Right now, I’m sitting in an airport lounge waiting for a flight to London. Ok! I know when you’re reading this, I probably won’t be still sitting in the airport, unless the flight is massively delayed, which if that’s the case, please come and save me!!!
 
Regardless of where I am right now, basically as I write this, I’m at the airport having lunch. On a table opposite me, there’s a lady working away on her laptop and her son who is about 5, sitting there eating lunch, with headphones on and stuffing food in his mouth whilst watching something on his iPad. Mum seems oblivious to what he’s up to and he appear transfixed on the screen.
 
Having worked countless hours in airport lounges, on planes and any random place I can, I understand deadlines and the need to get things done. But why can’t it wait until after lunch? The disturbing picture for me, is that this appears so ‘normal’ to the mother and son, which it shouldn’t be! The dining table, regardless of whether at home or about to travel, shouldn’t be about work. Now you might object and say that I’m working by writing this, but actually I have finished lunch and now I’m having coffee… so yeah…
 
Anyway, back to the point of all of this. When you look at some of the problems facing education today, this highlights the disconnect between social anchors such as family dinners and the reality of life. The problems this causes years down the track is already being felt as the current generation of school aged students have been “baby sat” by devices, which manipulate behaviours and undermine the ability for them to relate to others and have normal conversations and experiences.
 
The toxicity of the effect of technology on children is vastly underrated and a new ‘normal’ which increasingly disconnects them from other people, is a massive social and emotional problem just waiting to happen. Next time you’re travelling with the kids, don’t give them an iPad at lunch so they won’t bother you for a bit. Enjoy the moment for what it is. Talk with them. Talk about the trip, what they’re looking forward to and what’s going to be something new, interesting and challenging. Otherwise, the alternative of the babysitting mobile device, is just like Cat Steven’s cats in the cradle on steroids. What you’re gaining in ‘productivity,’ you’re simply losing at the cost of your family and their own well-being.
 
Now if you’re reading this, you’re probably not in that category at all, but the reality is that we’re teaching students like this every day and understanding the crippling upbringing they’ve had, can help us to understand on what we need to be able to focus and try to help our students recover. At the end of the day, humans desire real relationships with real people and it’s often up to us as educators to show other people how this can be done.
 
Ok supplemental… I’m still in the lounge. The lady just walked past me with her headphones on and looking down at her phone whilst her son is trying to ask her questions and talk to her. If only they could see the damage they’re doing… very sad indeed.

​If you’ve ever worked with someone who lacks or has lost their passion for what they’re doing, it’s often an unpleasant experience to say the least. Now I’m not here to say that long relentless hours equate to passion. In fact, it can be quite the opposite having worked with some people who equated hours at work to the measure of their work. Sadly, no matter how long some of them spent at work, it was never going to add up to anything more than a wasted car space in the car park.
 
As I’m a strong believer in delivering good, effective programs for students, hours spent don’t always come into this mix. Instead, it’s the ability of staff to engage with students, inspire and be effective that are the most important components of this.
 
Anyone can sit at a desk or in a classroom and use up lots of hours. It literally takes no talent at all to do this. A former colleague of mine was just amazed at this. He could be at work for 12-16 hours and do nothing. In fact, it was worse than that. Many days, it was less than nothing and that created more problems for everyone else to fix. However, thankfully people like this usually get moved on quickly, or should be.
 
Tired, exhausted teachers no matter how passionate they might be, can never be truly effective. Therefore, there needs to be that mystical balance that everyone seems to talk about, but like Eldorado and Saadam’s WMDs, nobody can find.
 
Most people go into careers because they’re passionate about it. However, many work places manage to smash that enthusiasm right out of them, which at the end of the day is a wasted opportunity. I’d rather have passionate staff who keep throwing ideas at me for how we can do things better or how we can build things up, rather than staff who like the status quo and you have to drag them kicking and screaming through any modicum of change.
 
Consequently, the real challenge is often not the development of passion in staff, but creating an environment in which passion is valued. Too often, I’ve seen passion and enthusiasm destroyed by hopeless organisations that think that doing the same thing over and over again is the only way to do it. The world changes, people change and if you don’t like change, then perhaps education is not the right place for you.
 
This doesn’t mean you have to take on every crazy new idea that staff come up with, but what it does mean is that developing a culture in which new ideas are welcomed and valued, is a vital basis to build and retain staff who have a great passion for what they do and are motivated by what will produce the best educational outcomes for students. If this means trying something new, then try something new! It’s better to listen to twenty crazy ideas, three of which could be brilliant and the other seventeen pointless, but those three ideas could have a massive and lasting impact on the lives of countless staff and students and flow on to the community and generations to come. However, stamping out ideas has the opposite effect and an organisation can become so stale and ineffective that it loses staff, it loses new fresh ideas and just becomes as standardised factor for processing students.
 
You don’t want a scenario like this, because trying to deal with unmotivated staff is hard work!! It’s much harder, in my experience, than encouraging new ideas to be shared, trialed and implemented in a process of continuous improvement. In this scenario, it’s the lazy and dispassionate staff that self-select their way out of the organisation to go and do something less challenging or to find another school that’s going nowhere fast.
 
The only way we can face the rapidly changing world is through embracing new ideas and encouraging those around us to share their passion. Through this, we can build cultures that value how fluid and dynamic education can and should be to ensure we’re producing the best results for everyone. 

Everyone seems to be anxious these days and it’s often difficult to understand why this is. The problem is that this is presenting itself in a significant way in education. The number of students who are labelled as ‘suffering from anxiety,’ is increasingly noticeable. Is the world becoming a more dangerous place? Are gangs of kidnappers roaming the streets of our nation, just waiting to find a child out playing on a bike? Or art thou just fatal vision… Drawing parents into a paranoia about child safety and pushing their own failings onto their children?
 
The problem with anxiety is that it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. Much like the way in which Macbeth was goaded into murdering a stack of people by three witches, due to a bunch a false prophesies, parents are making their children anxious shut-ins for no reason at all. Now this isn’t to say there aren’t bad people in the world, but there’s more chance that a child will be abused by a family member or close friend of the family, rather than marauding gangs of pedos in trench coats and white vans. Yet this is the way in which many parents are now behaving.
 
“Don’t do this, don’t do that. You can’t go out and play…” Whilst kids need to build some awareness and defences around stranger danger, shutting them inside with a video game for supervision is certainly not a good alternative to going out, riding a bike, running around building forts and playing with real friends. Sure, they’ll get scratches, bumps and bruises, but at the same time, they develop social skills and the resilience to laugh off those scratches, bumps and bruises and go and find more suitable trouble into which to get themselves. This has been a healthy way to develop for hundreds of millions of children over centuries. The bonus in Western countries now is that most children over 10 don’t have to leave school and go and work in factories fifty hours a week.
 
Unfortunately, there’s an increased tendency for children to be kept shut in at home or within their parents’ line of sight every moment of the day. How frustratingly boring this must be for everyone involved. It’s not only the fact that this is just weird. It’s also the fact that whenever there’s an opportunity for time to be spent away from the family, it can end up in a situation of separation anxiety. There’s really no winning in this situation as we’re back to the self-fulfilling prophecy in that parents are making their children unnecessarily anxious.
 
I recently read an article about a pilot program in Queensland, Australia that’s encouraging children to go out exploring and hanging out with friends… Unsupervised!!! The ‘pilot’ was a success, but the organisation is asking for more money so they can expand their program. Wait… what does that mean? The government is spending money to try and get parents to do what they should be doing anyway, which will help develop social skills and reduce obesity… What’s the government even doing funding this in the first place? It should be parents driving this to help ensure their children grow up active, healthy and resilient.
 
The unfortunate reality is however, that parents are not doing this. They’re disempowering their children and making them feel fearful of anything new, anything different and anything without a clear end result! I would like to blame terrible parenting books and rubbish advice from idiots, who don’t know anything about the reality of life. However, you can only blame stupid authors so much and at the end of the day, parents need to take responsibility for the anxiety they cause their own children.
 
Let’s face it! Getting covered head to toe in mud never really hurt anyone. Cuts, bruises and bumps are just a part of life and failure is not a four letter word! (It’s actually a seven letter word, but you get the point). The desire to try and create a ‘perfect’ world for their children, has in fact resulted in the exact opposite. For many children who are the ‘world’s most amazing child,’ they face so many additional challenges from this rubbish parenting and they struggle with some of the most basic of tasks when faced with a challenge. The fact that they can’t achieve even the most basic of things without the help and supervision of their parents, then suddenly… they become anxious and once you have an anxiety about something, the prophesy inevitably comes true. Not quite Macbeth true with all those murders, but all the same, true. The child becomes disempowered and crippled by the parents’ neediness and reluctance to let them face the realities of an often challenging and harsh world.
 
So how do we help students deal with anxiety? By enabling them to try and fail with a sense of a way forward. If something doesn’t work, then try something different. For camps, that seems to create massive anxiety for so many students now, tell them to deal with it. Don’t sugar coat an experience or help them escape it. Help them to face the reality that it could be a challenge, but, they’re capable of fulfilling that challenge. The only way to help address anxiety in anyone is to expose them to the thing they’re anxious about. Now I should put in here that some anxieties are quite real and beyond the remit of schools and outdoor ed programs to help solve. However, for all the other imaginary, self-fulfilling ones, reassure students and help them get involved in the activities. At the end of the day, what’s the worst that will happen?
 
With so many over the top parents who shut their kids in and try to stop them from ‘failing’ in anyway they can, this poses a massive problem for education, yet at the same time a massive opportunity. So long as the school or organisation is clear in what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, then that’s a good start to help save these children from their anxious, paranoid parents. I recently heard that a counsellor is increasingly dealing with the breakdown of parent/child relationships due to this style of over-parenting. This is not something anyone really wants or needs for their lives, so why not prevent it before it happens. It’s good that parents are involved in their children’s lives, but it’s time they also faced the harsh reality that over-involvement can damage and destroy their children’s lives.
 
There’s no reason why children should be increasingly anxious today. The world is safer, despite what the media may tell you, people are healthier and living longer and a few bumps and scratches running around playing with friends never really hurt anyone. Sadly, it all comes down to poor parenting and the false belief that parents can save their children from the reality of the world. As educators, we need to set a stand, send clear messages about how and why we do things and cut parents off when their involvement is detrimental to the welfare of their children. It may seem harsh, but the alternative of the Scottish Play, is far worse for everyone involved.

​Schools love to market themselves these days as being not only a place to gain an academic education, but also a place in which they can get every other bit of education possible.
 
From breakfast club to late afternoon care, you could off load your child somewhere for at least twelve hours a day!! But wait there’s more! You could then fill that twelve hours with so much stuff that your child is always exhausted from the relentless schedule of non-stop ‘compulsory fun’ activities that can even extend into the weekend! This will give you the time away from your children, so you don’t have to listen to them endlessly talk about making the world a better place and also a great chance to get to the gym or that great bar you used to frequent before ‘they’ came along.
 
This might be a bit over the top, but there really is an increasing danger that more and more schools are enabling in their parent and student body and that’s too much involvement at school through way too many offerings and the over scheduling of children’s lives.
 
Don’t get me wrong! I love co-curricular programs and I learnt more about life and the world from them than I ever did in the classroom. I think that a good co-curricular program is, in fact, vitally important to provide real experiential education opportunities to build relationships, work together, show leadership and give back to the community. The problem is that we have increasingly seen the value in activities other than the regular classroom, but instead of building them into a school curriculum and the standard school day, we’re stuffing them on top as ‘added extras.’
 
However, the ‘added extras’ approach doesn’t give anytime for kids to be kids. In the pursuit of value adding, we’re risking becoming detrimental to the health and welfare of students by expecting too much of them all the time. I’ve seen this over the years in outdoor education. As soon as you take a group away, where days have been so over scheduled they haven’t had the time to think, when you give them the time to think, they struggle with it.
 
Rather than cut back on these programs at school, we instead need a curriculum which enables them to be part of the regular day. This way, we can continue to provide the great value of experiential education, but also give our students the time to reflect upon and learn from these experiences. Thus students can get more value out of less time spent on something and as a result, can find themselves growing faster than ever before. 

Long gone are the days of going on camp for the sake of going on camp. Education is changing, and outdoor education is playing an increasingly important role in that change, helping to develop a vitally important skill-set of problem solving, critical thinking and teamwork, which is needed in a rapidly changing world.
 
Having worked on many different outdoor education programs, we’ve always needed to ensure we were setting the right level of challenge and hitting the right social and emotional developmental goals for our students. If we make things too soft and it’s just ‘a walk in the park,’ it results in complaints. If we make things too hard, and it’s like trekking to Mordor, it results in tears and complaints. Therefore, how do you find that happy medium?
 
Essentially, finding that balance is through understanding the needs of your students and clearly setting out what you want them to achieve from the experience. Are you developing teamwork? Are you developing resilience? Are you developing relationships? Are you developing personal responsibility? Are you developing leadership? An answer to each of these questions will help shape your approach to ensure your students are getting the most out of their outdoor experiences.
 
What you want is an authentic approach to address your students’ needs and not just a camp for the sake of it. To make your outdoor education programs as authentic as possible, it’s extremely important to understand the cultural and social context of your school. What are the biggest challenges your students are facing at school and at home? How does the culture of your school influence planning? What are the right teachable moments needed for your students? How much have they been pushed outside their comfort zone in the past? How much further can they be pushed in the future?
 
There truly is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to this and understanding the skill-set and level of maturity of your students, is critical in designing the right type of program. For example, one school I worked for, their Year 9 program was massively challenging with 5 days of a relentless expedition which saw students moving from sunrise to sunset every day. It pushed the limits in every way and was about personal challenge, teamwork and strength through adversity. However, they’d been building up to this from year 3 with a graduated, sequential program that pushed the limits a bit further every successive year.
 
Conversely, another group of year 9s I worked with, who had no other real outdoor education experience simply needed to be able to work together on a very basic level. Therefore, canoeing 20km in a day, followed by 19km of hiking the next day was out of the question. Instead, problem-solving and initiative games followed by a short canoe trip and a mountain bike ride was the most beneficial approach, because this was all new to them. It was a bit challenging, and far enough outside their comfort zone to create some teachable moments on which to reflect, but not enough that it was going to end in tears.
 
Some of the most powerful and memorable learning experiences come from outdoor education. However, as with every other aspect of education, this can be significantly improved through careful and authentic design to support and build upon any specific areas of need for your students. The more outdoor education is targeted at the specific social and emotional needs of your school and your students, the more effective it will be in producing great results for your students. Be it problem solving, teamwork, resilience, leadership or simply understanding the needs of others, focussing on these outcomes can have a profound effect on everyone that goes out on one of your school programs.

According to industry experts, concussions are set to be the next wave of significant negligence claims against schools and teachers. Currently somewhere between 20% and 50% of concussions in sports are not recognised nor reported. Basically, most people are flipping a coin and hoping for a good result. This is concerning and consequently a massive risk.
 
50% to 80% miss rate is something we can and must avoid. The reason being is that students who have an unrecognised concussion and continue to play or engage in further sports activities, are at a much higher risk of a second concussion, which can then lead to a far worse traumatic brain injury and has an extremely high potential for irreversible damage.
 
Since you as the teacher, coach, or activities director have a non-delegable duty of care for your students, you must ensure that you are properly assessing and reporting on head injuries or suspected concussions. Failure to do so, is just the start of the next tidal wave of claims against schools for negligence.
 
Having dealt with numerous concussions over the years as a teacher, we’ve always been mindful of this and are about to release an update to the Xcursion app with the CAT5 Berlin Consensus tool for recognising and recording potential concussions.
 
It’s important to protect both students from further injury and yourself from litigation. Record and report every potential concussion to make sure that every sport and activity is safe and enjoyable for everyone involved.
 
A really interesting resource on this is:
 
Malcolm Gladwell’s Podcast Episode ‘Burden of Proof’
 
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/22-burden-of-proof
​

​I do enjoy a good dystopian fiction, from 1984 to The Hunger Games and Fahrenheit 451. They all describe a future in which society has ‘embraced’ some form of totalitarian government for their own ‘protection.’ As a result, the few in power, control everything and in the case of Fahrenheit 451, technology is one of the key tools which is employed to track and monitor citizens and help restrict the amount of information to which people have access.
 
Whilst the idea of ‘big brother’ watching is nothing new, I can imagine George Orwell being horrified by the ease with which people have given up so much of their privacy and freedom in the name of ‘safety.’
 
Why am I talking about dystopian futures in an experiential education blog? Mainly because from what I’m seeing with technology, corporations and governments today, it worries me. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but let’s not forget that it’s not even been a century since the world was brought to the brink by the Second World War and Russia is still feeling the hangover from that horrendous experience.
 
We now have a generation growing up addicted and reliant on devices, through which information can potentially be controlled. With studies showing that social media has been designed to manipulate behaviour, this isn’t a huge leap to the next step of further controls to ‘help’ teens stay ‘safe.’
 
What happens if our whole experience and existence gets taken online and then filtered back to us with only what marketing, corporations and governments want us to hear? It’s potential for disaster. Whilst I hope this sort of thing will never happen, the risk is however, that it is now far easier to listen to, track calls, monitor online behaviour and develop a profile of someone with predictive behaviour analysis than ever before. If our next generation becomes too reliant on technology for everything, their exposure to potential despotism by stealth, is not so much paranoia, but a scary possible future reality.
 
Therefore, what can we do? For one, keep pushing real experiences in the real world. Help students think critically so they can understand the difference between the fake nonsense of the internet and the reality of the world and teach them how to leverage technology and not be leveraged by technology. If they have a sense of curiosity and are always willing to ask questions and demand reasons why, we can help them to be protected from the dangers of a future in which AIs monitor everything everyone does.
 
With rapid digital change, we have a great responsibility to this next generation to help them build a world that is not controlled by soulless corporations, despotic politicians and softly spoken AIs that want to kill you. Let’s help build a world that’s more Star Trek, than 1984, because at this point in time, both are possible in the not too distant future. 

Being a teenager has always been hard. You’re no longer a kid, but not yet an adult. Suddenly, you’re thrust into a confusing world full of miss-matched messages and expectations. In the past, this wasn’t as big a deal as it is today, as the outside world crept in at a much slower pace.
 
Yet one of the enormous challenges for teenagers today is the fact that the world doesn’t creep in slowly. It’s an unmitigated, relentless attack. Children and teenagers are constantly smacked around the head with marketing, social media and masses of uninformed noise around body image, relationships and how to live life in general. Added to this, they don’t even need to leave home to be exposed to this.
 
As a society, our children are spending more time indoors than ever before. Whilst I won’t go into too much detail about this, the reality is that in previous generations, teenagers went out to discover and experience the world for themselves. Some would find suitable amounts of trouble to get into and learn from these experiences. However, now teenagers have the world, or a distorted version of it at least, come to them.
 
Teenagers spend a lot of time in their bedrooms. This has probably always been the case as part of developing a bit of independence from the family. This is nothing new nor unusual, but in the past, the most access to the outside world teenagers used to have in their bedrooms was either the window, or maybe, if they were fortunate, a TV. Apart from SBS movies and crappy late night ads, at the end of the day, most TV content remained quite filtered and so the risk of harm to a teenagers sitting in their room was pretty minimal. However, due to the seismic shift in technology, the difference now, is the fact that a teenager can sit in their room and be directly exposed to all the horrors of the world. The family home is no longer a safe haven from violence, language, sex, abuse, hatred and bullying, all of which, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining are smashing down the door.
 
It’s an interesting phenomenon with this generation and it’s a significant risk for this generation that goes almost unnoticed until it’s far too late. Mental health problems are sky rocketing and teenage suicide in Australia remains at ridiculous levels. In my working in outdoor education, I’ve found an increasing lack of resilience of both boys and girls. As soon as something doesn’t have a quick answer or an easy solution, they go to pieces and either give up or start trying to blame others for their failures. This is a massive problem, because if they can’t do simple tasks, if they can’t complete simple challenges, what happens when they’re faced with a massive challenge with a massive problem? They’ll be unable to cope and totally and utterly fall apart.
 
This lack of resilience and mental strength all starts at home and is manifesting itself in the kid’s bedroom. To help avoid this, ask yourself a few simple questions. How are your kid’s bedroom setup? Do they have a smart device? Do they have a laptop, or desktop computer in their room? Are you running a content filter? Do you know how your content filter works? Do your kids know how a content filter works and how to bypass it? What supervision do you provide around devices? Do you set limits to time spent on devices and social media? Do you even allow them to be on social media? Can you have open and honest discussions about these issues?
 
The problem is, with too much screen time and no filters or supervision, children and teenagers can be exposed to a brutal soulless adult world that can cause long-lasting harm. Software on mobile devices is intentionally designed to be addictive and manipulate behaviour. Would you let one of these 20-something internet CEOs into your house to hang out with your kids? No! That would be creepy, but that’s basically what is being allowed when kids are able to spend endless time on addictive devices. This messes with the natural chemical balance in the brain and can ultimately result in long-term behaviour and emotional problems.
 
In the past, for a teenager to be exposed to the outside adult world, they’d have to physically leave home, go downtown, possibly to a shady less than reputable place to be exposed to all sorts of things to which you don’t want your teenagers exposed. Now, they can be exposed to all of this from the comfort of their own room and you might have no idea that anything is wrong.
 
There’s been this massive shift in the last fifteen years where you have gone from a society in which it was very hard to connect with people, but easy to speak with those you met, to now where it’s really easy to connect with people, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to connect with real people. That’s a massive cultural shift within a really short space of time. The result of which is that it’s exposed the next generation to a whole host of problems that weren’t there before. With any significant seismic shift, it takes a long time for people to catch up. If you look at education for example, many schools are still trying to come to terms with the fact that what you could do and call education in the 18th century, just doesn’t work these days.
 
However, despite this, with all the massive problems, there are massive opportunities. Once you’re aware of the concerns, it’s easy to start to do something about them. Unfortunately, the massive opportunities to deal with these problems aren’t being addressed and so a lot of educational institutions, a lot of parents are still struggling to catch up after they’ve finally realised the world has suddenly changed.
 
One of the big roadblocks is a parent’s fear of missing out! (FOMO) ‘My child has to have everything that everybody else has otherwise, they’ll miss out on the opportunity... Usually the idea of having everything is about material goods and nothing to do with experiences. The reality is that the more parents freely give stuff to their children, despite the short-term fix this may appear to have, the more likely their children are to really miss out in the future, because they’re socially and emotionally unable to cope with real life and the rapid change that is the reality of the world today.
 
This FOMO has led to droves of parents buying mobile phones for their children, allowing them to become hooked on a highly addictive device and potentially exposing their kids to this massive dangerous world that is totally and utterly unfiltered and soulless. It’s a world into which the teenage mind that doesn’t understand risk, can throw itself in the search of meaning and fulfillment, only to find emptiness and loneliness.
 
Teenagers will find themselves connected with hundreds if not thousands of ‘friends.’ Sadly, the reality is that most of these friends are as real as the tooth fairy, but the more friends or like you have, seems to equate to a higher status or feeling of fulfillment. However, anyone can get friends and likes. You can even buy tens of thousands of followers on Instagram from Russia. None of them are real, but I’m sure it would give you a nice ego boost for ten minutes to have that.
 
Our next generation is desperately searching for real meaning in their lives, yet the irony is that they’re doing it through one of the most shallow, hollow mechanisms possible. They’ve been programmed to need fast actions and fast reactions and, as a result, they want instant gratification. No wonder we’re facing a tidal wave of mental health issues when we have a generation growing up, getting given everything and sitting in their bedrooms exposed to a soulless digital world.
 
Parents who are using devices as pseudo babysitters, are only reinforcing the false expectation of a world where happiness and relationships are simply a swipe away. Whilst so many parents have been focusing on their FOMO for their kid’s materialistic possessions, they’ve totally missed out on the emotional needs of their kids.
 
Despite the amazing improvements technology has provided us, enabling everyone to have the answer to just about everything at their fingertips and watch endless movies of cats falling off tables, the downside is the fact that we’ve created an enormous social and emotional millstone for the next generation and unwittingly hung it around their necks.
 
It’s time we took stock of this, both at home and at school and look at exactly how these addictive devices are impacting on the health and well-being of a generation. The problem however, is not in the device or technology itself. The problem is the disconnect between appropriate parental supervision and real world experiences for children that can enable them to leverage technology as a tool and not let technology leverage them as a consumer.

Recently, a Victorian primary school placed a ban on students bringing balls to play with in the playground, citing an increase of injuries as the reason. Whilst I’m sure this isn't the first to ban balls, it's an idiotic and irrational decision to say the least. In terms of managing risk, unfortunately, it’s a sad reflection on a complete lack of understanding of the complexity of education, the need for students to understand risk and take reasonable risks to help them to understand how to actually assess and manage risk.
 
To put a blanket ban on something such as balls, robs students of some great social play activities. So instead of playing handball, cricket, basketball, soccer or dodge ball, instead bored students look for other less sociable pursuits. Having worked in a number of boarding schools, I’ve seen first hand what can happen when bored students start trying to find their own things to do to entertain themselves. It tends to result in far less social behaviour and can result in bullying to develop purely out of boredom.
 
Consequently, you can stop everyone from doing everything for their ‘own safety’, but you’re likely to create bigger problems than that of balls and a few minor injuries which are just part of life’s knocks and scrapes and are extremely healthy for children to have. Having said that, too many blows to the head with a football might need checking out.
 
The reality is that life’s not free of risks and trying to ‘eliminate’ any form of risk possible within the school environment is ludicrous and only setting students up for more significant failure in the future. Whatever the mistaken belief is for something such as a ball ban at school, it’s counter to any basic educational principles and is failing the students it’s supposedly designed to be ‘protecting.’
 
The world can sometimes go crazy when it comes to supposedly ‘managing’ risks. Often it’s a knee jerk reaction to an incident that doesn’t take into consideration other longer-term factors or specific incident circumstances. If you end up with a pattern of injures for whatever the activity is, then review it, but look for other options outside of blanket bans. What level of supervision was being provided? What level of first aid training and experience do staff have? Is it one ball activity in particular or everything? Did a teacher get hit with a ball by accident and has now had an hysterical meltdown? Yes things like this do happen. One place I worked had a ban on playing on the grass, because they wanted the place to ‘look nice’, which was never going to happen cause it was built on a misquote infested swamp, but anyway, the ban led to it becoming impossible to adequately supervise students with the staff we had and led to more problems and injuries because the boys spent the whole time spread out over a campus rumbling with each other. This was pure idiocy in my opinion!
 
Before someone throws a blanket ban out there on something fun, sociable and educational with the mistaken belief that they’re ‘saving’ everyone from themselves, then they should consider the wider implications and the potentially far greater negative impact that their decision will have on students. Managing risk is not about banning things. It’s about weighing up a series of competing factors which include the educational value of the activity, the risk of allowing the activity to occur and how it is to be supervised, as well as the risk of taking the experience away from students. Often people mistake the management of risk with their idea that they must stop everything from possibly ever happening to anyone. That’s just pure idiocy and something which fails to take into consideration how children learn from their playtime experiences and how keeping children actively engaged in an activity they love doing, will help build confidence, skills and social skills.
 
Before the fun police get away with banning the next cool activity at school, remember, ‘If you can dodge a spanner, you can dodge a dodge ball!’

​Some of you might have noticed that we’ve deleted our Facebook page and I’ve deleted my Facebook account. Whilst I don’t want to make a big deal about it, it was well and truly time for it to go.
 
Whilst for many younger people, it’s a toxic waste dump that’s messing with their emotions and proven to have been attempting to manipulate their behaviour, I just found it such a waste of time and morally questionable given the countless breaches of trust, privacy and the way in which extremists of all types have gotten away with spreading their hate on this global platform.
 
So instead of being one of those pointless user-metrics on Facebook, the business is no longer there and nor am I. The feeling of relief and the time I’ve got back is great and it’s made such a difference to the quality of my attention span and life.
 
Who will miss me online? Mainly advertiser and marketing professionals who will surely be crying themselves to sleep now due to this decision. I just hope they can get the help they need to be able to move on from this.
 
I also deleted my Twitter account, as it was mostly just a lot of people yelling at each other and nobody really listens to any of it. How can you? You need an AI bot to get through all the crap and I think the AI will self-destruct to avoid the boredom of it. Having said that, it’s a great place to make up and randomly change national policy directions and go on random international relations rants, therefore we’ll keep the business account open so we can continue to tell North Korea and the rest of the world what we think of them.
 
It’s great to be able to digitally detox and not just for a short time. You quickly realise that life is far more interesting in person than it is filtered through a device. So why not disconnect today, then you can reconnect with something a bit more real.