​​COVID-19 is a significant global pandemic issue and has been running since the end of 2019, when it was first discovered in Wuhan, in China. Now, this has ravaged the world and there are some serious considerations to be made when planning any sort of school excursion or activity around the impact that this may have on one of your programs.
 
The way in which you should be treating COVID-19 is the same way that you should be treating any other highly infectious disease for either your campus or school activity. So it shouldn't be done in isolation as a separate issue. It should be done in conjunction with your other risk management considerations and concerns. What's really important, though, is that the focus on COVID-19 shouldn't detract from the other risk management principles and practices you have in place to manage risk for whatever the excursion or activity is. If the management of COVID-19 were to compromise the management of risk in another area, then it's critically important that you review the appropriateness of doing that activity at this point in time.

The safety of one activity shouldn't be compromised by the implications of another. And for an example of this, I can imagine doing a belayed climb. You may have an instructor who is up close to one of the students or several students where they have to check harnesses, and then you're belaying on a rope. Now, this can be done safely and you can apply control measures such as face masks and also social distancing. However, where that social distancing is not possible, then maybe it's worth reconsidering the activity itself until later down the track. But critically important, just as a reminder, don't compromise any of the other safety of your activities for the management of COVID-19. Now that's not to say don't manage COVID-19. I think I really need to make a clear distinction there. But if the risks are too great for that activity, as a result of having to manage another contingency and another hazard, then discontinue that activity at this point in time.

I think that's really the most important outtake from this. It is really important to expect that all of your instructors are up to speed with what the virus is, how it is transmitted, and control measures. It's really important to provide this information to the school administrators, the teachers involved, the parents, and the students. And clear communication is critically important. Just because it's been on the news every single day for the last 8 months or 12 months, or however long it's been, it's really important that you still go through the causation and the control measures, and be very clear with staff about this. It's really important that prevention is absolutely critical to the safe running of your programs.
 
As an indication of some of the different levels of risks you may encounter and how to manage them, we'll just run through some of the high and medium level risks where you may need to look at other personal protective equipment and other controls to be in place for this kind of activity. For example, an instructor providing first aid to a student, generally, you would have your standard and absolutely, you would have your standard of gloves on to handle any patients. But in addition to that, you should also look at having face masks on both parties and ensuring that if you can't maintain that social distancing of around six feet, then you must have those personal protective equipment and devices in place to prevent that or reduce the risk of that transmission. So that's one of the high-risk activities is applying first aid. Also, if you have teachers or teaching assistant who are working with higher-need students. Say if you have students with disabilities or any other provisions where they need a carer and the carer may be in close contact, again, this is where that personal protective equipment is critically important as these would be considered a high-risk activity in the scheme of things in the current environment.

In terms of some of your medium risk activities, all of those instructors and students and staff on any of the trips should be considered a medium risk. So as this medium risk may involve handling cutlery, handling dishes, also being on vehicles or in vehicles together, then you really need to consider the cleaning regimes and the monitoring of this as a critically important part. What we've done is we've put together a document which steps you through these different contingency plans to help guide your approach, to getting school excursions back out and running again.

This online guide is to be used in conjunction with the latest recommendations from the CDC, as well as the recommendations from your school administration, their legal counsel, and their insurers. So please ensure that you cover all of these different bases because the most important thing is to safely get our students back out and doing the sorts of school excursions and activities and camps, which they love, and they learn so much from. So it's really important as an additional consideration to your risk assessments at this point in time, and certainly for the foreseeable future, to be really focusing on how you are going to effectively prevent the virus coming onto your program. And if so, if a case does occur on the program or a suspected case, how are you going to quickly isolate that student or that staff member or that instructor, and then make contact with authorities to let them know so that contact tracing can start to prevent the wider spread of the disease.

​What is your school’s risk management plan? Do you have one? Does everyone know about it? Do you really know what’s expected of you in regards to your school’s risk management? Is it just about the documents or does it go deeper than that? What’s your school’s appetite for risk? Do you even know what that means? Is the school’s risk management backed up by any sort of budget?
 
These are some really important questions you should be asking your school administration. With the global pandemic having highlighted some serious challenges for schools and the world, the idea of risk management can feel overwhelming. However, it doesn’t have to be because much of the angst and frustration comes from confusing and contradictory information. Having a solid foundation and understanding of risk management can help reduce some of these concerns now.  It is massively beneficial over the long-term for student safety and wellbeing.
 
Unless we have an idea of what’s expected and or the systems in place for risk management at school, it’s hard to know where to start. Most schools have a risk form, which is often completed by teachers with no real understanding about risk management. This is not their fault but is problematic and an issue which needs to be addressed right across the school to ensure good risk management can be developed and applied consistently throughout the school.
 
To achieve this, staff need training and annual refresher courses, or extension courses in risk management. The expectations of risk management need to be clear and able to be implemented by every department, regardless of the subject. This will help reduce injuries, incidents and make every activity which is being run safer and more enjoyable for students. Risk management should not be just made up as the program goes, nor should it be just a piece of paper which someone has to fill in. Good risk management occurs weeks, months and years before a school excursion or activity even begins, but so many schools don’t provide training for their staff, which results in bad outcomes for the school and their students.
 
From years of working in the industry, we’ve seen the same things over and over again and the amount of money and prestige at a school has no bearing on its ability to manage risk. It’s only through good quality training and development that this is possible. Importantly, schools need to allocate money for good quality training, equipment and reviews for all the programs they run which involve a level of risk. Through doing so, this will help build a culture of risk management that results in great educational programs and outcomes for students.

​Recently, I was reading a fascinating book about airplane crashes and how poor decision making ultimately led to disaster and the huge loss of life. What was striking about this was the similarity to so many coronial inquests for outdoor education incidents.
 
Much like many fatalities on outdoor expeditions, each of the airplane disasters could have been avoided. However, fatigue and poor decision making ultimately led to disaster. So why are we so impaired by fatigue and why do some organisations still not see this as a major problem?
 
One school, which shall remain unnamed, for which I worked a number of years ago, were vehemently opposed to any discussion around fatigue, despite numerous concerns being raised by staff around the impact it was having on the welfare and well-being of the staff. The implication was that we were just being lazy and trying to get out of work. I would suggest 80+ hour weeks backed up by driving vehicles full of students was a bit over the top. However, I’m not going to dwell on the rest of that experience, other than to say it was a pre-loaded disaster waiting to happen.
 
When we’re fatigued, a number of things happen which reduce our ability to make clear, informed and reasonable decisions. The harder we try, the less effective this becomes. Our focus narrows further and further into a tunnel vision that cripples our ability to make sound, reasoned judgment. This was evident in the cockpit recordings of each of the plane crashes outlined in the book. Instead of clear, thoughtful and decisive action, mistake, after mistake, after mistake was made, culminating in the inevitable plane crash. Experienced pilots forgot their training. Simple corrective actions weren’t taken.
 
The same is true of fatalities in outdoor education in which fatigue adversely impacts on the ability of an instructor to make reasonable, informed decisions. Research has shown that multiple shifts of work and not sleeping for 24 hours (which counts poor/broken sleep within the mix), has the same effect on decision making that being drunk has. Do we ever allow teachers and instructors to be drunk at work? No! So why do we allow fatigue to be overlooked?
 
If you examine the black box flight recordings of the conversations inside the cockpit, it becomes abundantly clear that for example, despite evidence to suggest that all the pilots needed to do to save the plane and those they were responsible for was to push down on the controls to increase speed and prevent a stall, they kept pulling back on the stick, consequently condemning the plane and all onboard.
 
However, before we call them stupid, which is the temptation of a back-seat pilot with no airtime, let’s look at the effects which fatigue has on people and why it’s not surprising that such poor decisions were made in the air and also in the field, for so many expeditions which have gone disastrously wrong.
 
When people are fatigued and/or drunk, their reaction time slows, their ability to solve complex problems is significantly inhibited and their ability to perform even the most regular and simple tasks becomes compromised.
 
The only solution for fatigue, is sleep, not push through it as a former boss of mine would always profess was the way he always did it and we should do the same! That, in my opinion, is idiotic in the extreme and will eventually result in someone getting killed. However, you can always learn a lot from idiots as they demonstrate the dangers of what not to do. Often this can be even more beneficial than someone telling you what you should do.
 
Good decision making is one of the best risk management strategies you can have. You see something that hasn’t gone to plan, doesn’t fit or doesn’t feel right. You assess the problem, adapt and respond accordingly. Good outdoor leaders will continually do this throughout any program. Most of the time, what they do isn’t even noticeable. Other times, it’s clear that there’s a problem and there’s a shift in plans to address it. The same is true with airlines. Most of the time you have no idea that corrective action was taken, which is the way it should be. Unfortunately, when we’re fatigued, that vitally important, broad problem-solving skill set stops working. We can only focus on single tasks and, even then, we might only be able to focus on a single part of a single task, which is even worse.
 
Often fatigued individuals will also focus on something that is completely irrelevant to the problem at hand. Instead, they become entrenched in a minor detail and they can obsess over it, as it’s the key to solving their current problem. However, their tired-self can’t even rationalise the fact that they’re grabbing onto something which is completely pointless, again due to their diminished capacity to make rational decisions.
 
Unfortunately, in outdoor ed incidents, we generally don’t have first hand recordings of the events as they transpire, which we do have for the airline industry. Listening to these recordings, it becomes clear that minor and irrelevant concerns become the sole focus of someone who is fatigued. The death spiral starts and there’s no way out. If you compare this with coronial inquests into outdoor education fatalities, on many occasions, you can see how fatigue might have impaired judgment and might have contributed to triggering the repeatedly poor decisions and the downward spiral which ultimately resulted in the fatality.
 
Now not all outdoor ed fatalities have fatigue as a contributing factor, but if we’re aware of the fact that it’s one of the most dangerous problems we can face even as experienced instructors, then we can put systems in place to manage and avoid fatigue and it’s related hazards. If we don’t want staff to be working ‘drunk’ from fatigue, then we must have good systems in place for managing this.
 
How long is an acceptable shift? What are the tasks that each staff member is doing during this time? What driving is involved? Can the load be shared? What if someone feels fatigued? What backup plans do you have in place?
 
The outcome of each of the airplane crashes was that systems to monitor and address fatigue were introduced, the result being, safer air travel. For outdoor education, this is something that must be addressed. It can’t be pushed through. It can’t be ignored. It can’t be put off for a discussion later in time. The end results, like the fatal vehicle accident in New Zealand where the teacher fell asleep at the wheel, are self-evident that fatigue and good decision making don’t go hand in hand. Do you have a fatigue management system in place? If not, make it your number 1 priority today as it’s vital that we and our industry ensure we keep safe those for whom we’re responsible. It’s essential to have instructors with clear heads and great decision-making skills, so that every outdoor experience is a wonderful and rewarding one for everyone.

Tin Tin is awesome! If you haven’t read any of the comics, or seen the cartoons or movies, where have you been hiding so shut off from the world? Tin Tin is the young investigative journalist who finds himself on all sorts of global adventures. From treasure hunting to jewel thieves, to kidnapper and opium smugglers, Tin Tin is a crime fighting machine. However, I really worry about him.
 
It’s not the fact that he gets shot at quite often nor that he finds himself in crazy pursuits in cars, on bikes, boats and planes. No, it’s the fact that he gets hit over the head and knocked out so many times. Yet a few hours later, he’s back chasing the bad guys around… until he gets hit over the head again. In most stories, this happens to Tin Tin two or three times and each time he’s ok. His dog, Snowy seems to get drunk quite often too, but that’s another issue entirely.
 
Whilst Tin Tin is just a story and cartoon characters can bounce back from pretty much anything, unfortunately in real life, we’re not quite built the same way and one knock to the head causing someone to go unconscious is a very serious matter and a second knock can be deadly. If Tin Tin were a real person, he’d either be in a coma, have serious onset of CTE or dead.
 
It doesn’t even take someone to be knocked out to suffer a serious concussion and if they don’t follow a recovery plan as directed by a medical professional, then they risk going back to an activity too soon and risk the second impact syndrome which can kill. If you don’t have a comprehensive return to play/sport or activity plan at your school or organisation, then you need one today! Yes today! Don’t wait for someone to be seriously injured or killed to do something about it. Whilst that may sound dramatic, it is because it’s one of those injuries which isn’t as obvious as someone bleeding profusely from their body and isn’t as easy to treat, as each person recovers differently and at different speeds. In many cases, this is a minimum of 21 days with a planned recovery process overseen by a doctor. However, again, 21 days is the current thinking around minimum recovery times and may change or be different for individuals depending on age, development, severity of the knock and so many other factors and could be months for someone to fully recover.
 
For most schools, the main causation of this type of injury is sport, not getting whomped over the back of the head by international drug smugglers. However, I remember going on an excursion once when I was in Year 4 to a deer farm in Tamworth, which then turned out to be an enormous drug plantation, so anything is possible and fighting crime and international drug smugglers is probably way more interesting than a normal day at school. However, failing that, your injuries are mostly going to be from sports. Therefore, you need to be able to do an initial concussion test and assessment and then if this assessment suggests a concussion in a student or player, you need to site them out and they need to be seen and assessed by a medical practitioner.
 
For the case of Tin Tin, he could probably afford to get knocked out maybe once a month or every second month and although his writing and bad guy chasing may suffer and he’d have to put a lot of activity on hold, he might be ok with the occasional blow to the head. Having said that, I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. Added to his woes, if he’s not getting whomped over the back of the head, the bad guys are chloroforming him. All in all, Tin Tin by all measure should be dead by now. However, thanks to cartoon laws of reality and physics, he and his drunk dog are back again fighting crime and saving the day.
 
Since we can’t rely on these wonderful alternate reality laws of physics and health, make sure you have a concussion assessment and return to play with a plan in place so that you don’t risk the worst case scenarios that unfortunately happen to people back here in the real world.

​Catering is a really important part of your program. Any camp, school excursion or overseas school trip needs to have good food, with considerations made for any dietary needs. This could be based upon allergies, religion or preference.
 
The complexity of this can, at times, get a bit overwhelming. Some are justified, some are ridiculous and indulgent. The ongoing challenge is however, to ensure you push through the fact that some parents push stupid diets on their children and focus on the fact that getting the catering right for your critical needs students is vitally important.
 
For most students, it’s fairly clear and obvious that they’re a vegetarian, they can’t eat nuts or seafood or whatever the case may be and you simply provide this information to your camp catering team to sort out. However, it’s important not to set and forget this, as things can always slip through the cracks and when they do… you can have some of the most dangerous situations on hand.
 
On one program I was running, we were using a hardtop catered camp site for part of it. I walked in to have dinner and saw that it was a pasta dish with a tomato sauce. However, as I looked a bit closer, I saw some tiny prawns in it. I quickly looked around the room as this was not on the menu plan and one of our students was anaphylactic to shellfish. I spotted him down the back of the dining room, having just sat down to eat. I dashed down and immediately said not to eat the pasta. Despite being old enough to have some level or self-regulation, he hadn’t seen the prawns in the food. Thankfully, he hadn’t eaten anything and I arranged for another meal.
 
It turned out that the cook had a bag of spare prawns in the freezer and just thought he’d use that to ‘bulk-up’ the dish. The potential consequences of this could have been fatal. Even if you’re really careful with food allergies, it’s important that someone is monitoring this and not just ticking that box before the program and thinking it will have sorted itself out.
 
Another camp provider I was working with was completely dysfunctional and couldn’t understand dietary needs at all. This was obvious from the signs they had placed on the servery. ‘46 normal’. It wasn’t just the fact that they had odd signs, but then they hadn’t actually catered for any dietary needs at all, so the not-normal were given salad. I ended up having to go out at the last minute and buy some supplies because the caterers were so incompetent. Needless to say they were never used again. However, once again, if you don’t have someone actively monitoring this for your program, you can end up with all sorts of nightmares.
 
Even in-house, if you’re employing people who are supposedly well-experienced in food preparation and catering for school groups, this is no guarantee that things will go well. Once place I was working the cook (really couldn’t!) kept sending out meals raw. Now a raw hamburger is one thing, but when you have raw chicken breasts coming out for dinner, it’s obvious they’ve got no idea and time to replace them.
 
Whilst it’s often tempting for schools to contract out their camps to other people to organise and run for them, you’re still ultimately responsible for the health and safety of your students, so someone should be overseeing and observing meals, snacks and drinks throughout the day. In doing so, you can save yourself from far greater problems that can result from bad catering and a lack of attention to this part of your program. You don’t have to be over the top or hyper vigilant, but you do need to have your finger on the pulse as to what everyone is eating.

​If some of your providers can’t cater, or the level of complexity of students’ food needs is too great for you to adequately cater for them, its important to have this conversation with parents and find an alternate solution.
 
In my experience. if you have someone who needs a specific brand or exact item from a gourmet food store, then it’s probably best to document in your program information that some cases might require self-catering. I’ve had this both for extreme allergies and extreme parenting. The extreme parenting and ‘fussy eater’ scenario aside, if you have serious concerns about major food allergies and triggers, then just work with the parents to provide the food themselves. We’ve done this on many occasions and have also provided separate cooking equipment for those students to ensure there’s no cross-contamination.
 
At times, this is a challenging part of running the program. It doesn’t have to be and putting those plans in place early, talking with parents and the students, as well as monitoring what’s being provided, will help ensure those catering nightmares are well and truly kept at bay. 

​No you can’t do that! … It’s not safe!
 
This is the deafening catch cry of the fleet of helicopter and drone parents who put the apocalypse, now pilots to shame. Be safe! Take Care! Don’t do this! Don’t do that!
 
Stop! I wanna go home… take off this uniform and leave the show!
 
With such an increasingly large group of paranoid parents who don’t want anything to happen ever, unless it’s a participation award ceremony where the trophies have had their razor sharp edge buffed off, it’s difficult to know how damaging this will be over the long-run. But damaging it is and damaging it will continue to be for years to come.
 
In an attempt to make the world ‘safe and perfect’ for their wonderfully ‘perfect’ children, parents continue to cripple their kids into a false sense of security and confidence, or made them insanely dependent, depressed and anxious about the world. Either way, it’s not a healthy way to raise children.
 
Everyone learns and grows from taking risks, be they physical or emotional risks. If we don’t step outside of our comfort zone and do something, then we make little progress. We don’t learn from our mistakes and we’re unable to understand our true capabilities and grow as a result. Despite the world getting safer and being a far more stable place than it has ever been, for some reason, (probably social media driven) parents seem more fearful and paranoid about everything. They therefore aim to remove all risk and all potential challenges from their children’s lives. There’s just one massive problem with this. It’s insanely stupid and crippling for children and it increases the risk of harm to those children dramatically.
 
If you don’t know what it feels like to take a risk, then you have no way to gauge the level, severity or potential consequences of that risk. Teenagers struggle with this anyway, as their brains are wired to only seeing rewards out of any situation. However, couple this with absolutely neither perspective, experience nor understanding of taking risks, then you end up with an extremely dangerous combination of false confidence and the illusion of that everything will produce a positive outcome. This lack of experience and false confidence coupled with a parent who will never let a child take any risks, results in teenagers who will take completely unhealthy and dangerous risks with no thought of or perspective for the consequences.
 
However, if children are allowed to take risks, they’re going to injury themselves. They’re going to get dirty, scratched, knocked about, but each time this happens, they learn from this and develop a level of resilience. They gain understanding of what they’re capable and of what they’re not capable. They build a level of understanding of risk and from this are able to begin to self-regulate, because they know, if you jump out of a tree and land hard, this could result in a rolled ankle, broken wrist or something that’s unpleasant, but not exactly that bad.
 
We all learn best through our experiences, so those children whose parents don’t let them take any sort of risk, generally drive them to and from school no matter how close it is and don’t let them out of their sight ever. They don’t allow their children to develop a perspective or gauge for risk and consequently are more likely to take dangerous risks as all they have developed over the years is false confidence and nothing more.
 
Taking risks diminishes this false confidence and is critical to long term development so as children turn into teenagers, they’re far more switched on to identify real risks and approach them in a more responsible way. The next time parents ask why you’re doing this activity or that activity, have a positive conversation about the benefits of taking risks and growth in a great way from these experiences. 

Recently, I was working on a residential program and despite students needing to have a phone on them for our risk management as part of the program, we collected everyone’s phones at night. Now this was something which had wide spread support of parents and limited support from students. No surprises there with the Pandora’s box that’s been opened on that front, which is the point of this article.
 
Whilst many students thought I was the worst person in the world for taking their phones every night, it made me realise something which I suspected, but didn’t quite have the evidence to support it until now.

The phones generally went on charge before homework time in the evening around 7:30 and after prep, bedtime was around 9:45 with lights out at 10pm. With all the phones being recharged in the duty office overnight, I noticed something when I went back to wrap things up for the evening. Depending on what time all the students were settled, I’d generally head back into the office somewhere between 10:30 and 11pm.
 
Sitting there, writing up the daily notes for the next day’s handover, I’d hear the buzz, bings and blips of the fifty odd phones going off the whole time I was there. To begin with, it was just annoying, but it became progressively more concerning. One evening, I was up past midnight and the phones were still going.

This gave me the sudden realisation of how overwhelming this must be for their minds. Phones are already addictive by nature. This helps us to understand the ongoing problem that teenagers are facing with the inability to switch off from the connected world. If their phones are still alive with notifications late at night and I mean every night, not just weekend, every single night, what chance do they have to be able to cope in class with tiredness and a constant craving for another dopamine hit.
 
Like coked up lab rats, they become slaves to the device that’s shaping and manipulating their behaviour almost every hour of the day. This is bound to be slowly destroying their ability to cope with the real world and doing unknown long-term emotional damage. Yet parents are still giving their children phones at a phenomenal rate.

We have well and truly thrown in the towel on this one in such a short period of time. We need to pick up that towel and get back in the ring. This is something worth fighting for as large social media companies care nothing for their users and everything about their profits. These companies have built intentionally addictive functionality into their platforms to keep people online and this is the result, endless distractions designed to manipulate the formative years of children. When you see this toxic mess for what it really is, it makes you wonder about the world 2.0 and how regressive social media has been for us.

Digital technology is amazing, but we still need everyone to have the opportunity to switch off from it and not be constantly bombarded with messages, notifications and whatever other crap comes through their phones. Despite the large tech companies doing nothing but giving lip-service to social responsibility, we have a responsibility to help students switch off from this potentially dangerous ​and destructive world and provide them with the opportunity to understand the life and circumstances in which they find themselves living.
 
It’s time we gave them the opportunity to switch off and build real relationships with real people and not just be mindless slaves, slowly losing their sleep and minds to the wonderful machine that goes bing.

​Education without focus, is just like anything else without focus. It’s hap-hazardous at best and pointlessly time-wasting and counterproductive at its worst. However, this seems to be the way education goes these days. It’s all over the place where you’ve got a bit of this, a bit of that and a bit of everything. Yet if you’re trying to please everybody with everything, you invariably don’t end up pleasing anybody with anything. The fact is that the world has changed and in recognition of that, so must education.
 
Recently, I came across a number of different schools that are targeting specific areas for growth and development. I find this is a fascinating approach and one which has the potential to produce some amazing opportunities and educational results. However, how do you know what your child wants to focus on?
 
Often, it’s the parents who want their kids to do something, rather than the desire coming from the children themselves. I’ve seen this horrible and damaging sort of situation so often and you know what the end result will be, but it’s like watching a train wreck in motion. There’s not much you can do about it.
 
The fact is that if this is the case, then no matter how much a parent wants something, it's never really going to be something their son or daughter really wants to do. For example, my parents wanted me to learn the piano. I hated the piano. I didn't enjoy learning. I didn’t enjoy practicing. I didn't enjoy performing. I really didn’t enjoy anything about it. Despite loving to listen to music, I wasn’t someone who wanted to play an instrument of any kind. However, I enjoyed singing and I ended up doing some singing lessons and performances which I really enjoyed.
 
Yet without both these experiences, I would never have known what I liked and what I should focus on. To begin with, it’s well worth encouraging kids to experience a whole range of different activities and explore interests without the parental pressure and expectations to pick one thing that they really want themselves. This process can help students work out what makes them tick and therefore what they should be focusing on in their education, especially in their high school years.
 
I remember when I was in primary school at the end of one term, we did a week of trying out a different sort of activity. We were given a range of different options. We could choose bowling, squash, tennis or even roller skating and I don’t mean roller blading. I mean roller skating! Yes, it was still a thing back then and it was so much fun. You'd skate up to the DJ, request a song, then skate around the rink as fast as you could when your song came on! Unfortunately, the skating rink, ‘Skatehaven’ was turned into self-storage units years ago. Such a sad end to a wonderful venue, but back to the main point!
The fact was you were able to choose something and concentrate on it for a week. You’d learn different skills and techniques and you’d be able to challenge yourself doing something new and different. If you didn’t like it, at the end of the week you never have to do it again, but if you liked it, this just opened up a brand-new opportunity and interest for you. That week I chose squash!
 
This is something I really remember about primary school. Most of the time you don’t remember anything about primary school because it was so long ago and far away and but so much better than it is today. Every maths, English, geography and science lesson all blend into one with very little recollection at all of any that really happened. However, when you do something unique and different it stands out and becomes memorable.
 
To be honest, I’ve never played squash since, but I did really enjoy that week. I did however, go on to play tennis which is sort of the same thing anyway. Yet schools don’t tend to do many experiential education weeks like this. If they did, it would have a profound impact on a child’s education and development. Think about it this way. You have schools full of dedicated teachers, whose lessons will never be remembered. That to me seems like a complete waste of time and talent. Perhaps a few more memorable weeks each year doing something different wouldn’t hurt at all. In fact, even if you did a month a year throughout high school, that’s still only six months of a student’s education, which is six months more of experiences they will actually remember, learn from and cherish for the rest of their lives. Even taking this time out, they’ll still have five and a half years of blurred generic grey days in classrooms about which to forget.
 
With the stats suggesting that in Australia 40% of students are disengaged, why not try something different and meaningful to get at least some of those 40% back on track. In what are they interested? What do they love to do? Do you have any idea what drives them? If you don’t know that, you can’t tailor a program for them. Why not have a month every year that’s dedicated to doing different activities and I don’t mean outdoor ed activities, I mean a whole range of community, cultural, sporting and workplace activities to see what actually makes students get excited about their life and contribution to society. Some weeks they will like, some weeks they won’t like but it starts to develop a picture and it starts to give students a feeling for different activities, for different experiences and for different challenges. It lets them develop some ideas of a path that they enjoy and that they want to follow. It lets them explore what they want to explore and this can be tied back into the classroom and academic programs they need to be able to do to get into a specific field which interests them.
 
There’s a great benefit from this because once you have students re-engaged, they’re actually going to learn and so if you have someone who is learning and someone who is keen, they’re more likely to go on to further education or seek positive employment opportunities or contribute in a meaningful way to their communities. They’re less likely to be disillusioned, disengaged with the life, the universe and everything and sitting at home doing nothing.
With massive levels of youth unemployment in our country and a growing trend towards automation of many entry level and low-level repetitive jobs, it’s time to do something more useful and productive in education. At the end of the day, things like NAPLAN results and standardized tests are pointless numbers which are quickly forgotten like most classroom lessons. The emphasis that has been put on these things, would give you the impression that they’re useful indicators of long-term learning and employability, which they’re not.
 
At the end of the day, you want young men and women who can think for themselves and be able to help solve the terrible social, environmental and economic mess they’re been left with by previous generations. Finding meaningful experiential education experiences for them to have over the course of their schooling is critical to achieving this and it shouldn’t be lumped as a ‘co-curricular’ or one off activity. Build something useful into the daily lives of students and this will have a profound impact on the way in which they learn.

Most people overlook behaviour when preparing a risk assessment for any program. To be perfectly honest, in my experience, most people struggle to understand what they need to do to assess risk for an activity, which is fair enough as there’s no training for this at uni and most teachers don’t need to know, until they really do. Whilst I won’t go through what you need to do here, even if someone is experienced in doing this, one thing  often missed is the increasing problem children and teens are facing around social anxiety and how this is impacting on parents’ understating of what real risk is and why doing something different isn’t going to kill their child, but sitting on their device for almost eight hours a day could.
 
Due to some rubbish parenting and everyone’s individualistic desire to be the same, children have been given a lot of addictive devices from which they can suffer withdrawals. Their brains are smashed with marketing, body image messages and a filtered view of the world. Whilst in the past, our brains were attuned to be anxious about large animals which may kill us and eat us. This moved on to having your village raided by Vikings and being forced into slavery and even in fewer than the past 100 years heading off to war to fight the real threat of Nazis taking over the world. To ensure our survival, our brains are wired to help us fight or flee from threats to our safety. However, what happens when the world becomes safer, wars less frequent and the change of being eaten by wild animals almost entirely a thing of the past? Are we a happy and progressive world where we look out for each other? No, we’re in an increasingly individualistic world that has little regard for others and are becoming increasingly worried about things that don’t exist.
 
Whilst the Salem witch trials might be an extreme example of this, it does have merit. What happened in that situation was that mass hysteria overtook people’s ability to think for themselves and countless people became worried about someone putting a curse on them, or turning them into a newt. This self-fulfilling prophecy not only in Salem, but throughout England during this period, resulted in tens of thousands of innocent people being hanged, drowned and burnt to death.
 
“But that was in the past,” I hear you say and people don’t believe in witches anymore! Well true, but that’s not the point. The point is that people’s irrational fears took over. In the absence of any real threat or danger, people make it up in their minds. The same is true of many students and parents today when it comes to understanding risk and the activities they’ll experience outside of school.
 
We create new ways of worrying, especially when there’s actually not that much about which to worry. The chance of being killed by a terror attack is extremely low. Wars across the globe are at the lowest point in history. Most people in developed countries have access to plenty of clean drinking water and food. People have plenty of opportunities for work and freedom of movement and association, yet people are often irrationally worried about going on camp, or  abseiling. In terms of outdoor activities, abseiling is one of the safest activities you can do, yet this causes a huge amount of anxiety. The reality is that driving your kids to and from school each day is one of the most dangerous things you can do. More people die in road accidents every week than they do in a year or two or more in outdoor education.
 
With such a disconnect, how do we start having this conversation about risk with parents? Firstly, explain a bit about the current state of the world and back it with some stats. People are always quite surprised by this. Then explain a situation where you went up to a stranger and started chatting with them. What was the fear? How did that make you feel? What happened when they started chatting back to you and you discovered they were a really interesting person. If you haven’t done this, do this and then you’ll know what I mean and you’ll have a story to tell.
 
Talk about the growth associated with taking risks. Turn it over to the parents. What was something you did as a child that was fun but your parents didn’t know or what was the last time you took a risk with something new? How did it feel? What did you learn?
 
The reality is that most people’s fears are now grounded well and truly in the fantasy world with social media making it easier for parents and students to reinforce their own beliefs about a topic, no matter how stupid that topic may be. For example, a parent searching for bush walking fatalities, will end up down a rabbit hole which is solely focussed on how people have died in the bush. By doing this, they discount everything about the fact that bush walking is incredible for students to get out and about and learn about themselves and others. Social media and google searches will filter everything out and now the parents’ world is just a clouded mind of bush walking fatalities and just like witches, nothing else is right with the world until we ban it or get rid of it, which will then lead them to support groups for angry parents to want to ban bush walking and on it goes.
 
Unfortunately, it’s our job to bring them back to reality, because this is the exact same thing that’s dragging their kids down into other rabbit holes of pain, despair and other people who are always far happier, more successful and wealthier than they are. At the end of the day, most of this is total rubbish and yet it’s what children and parents are believing. Let’s bring them back to reality. Talk with them about social risks, social anxiety and maybe facing this fear is far harder than facing down a bear charging at you looking for a tasty meal (although this would have to be in North America, as our Koalas are way too stoned on gin leaves to care).
 
Often what I’ve seen is a huge amount of social anxiety prior to camps as both parents and students fear disconnecting from the world. The fact is that most of it’s a complete load of crap, but trying to get the socially anxious to understand this, is a much harder task than simply stating the obvious. At your next pre-camp briefing, call this out. Show them some stats and get them grounded in some level of reality.

Smart phones are one of the most addictive things you could give to children! Forget gambling, cigarettes and alcohol! Phones are the completely next level in their addictive and manipulative nature and yet parents hand them out to their kids without a thought!
 
Why does a primary school student need a phone? Are their lives so hectic that they need to ensure they’re reminded of their next appointment coming up on the calendar? Do they need to be in constant communication with ‘head office’ so that the mission critical operations of the day’s play with Jimmy is guaranteed 99.9% uptime?
 
To be perfectly honest, children don’t need phones at all. This is a massive failing of parents today who have either convinced themselves that they’re doing the right thing by giving their child a phone to ‘keep them safe’ or massive marketing and peer pressure from other children, parents and social media for which resistance is futile. Whatever the deluded rationale behind it is, it’s just wrong. Phones are dangerous, addictive and manipulative devices which are clearly contributing to the increasingly poor mental health of children today and their inability to cope with so many situations that can’t be resolved instantly.
 
Since this is so clearly self-evident, what don’t parents just cut to the chase and give their kids a nice big plate of cocaine to snort. Same basic effect: addiction, behavioural change and damage to mental health. For what are they waiting? They’re already creating dependencies and junkie type behaviours so, rather than doing it slowly over years with a gateway addiction, why not just cut to the chase, cut some lines and make it happen?!!
 
Whilst some people may think this comparison is over the top, I’m not the first person to make this comparison, nor will I be the last, so let’s look at it in some more detail.
 
Do any schools allow, smoking, drugs or alcohol to be consumed on site on a daily basis? In my experience, no! This will get you suspended or expelled, yet it’s common practice for students to be using their phones constantly throughout the day. Using a smart phone and all the buzzes and bings, notifications and ‘rewards’ which come from using it and giving it your attention all the time releases dopamine, which makes you feel good and re-enforces the behaviour surrounding the activity which just gave you that hit. Other than turning people into wandering zombies, what’s this constant deluge of notifications, stimulations and reliance doing to children?
 
Although it’s still only early days of this phenomenon, studies have shown that it’s further lowering children’s attention span, manipulating their daily activities and behaviours and reducing their ability to cope without constant stimulation and activity. Add this to the already challenging teenage years of relationships and body image and let them get bombarded by fake images of fake people throughout the world. You’re just setting them up for further trauma and mental health issues from which people are finding it more difficult to recover.
 
Is this what parents think is a good way of keeping their children ‘safe’? It seems rather idiotic to me and so far removed from any notion of safety, you may as well just get them hooked on a few random drugs instead and therefore save everyone a huge amount of time as the damage will occur far more quickly and efficiently. The next cry will be from parents for schools to conduct ‘phone testing’ to see if their child’s phone is ‘safe’ to use. Therefore, taking yet another step away from actual useful action and taking responsibility for themselves to not give their child a phone to begin with.
 
The actual danger and long-term damage associated with giving children smart phones, far outweighs the potential risk of their not having a phone so they can be contacted 24/7 ‘just in case.’ Generations of children have survived throughout the ages and managed to find their way home every day without the use of mobile phones, ride-sharing and GPS locationing, yet some parents would have you believe that the world is far more dangerous than it’s ever been and justify giving their child this dangerous device out of ‘safety.’ The fact is that in this situation, the phone, what it does and what it can access is the real risk and is doing real harm to children and adults alike. The random gangs of child kidnappers in white panel vans from whom parents are believing they are protecting their childing, are predominantly the perceived risk in the modern world and an extra-ordinarily rare occurrence. Yet parents seem willing to give their children smart-phones which open the door to a highly addictive, manipulative and unfiltered adult world, that’s far more dangerous and destructive at home than it is for their children to go down to the park or ride a bike with a friend or two and be ‘unsupervised’ and ‘out-of-communications range.’ If you’re really worried about the roaming white panel vans, perhaps paying for some martial arts lessons is a far better investment than the phone.
 
We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg for this problem. It’s impacting student behaviour, and engagement as well as their mental health and well-being. Schools and teachers are now being expected to clean up yet another mess which is not of their making. However, until parents realise the difference between the real risk of giving their child a smart-phone versus the perceived risk of not giving them one, it’s going to be a hard uphill battle ahead.
 
Some further interesting reading on the subject:
 
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/
 
https://www.promisesbehavioralhealth.com/addiction-recovery-blog/new-studies-compare-smartphones-cocaine-addiction/
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