Off-site activities and educational visits

Key Benefits

• Advice and support on all aspects of off-site activities and educational visits.
• Approval procedure for specific educational visits so you can check that your arrangements reflect our guidance and statutory requirements.
• Access to the OAEV02 Direct Crisis Management support service (additional charges apply).
• Reduced rates for our comprehensive range of training courses.

Service Details

Advice, information and support

We will:

• provide advice and support by telephone, email or through meetings, on all aspects of off-site visits
• arrange for you to get advice from other professionals and organisations, as required and agreed with you - your academy will be responsible for any charges made by these professionals
• provide relevant information distributed to all maintained schools through Czone, including ESCC policy, procedures and guidance.

Monitoring and approval

We will monitor and approve visits under the same approval procedure that applies to maintained schools. This applies to the following types of off-site visits:

• overseas visits
• hazardous activities, as listed in our Off-site Activities and Educational Visits: Regulations and Guidelines (Word, 1.7MB) (2011)
• residential visits.

We do not routinely monitor other visits, such as low complexity day visits, unless they are chosen as part of our authority-wide sampling procedure for monitoring.

We will only carry out field monitoring of visits at your request. We will make a daily charge for this, plus expenses. The fee includes a written monitoring report.

Training

We offer training and development courses for educational visit coordinators (EVCs) and group leaders.

• EVC training (1 day)
• EVC update training (half day)
• Group leader training (half day)
• Group leader update training (half day)
• centralised crisis management training, based on an offsite crisis scenario (half day)
• bespoke crisis management training, delivered at your academy, based on an onsite crisis scenario (time negotiable)

Our courses are offered at a discounted  for subscribing academies - see our 2013-14 Academies (Adobe PDF, 184KB) price list for details.

Course fees include course materials, light refreshments and a buffet lunch (one day courses only). They do not include travel expenses and supply cover costs.

We also arrange training and development courses provided by other organisations, for example for specific outdoor qualifications. These will be open to academy staff at the published LA course fee if there are places available.

On request, we can offer bespoke training courses to suit your individual needs - see price list (Adobe PDF, 184KB) for details.  

The service costs £1 per pupil per year.

Pricing

Funded Support

Getting The Most From Your Service

What Your School Needs To Do

• Ensure that areas accessed by the schools resilience support officer (SRSO) comply with health and safety and other relevant legislation. Also make sure that services used by the SRSO are safe and tested as required by legislation.
• Designate a member of staff as the educational visits co-ordinator (EVC) This person must be appropriately trained and competent to fulfil the role – for more information see the Department for Education (DfE) website.
• Communicate with the SRSO through the office of the EVC, unless you have made alternative arrangements. Your EVC is responsible for raising issues with your headteacher, senior leadership team and governing body.
• Put an educational visits policy in place, either as a stand-alone policy or as part of your academy’s health and safety policy. You must provide evidence of this to the SRSO before the service begins.
• Ensure all visits comply with the Off-site Activities and Educational Visit Regulations and Guidelines (Word, 1.7MB) (2011).
• As the employer, be responsible for the care, health and safety of staff, volunteers and young people taking part in educational visits. In providing the off-site activities and educational visits service, ESCC is acting in an advisory capacity.
• Make payments for this service to ESCC promptly.
• Indemnify and keep indemnified ESCC from and against any and all loss, damage or liability (whether criminal or civil) suffered and legal fees and costs incurred by ESCC resulting from a breach of any terms in this service by your academy including:

- any act neglect or default of the Academy's employees or agents
- breaches in respect of any obligation contained in this Service Offer resulting in any successful claim by any third party.
- the receipt of money by either of the parties shall not prevent either of them from questioning the correctness of any statement in respect of such money.

All documents and information on Czone remain the property and copyright of East Sussex County Council, except where it is clearly stated otherwise (for example DfE guidance documents). Your academy is free to use the documents and information within your establishment but you must not share or pass them on to anyone outside the academy without our permission.

Quality Assurance

Contact the Schools Resilience Support Officer if you have any suggestions for improving the service, or have any problems with it.

Terms & Conditions

Support