity rate of the population, a change as to how parents regard the role of schools, and the recent guidelines from the DfES as to who is both qualified and suitable to be a school party leader, have weakened that source of volunteer labour supply.

Our hypothetical party of 40 pupils which, in a primary school, could easily have been taught by two teachers, will now require three as they are going on a visit. Replacement, or as they are known, supply teachers, cost in a range of £120–150 per day, paid for by the school.

Disruption costs

In a primary school our party would also have been taught by the same teacher for the entire day. In a secondary school the matter is far more complex.

The practices of setting – allocating pupils to classes in each subject according to their ability in it – and options – allowing pupils to select certain of the subjects they take at KS4 – means that 30 children who enter their first class of a school day may never be together again as a group for the remaining lessons of that day. If the teacher of that first class takes the pupils in it on a day visit, the knock-on effect is felt throughout the remainder of the school day by other teachers who discover a high level of absence in their classes.

Not all subject departments in secondary schools are visit organisers but all are held accountable for the measurable outcomes of their teaching. When a curriculum coordinator or Head of Department in one subject area is required by another to release pupils to go on a visit organised by another subject area, they too know that they will carry an element of its true cost in the form of disruption to their teaching programmes. Repeated disruption of this type must inevitably reduce pupil progress, progress which is increasingly measured and monitored.

Organisation time cost

Senior staff in schools also know that the organisational time and energy cost of a school visit is hidden but present. In a school staff room, the visit organising teacher is readily identifiable. There are a stream of pupil requests to see them and a file full of parental consent forms, risk assessment profiles, quotes from coach firms, drafts of materials needed to support the visit and lesson plans for supply teachers. What is the cost of time devoted to the organisation of a school visit?

If the above appears to be a somewhat empirically pedantic analysis of a school visit, no apology is made. It is vital to recognise that the true cost of a school visit is probably three times that contributed by the parents to cover the direct cost element. It would seem appropriate for teachers, governors and parents to seek evidence for a return on the expenditure associated with this visit. More specifically – where this return is claimed to be in the form of learning outcomes – could these not have been achieved equally well and possibly cheaper within the confines of the school by deploying other teaching methods?

What are the benefits of learning by visiting?

Increased learning opportunities

Many operators in the tourism and leisure industry know that schools sub-contract to them because they cannot by themselves provide their pupils with all learning opportunities. Swimming pools and sports centres are used by schools which do not have such facilities available on campus. Schools also recognise that they do not have the qualifications to instruct, equip and locate adventure activities but recognise that the learning outcomes in terms of personal and social development derived from such experiences are so valuable to many pupils.

Commercial good practice

Field study centres invest heavily in scientific equipment needed by students in subjects such as geography and biology, spreading its cost across intensive use by many schools during the course of a year. These schools could not justify the volume of capital investment involved for use by only a few pupils once a year. Sub-contracting makes commercial sense.

Curricular-related learning outcomes

It is in the visitor attraction sector of the industry that school ambivalence towards visits is at its greatest. The claim of any visitor attraction to host school party visits has to be in terms of measured, subject-related, learning outcomes which cannot be delivered in the comfort of the classroom or which are better delivered at the attraction itself.

Across Britain there are stunning illustrations as to the validity of this claim. If one can generalise as to what gives these attractions true quality in educational terms it is that they have, whilst remaining honest to their core values, provided a discrete product for schools which both co-exists alongside that for the general public and is delivered according to the principles of current teaching methods.

This is not the case in far too many attractions where the educational product for schools is quite simply the same as that for the general public but with cheaply produced quizzes or word searches replacing expensive guide books. At these visitor attractions the presentation of the learning experience is in a manner inappropriate to the learning skills and needs of young people, in that:

• they are required to trail around a conducted tour, listening to guides who all too frequently use anecdotes and language inappropriate for young people;
• they are made to sit passively and watch a film or some other form of audio visual presentation;
• they are then sent off to read books on walls, scattered around the site and inconveniently placed for younger pupils to read;
• all too often, the visit experience is based upon a fixed-format presentation which, whilst its duration may suit the average adult visitor, leaves teachers looking for time-filling activities pending departure time.

The importance of residential visits

Residential visits have far greater potential benefits than day visits for schools and the tourism and leisure industry in large areas of Britain.

Benefits to schools

During residential visits a far lower proportion of the total visit time is spent on transport and, therefore, the majority of time is devoted to learning activities.

Learning outcomes of visits go beyond those which may be termed as subject-related. Among them is personal development, such as self-confidence and the ability to work in a team. They also include the development of social skills, which can be as a basic as sitting down to a meal with others without the distraction of television.

Moreover, the longer journey time to the destination takes pupils out of their immediate environment and opens up learning opportunities which cannot be accessed through day visits.

Benefits to the industry

These are primarily financial and tend to be confined to those who provide accommodation. A school which makes a five-day residential visit, however, has the potential to organise a series of day visits to attractions and other providers in the area in which it is staying.

The information gathering process of the school organising a residential visit is, however, far more complex than that required for a day visit. Schools are looking to buy into programmes which include accommodation, learning activities, information about the area and transport. They will rarely buy this as a package, preferring to put together their own itineraries from a range of choices.

Challenges for schools

The time and effort required for such an extensive information search is a major challenges for schools. This occurs because operators in given areas rarely collaborate to present the total educational tourism product for the area in one marketing initiative. Schools are inundated with individual promotions by providers of separate products.

Such individual marketing also fails to respect the value of residential visits. Schools are known to remain loyal to a visit destination which services their needs well and this loyalty can last for periods of several years. The loyalty tends to occur because the school has to invest a significant amount of selection, planning and preparation time for a new residential venue, an investment which it is reluctant to repeat frequently.

Schools know, therefore, that a decision to select an accommodation provider for a group of 30 pupils for a four-night package is likely to result in business benefit to that operator of £15,000-20,000 over a 5-6 year period, in which they feel ‘locked’ in to the arrangement. It is an investment decision on the part of the school community to buy in part of the education programme from a third party supplier, and the marketing processes likely to win it will be those of a direct, business-to-business, nature.

As the costs inherent in such marketing approaches are likely to be beyond all but the largest businesses in the industry, the need for collaborative marketing occurs once again.

How should the tourism industry respond to these changes?

Individual (operator) responses

In author’s opinion, in the majority of cases the educational visits products offered to schools are:

• Inappropriate to the active learning requirement sought by them. Sectors of the industry need to look in detail at what is actually offered to schools which could not be accessed by them in some other format.
• Inappropriately marketed to schools, without recognition of the nature of the business decision schools are making when organising visits and of the performance pressures which now motivate schools’ management teams.

Schemes

There are some encouraging signs that these improvements are beginning to occur. The Sandford Award for Heritage Education scheme operated by the Heritage Education Trust identifies those historic properties which have developed genuine educational products. School visitor numbers to its annual winners to date indicate that schools recognise the quality of their product.

The Heritage in Action (HERIAN) initiative has identified that the educational product offers of many industrial heritage sites in the valleys of South Wales lack coherence and are too didactic in their approach to young people. It is seeking to promote good practice across this sector of visitor attraction on a collective basis.

Such schemes, particularly where they are award based, have the potential to motivate and acknowledge appropriate product development and to assist schools in their search for quality visit experiences.

Marketing on business-to-business principles is commonly experienced by schools. Ski trip organising companies have practiced it for years and some larger accommodation and activity providers have sales representatives who target schools. For the smaller operators such tactics can only be deployed on a co-operative basis – coming together to form a product which can then be promoted with a larger, more effective, marketing spend. One of the few illustrations of such marketing to schools is that of the Wales Tourist Board’s School Visits Wales initiative.

Collective industry responses

Research

There is scant evidence as to the relationship between visiting and learning. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that headteachers of schools become increasingly sceptical as to its validity.

“Teachers know well enough how pupils flourish in the outdoor classroom, responding with energy, enthusiasm and intelligence. But the independent evidence to prove it has never been comprehensively assembled.”

With these words, the DfES introduced its Flagship research studies in a partnership with countryside and agricultural interests. The aim is to test the hypothesis that visits to the countryside and farms will raise the level of pupil understanding of the food chain and rural issues.

The National Farmers’ Union and the Countryside Alliance has, therefore, commissioned the National Foundation for Educational Research and Kings College, London, to undertake a further review – Understanding the Countryside – of how young people learn about countryside issues. The outcomes of these research studies may well prove to be of benefit to certain rural sectors of the tourism industry and test ‘the learning by visiting hypothesis’ on a broader basis.

National Code of Approved Contractor Practice

The HSPEV guidelines and Child Protection measures initiated by government have gone far in creating what is, in effect, a Code of Practice for schools in the organisation of school visits. Industry response to this, however, remains reactive and on an individual basis. Both the government and the education industry must realise that the time is nigh for an Approved Contractor system for visitor attractions and accommodation providers in Britain that host educational visits. Such a scheme would:

• act to reassure parents,
• ease the burden on LEAs and teachers in terms of organisation and, critically,
• act to raise the overall standard of educational tourism provision in Britain.

To somebody coming from a teaching background it seems odd that tourism authorities have accreditation schemes designed to yield quality assurance in everything from hotels and golf courses to marinas and caravan sites when, with the noble exception of the Adventure Activities Licensing Authority, no such scheme exists to measure and promote minimum standards of quality to be experienced by young people on educational visits.

Even such schemes which might be seen as having relevance to the school visit product – budget accommodation, for example – make no reference to the criteria relating to security and exclusive use which would render such establishments acceptable to schools.

Conclusions

The true financial value of educational tourism by schools in Britain is not known but its strategic commercial importance to certain sectors is frequently claimed. It must surely be the case that, in the near future, the leisure and tourism industry in Britain will have to address both the means by which to measure the extent of business benefit in this market and to then make an appropriate level of investment to retain it. The assumption that schools will go on organising visits simply because they have always done so has become a highly dangerous stance for the industry to adopt.

References

1. It assumes that if a young person has a good experience of visiting a destination or taking part in an activity, he/she will either persuade their parents to take them back for a repeat visit or return to it in their later life. In the absence of any formal evidence that this might be true, however, this assumption should be considered together with the belief of many teachers and parents that the introduction of a child to something ‘very worthwhile’ could be the kiss of death for its future consumption.
2. Copies of these guidelines can be downloaded from www.teachernet.gov.uk/visits.
3. Note: this is not the case for schools in Wales, where the National Assembly Government has yet to publish any guidelines to schools in regard to the HASPEV document.

About the author

A former secondary school teacher in Bristol, Berkshire and London, Phil Keely has undertaken several major research studies into the pattern of educational tourism on behalf of national tourist authorities. He has also worked extensively on education product development with many visitor attractions and local authorities. At present, Phil heads Bristol-based youth market research and marketing consultancy, The Guide, and is Project Co-ordinator for School Visits Wales. He can be contacted at theguide.eu.com@virgin.net or on 0117 940 2425.