Out And About - A Teachers Guide To Safety On Educational Visits

Out and About - A Teacher’s Guide to Safety on Educational Visits, published by Schools Council Publications through Evans Methuen Educational in 1972, is a marvellous survival from the age when taking thirty children somewhere outside the school gates was considered both educationally valuable and only moderately likely to end in administrative disaster.

This is a practical guide for teachers responsible for school trips, field visits, excursions and other organised attempts to move groups of children from one place to another without losing anybody.

A noble ambition.

The book belongs to a period when educational visits might involve coaches, youth hostels, museums, country walks, factories, farms, coastlines and possibly the sort of weather that causes everyone to discover exactly how waterproof their coat really is.

The central message is straightforward: children benefit enormously from seeing the world beyond the classroom.

Unfortunately, the world beyond the classroom contains roads, cliffs, rivers, machinery, traffic, strangers, weather and children.

Hence the guide.

Published in 1972, this is particularly interesting as a piece of educational history because attitudes to risk, supervision and responsibility have changed enormously since then.

There were certainly rules.

There was certainly concern for safety.

But the great modern civilisation of risk assessments, consent forms, safeguarding procedures, emergency-contact databases and laminated high-visibility jackets was still some distance in the future.

A teacher could apparently take pupils somewhere and return with all of them without first producing a document the thickness of a small telephone directory.

How they managed this remains one of the great mysteries of twentieth-century education.

The guide considers the practical hazards involved in taking pupils away from school and the precautions teachers should consider before setting off.

Transport matters.

Supervision matters.

Planning matters.

Knowing where everybody is matters quite a lot.

Anyone who has ever accompanied a school trip will recognise that last point as both obvious and strangely ambitious.

There is something charmingly serious about the title Out and About.

It sounds carefree.

Almost recreational.

One imagines smiling children exploring nature while an enthusiastic teacher points towards an interesting geological formation.

Behind the scenes, however, somebody is counting heads for the nineteenth time.

That contrast is eternal.

Educational visits are supposed to broaden horizons, encourage independence and bring learning to life.

Teachers mainly want everyone back on the coach at 4.15.

Preferably the same people who arrived on it.

The book also offers a fascinating glimpse into the educational philosophy of the period.

The early 1970s saw considerable enthusiasm for learning through experience, fieldwork and activities beyond the classroom.

Children were supposed to encounter real places, real environments and real situations rather than acquire their entire understanding of the world from textbooks.

An admirable idea.

Unfortunately, real places contain mud.

Modern readers may find some of the advice reassuringly familiar and other parts wonderfully dated.

Safety never goes out of fashion, but the machinery surrounding it certainly changes.

The basic principles remain remarkably constant: plan properly, understand the hazards, supervise sensibly and avoid circumstances in which explaining events to the headteacher becomes difficult.

For teachers, educational historians, collectors of vintage school material and anyone interested in how childhood and institutional responsibility have changed, this is a delightful little period document.

It is also excellent material for anybody nostalgic for the era of school trips when the packed lunch came in a plastic bag, the coach smelled faintly of vinyl and somebody was sick before reaching the motorway.

Condition: Fair. A used vintage copy showing noticeable signs of age and handling consistent with a practical educational publication from 1972. It remains perfectly suitable for reading and reference, but it has clearly been out and about itself.

No ISBN stated.

A wonderfully specific piece of educational history from the days when teachers were expected to expose children to the wider world while simultaneously preventing the wider world from doing anything unfortunate to them.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where permission slips are optional, but returning with the correct number of customers is strongly encouraged.

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