Challenge, Reward, Repeat: Why repeated trips is key

So you’ve delivered a great trip. The students loved it. They were challenged, engaged – they’ve discovered the great joy of overcoming obstacles. Job done?

Not quite. Yes, you’ve done an excellent job (which few teachers manage). But it can’t stop there. A vital, recent finding is that trips need to be repeated to allow for long term impact on students.

That might seem obvious. But we rarely offer students more than one trip. We hear a young person articulate positive changes, like improved self-belief, and we hope it will last. We move on and focus on another task or year group. We should be thinking:

“Right, how am I going to ensure that this young person can maintain – or even further develop – this new found outlook.”

Greatly supporting this is a Fuller et al (2017) impact study on a Year 9 cohort in South London. They selected a group of twelve students to take part in twice yearly, 3-day residential trips (biking, camping, canoeing), all the way up until their GCSEs.

The result? Predictably, this lucky group of students showed clear gains, reaching their target GCSE grades and developing essential life skills, such as social confidence (due to bonds of trust and networks created on the residential which continued into school).

And the control group? They fell well below their target grades (the case study school is positioned within the top 5% of areas most deprived nationally). You have to feel sorry for the control group who missed out. But they are the norm. Repeated outdoor experiences are extremely rare in state schools (and even in many private ones).

Of course, running twice yearly trips is costly and very tricky with the time it takes up. And offering one trip is 100% better than no trip (and students will benefit). But how about an annual trip. If you can make that trip really worthwhile, with a high purpose goal, then we can find an excellent compromise.

It doesn’t have to be for every student. Some have their football; some their orchestra or Debate Mate. What I propose is identifying a cohort who want the outdoor challenge, and who need that boost to make them believe in themselves.

By offering many different kinds of trips, we provide a neat starting point for schools to begin this journey.