Important briefing paper for all staff that plan excursions in New South Wales government schools. The information in this briefing paper is current as at December 2022.

Schools have a legal duty to take reasonable care to protect students and this duty exists outside school premises and outside school hours. A school that breaches this duty by, for example, failing to provide adequate supervision during a camp, tour or excursion may be found to be negligent in failing to safely conduct an excursion.

The NSW Department of Education (NSW DoE) provides various policies and materials (which we will refer to collectively as the NSW Guidelines) on the procedures to employ with respect to excursions and specific sports and recreational activities. However, staff have limited time to read and digest guidelines before beginning to plan an excursion, camp or tour. Therefore, staff tend to rely on a ‘common sense approach’ to student safety and in many cases excursion planning strategies are undocumented.

The safest approach for schools is to have a structured and documented online planning process to assess all reasonably foreseeable excursion risks and conduct due diligence in relation to the external providers that they use.

To help schools manage the risks associated with excursions, CompliSpace has developed SafeTripBuilder, an online excursion risk management tool.

This paper discusses the different elements that make up the risk management and risk assessment processes in SafeTripBuilder and details the research, methodology and risk management standards used by CompliSpace to create the content that drives SafeTripBuilder.

This paper also defines what an “excursion” is, addresses particular issues that impact on planning excursions and managing COVID-19 risks and discusses the use of inherent and residual risk assessments.