When I was in my teens, at the start of every single summer holiday, we’d make the short drive to a campsite near Beeston Castle, the grand old thing situated on the hill overlooking Cheshire.
With my dad as a guide (he was a lifelong member of the English Heritage so I think I must have visited their entire location catalogue during my teens), we’d walk up to the top, gaze at the wondrous view and walk back down. Sometimes, we’d watch one of the re-enactments.
I didn’t realise it then, but those regular visits really inspired me to feel history, not just see it. I’d imagine what it would have been like to have been a medieval knight wandering up that same path. Sometimes I’d see dozens of horses charging around with warriors jousting or armoured infantry battling each other.
I’d truly immerse myself into that world, something I’ve tried to do for my students in my classroom ever since. But nothing matches the incredible thrill of a truly relevant educational visit. Those formative “educational visits” with my family may have even sowed the seed which eventually led to me becoming a history teacher, like my father before me.
Collective experience
With this background, I’ve always had a keen desire to create educational visit opportunities. The first educational visit I organised was in my first year of teaching. It was a visit to Leeds to watch a “history comes alive” event. We took our Year 11 cohort - perhaps 50 or so kids.
I remember being so nervous when my head of department passed me the microphone on the bus, but that trip passed off brilliantly.
One of my most vivid memories of the real power of an educational visit was when we travelled to Ypres with a group of Year 9 students. One of the students had lost their great-grandfather in the Battle of the Somme and we visited the grave. This collective experience, for all the staff and students present, was timeless. I vividly recall sitting next to this student on the bus on the following day and having a very meaningful chat with him, one where I was able to offer words of condolence and encouragement that I would never have had the chance to in a classroom setting.
That’s the thing with the visits: they bring history alive, but they also offer a timely reminder to you, the teacher, of each child’s individual story, their personality and the fact they aren’t a piece of data to be spat out at the end of Year 11. It’s often on an educational visit that real bonds are formed between students and between staff and students. Students and staff never forget a proper educational visit.
I’ll never forget the Auschwitz tour with a group of year 10 students, particularly the look on their faces when we first entered the room with the cabinet packed full of confiscated children’s toys.
Students who seemed as hard as nails at school were suddenly unable to respond or speak, not wanting to engage with each other, just absorbed in that awful moment. Others openly sobbed as the tour went on, feeling safe to do so, away from the school environment. These are things you don’t think about when organising the visit. You think about the logistics and you think about what you’ll do, but not the actual experience, the way children will react and behave and particularly the lasting impact the trip might have.
Special value
Educational visits in history have a special curriculum value and they don’t have to be super costly or tough to organise. I recall one year I took groups of students to the local church to study the various war memorials, to research fallen locals and so on. This was free to do and full of benefits.
It’s absolutely worth trying to integrate an educational visit into schemes of learning. Time pressures are often immense and there are barriers to overcome in organising any trip out of school but, ultimately, the benefit is infinite.
One of those same Year 10s we’d taken to Auschwitz came to me on the day of the GCSE history exam the following year and told me they’d specifically included something one of the guides had told them in one of their answers. If that doesn’t demonstrate the intrinsic link between visit and curriculum, I’m not sure what can.
Nothing can beat seeing and feeling a place that you’ve read about in a book - it just all comes together. It worked for me as a child and I’ve seen it work for so many children I’ve worked with: the irreplaceable power of a “school trip”.
Discover amazing outdoor educational experiences across the UK here.
Tom Rogers is a head of history and tweets @Rogershistory
