What teacher would leave a school trip destination without checking all the children were safely back on the bus? What pupils would climb a fence into a field marked, ‘danger unexploded mines’? And who would seize the opportunity of a residential trip away to go on a five day bender? Quite a few people apparently, according to Rhodri Marsden. The writer has invited readers to tweet their most hair-raising, hilarious and horrific school trip experiences to @rhodri and the lack of planning, health and safety and common sense will make you unsure whether to laugh or cry. The tweets cover the human error, ignorance, madness and boredom of British school trips all over the world.
Amongst the most outrageous is an account of a coach journey in Greece when the driver took hallucinogenic drugs causing him to crash, all be it at 10 mph, into a wall to avoid a skip which no one else could see. Another twitter user recounted how she huddled in a tent for hours in the middle of nowhere as a helicopter scanned the area with infra red looking for a missing student. We have children knocking themselves out fleeing from ghosts, accidently climbing into teacher’s dormitories and spending exchange trips with Nazi grandparents. Tweets covered an attempted overdose on hay fever medication, a bus driver stealing a pupil’s shoes and a coach rushing back to rescue Dave from Chessington World of Adventure, when there was no Dave….The other side of the spectrum tweeted was the mind numbingly dull, including visits to Stansted Airport for the ‘architecture’, a trip to a Wolverhampton sewage works and a day at The Mark Hall Museum of Cycling. The bank of traumatic, boring and dangerous school trip experiences continues to grow.
If you have a story to share you can tweet to @rhodri. If you have been inspired to avoid as many of these weird and wonderful antics as possible HandsamSchoolTripAdvisor can help you plan an incident free trip with our trip planning system, risk assessment guidance and lists of top reviewed locations.
