So, the kids are back at school and many parents are going through the process now of re-mortgaging the house in order to fund the coming years school trips. That may be a trip to Wigan Pier (back in my day),a week away doing outdoor pursuits or trips abroad.
For the last few years, we here at FPB towers have been arranging school trips (culture safari’s, field-trips… whatever you want to call them) for our clients to go on. Why? Invariably they cost more money and take more effort to arrange for us and them.
School trips are about so much more than soggy white bread sandwiches, Seabrook’s crinkle cut crisps and avoiding getting a Chinese burn from the kids on the back seat (that may just have been me).
On a field trip, students are more likely to retain information. Being immersed in information and being involved in visual and practical experiences will help students remember, learn and understand subjects.
Field trips will help reinforce classroom materials, bringing lessons to life. School trips give students the opportunity to visualise, experience and discuss information on a subject.
Going on field trips offers students a unique cultural learning experience. It allows students to be involved in new environments, key to encouraging curiosity about a given subject. It is also valuable as an exercise in broadening a student’s understanding of the world and their place in it.
Educational trips encourage the development of social, personal and study skills. It has been observed that students appear to come out of their shell on field trips, becoming creative and displaying leadership qualities.
Cambridge Centre for Sixth-form Studies 2018
It’s all about exploration, experience and embedding.
What we are not talking about here is an offsite team building exercise such as paint-balling or duck herding (yes, I said duck herding and yes, it is a thing). Whilst these kind of team building things have their value, what WE are talking about, is an experience (not just swapping your conference room for a hotel conference room), outside the office or workplace that explores and embeds precise learning objectives; or provides dramatic stimulus to change and challenge thinking. Often this is to do with innovating around product, revenue streams or ways of working and culture.
“Unengaged students in particular experience events and engage socially in new and positive ways; they will learn in the real world in a manner that is not possible in a classroom.” “How far should you go?”
OFSTED 2008
Here’s a few examples of some of the kinds of school trips we have organised for clients:
Supercharging your L&D experience – Working with an intact L&D team we used the V & A Museum of Childhood as the stimulus to explore some of the fundamentals of learning and how they could use play and gamification to elevate their internal L&D offering.
Culture Safari – We arranged time for Execs of a Pharma-tech to spend time visiting innovation hubs and start-ups to see what they could learn about rapid development, test and learn and how they could adopt agility and open sourcing of solutions within their own organisation. The “give-get” was that the start-ups were able to learn about scalability and as a result of the visits several start ups received funding or other support from the client.
Discovering new approaches to familiar challenges – Working with teams from a large global bank who wanted their staff to realise that they were all responsible for innovation (whether that be process or product), we arranged an experience at the Design Museum to explore ‘design thinking’ and how that can be used to enhance both internal and external user experiences, or put simply “surprise and delight”.
Aside from the learning objectives, these trips allow people to interact with each other in a different way. And ultimately it’s about seeing you own organisations challenges in the context of the outside, or sometimes, just different world and the epiphanies it may spur.
Get out of the office. Yes it is a little more expensive, yes it takes more time. But you will reap the rewards ten fold.
And if you want some help with that give us a shout, we'll bring the crisps and the batteries for the Walkman.