Without a clear vision of what it is exactly that your colleagues want to achieve by taking their students on a school trip, it is unlikely that the LOtC experience will be as beneficial to students’ learning and development as they might have hoped.

Therefore, before your colleagues go any further with their planning, it is important that they ask the question, “What do I want to achieve?”

Of course, if your colleague in the English department plans to take his or her students on a trip to the Globe Theatre, it is clear that the purpose of this visit is to cement the learning that they have done in the classroom for their upcoming exams and beyond.

In other instances, it might be that your colleagues wish to use learning-outside-the-classroom to provoke an emotional response among students, as opposed to using the visit as a revision tool or for learning new knowledge.

Where your students are encouraged to engage on an emotional level with a subject or topic area, they will be able to remember information about it more readily. So your colleague in the history department might plan to take his or her students to a WW1 memorial site.

However, not every school trip has to be focused on learning. Sometimes, if there is time left at the end of term and the budget allows for it (or parents are willing to pay for it), your colleagues might plan a school trip as a reward, to boost morale, or perhaps to re-ignite students’ passion for a subject.

But it doesn’t end there – school trips, or learning-outside-the-classroom, can also be highly beneficial to secondary school students when it comes to deciding which career they would like to pursue.

School trips enable students to experience activities and events that they don’t have the opportunity to experience in the classroom, thus giving them a better understanding of where, in society, they (could) fit in.

Benchmark has created a Facebook and Twitter page especially for teachers where we post and tweet a constant stream of activity and location ideas for whatever it is you or your colleagues wish to achieve by undertaking learning-outside-the-classroom.

To get notifications of school trip activity and location ideas and how LOtC can be used to benefit your students’ learning and development, follow us on Twitter @MinibusLeasing or like our Facebook page – Benchmark Minibus.

For more information about Benchmark Leasing you can go to our website, call us on 01753 859944, or email minibus@benchmarkleasing.co.uk .