Somewhere in New Zealand this week, a school leader will sign off on an EOTC trip, a tramp, a kayak, a snorkelling activity or a trip to the zoo. This will probably happen between a couple of meetings and a sudden urgent issue that’s just popped up. The EOTC sign off will look like routine paperwork, but we know, it isn’t!
David Gregory, Founder / CEO, Xcursion Safety shares his thoughts on how best to prepare for EOTC.
EOTC safety planning, the system a school uses to plan, approve, supervise and review Education Outside the Classroom, is one of the more consequential responsibilities a school leader carries. Tragically, so often we’ve seen exactly what happens when EOTC is treated as routine or decision making loses its rigour.
Since EOTC programs are some of the best learning experiences students have, it’s important to have both effective staff training and a clear and consistent safety system backing it.
What EOTC Safety Planning Actually Means & Who’s Accountable
EOTC safety is the staff training, planning systems and process a school uses to identify, assess, and manage the risks and operations specific to each of activity. As with all safety systems this requires ongoing training, review and continuous improvement to ensure our staff and processes remain sharp.
This means that all staff leaving the school grounds should have an appropriate level of training to ensure the safety of the group.
Responsibility for the safety system ultimately sits with the board of trustees, however, principals and senior school leaders carry this responsibility for the operational implementation of the system: Providing appropriate training, approving trips and making sure a risk assessment written last year for the program still holds true this year and has been reviewed and approved.
Nobody involved in an EOTC program is ‘just’ a classroom teacher. The moment they step outside the school grounds their duty of care increases and they have a responsibility to understand and implement the school’s safety system. Unfortunately, time and time again incidents happen because staff don’t have any safety training which leads to preventable incidents.
What EOTC Incidents Show Us
In December 2023, a group of Auckland primary-aged students narrowly avoided drowning on a Waikato River float using pool noodles rather than proper flotation equipment. WorkSafe found the school’s policies, planning, supervision and emergency procedures were inadequate and the trip should never have gone ahead. In 2025, the school entered an enforceable undertaking committing to staff training.
Fixing a broken system, once a regulator is looking over your shoulder is far more costly and onerous than taking some simple pro-active steps to train staff and implement a clear safety system and process. In fact, with the investigation and legal costs alone could train all your staff for a decade and build an effective safety system 12 times over.
Personally, having built safety systems from scratch, trained and supported staff and investigated incidents, I’d rather spend a small amount of time doing the training and system design, than spend a single minute with a lawyer. To that point over 20+ years of being an EOTC teacher and head of campus, despite bumps, scratches and the occasional broken arm, we never once had to call in the lawyers. Good luck? No! It came down to effective staff training, risk management and safety culture.
What Good EOTC Safety Looks Like
Some Key Considerations:
• Every EOTC activity camp, sport, day trip, or international programme runs through the same clear and consistent process, not a stricter one for activities that ‘look risky’ and a rubber stamp for the ones that don’t. The teacher running your program is usually the determining factor as to how risky the activity is.
• Risk assessments are written each time for the actual trip: this location, this group, this week’s conditions not a generic template with the date changed.
• Approval is a genuine check. Someone with real authority reads the planning and assessment closely enough to ask the question Whangārei Boys’ High couldn’t answer in 2023: what counts as high risk here leading up to and on the day of the program and why?
• Staff are trained and refreshed regularly, not once at induction and near misses get reported and reviewed with the same seriousness as actual incidents.
Reducing The Burden on Staff and Improving Safety
Most school leaders already know what good EOTC safety management looks like. The honest problem is capacity: keeping risk assessments current, chasing updated medical information before every trip, and making sure every supervising staff member has the right training and mindset to make sound safety decisions or call back to school when they need to.
This is why we built fast and effective online training for teachers so they understand their duty of care in less than an hour and our Xcursion Planner software which streamlines risk assessments, permission notes, planning and program feedback so that your EOTC safety is systematised and extremely easy for staff to understand their planning and duty of care obligations.
If you’re at the ISNZ conference in Auckland this September, come and talk to us about what clear, consistent EOTC safety planning looks like at your school. Or get in touch anytime to see how we can help support you and your school with training or our Xcursion Planner software so that your EOTC programs are memorable for all the right reasons.
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