Children are growing up on screens. School trips can get them back into the real world

They can look around a museum online, watch clips from a West End show or see what a capital city looks like from their bedroom. That may have some benefits, but it isn’t the same as experiencing it in person.

I’m not against technology – screens are part of children’s lives and have a part to play in school too. But seeing an historic landmark or exploring a new environment for the first time on a phone is very different from getting off a train and immersing yourself in the real world.

At Highfield Leadership Academy, some of our pupils have never left Blackpool. A school trip might be their first time outside their town, or their first visit to a theatre or museum. If you’ve done those things all your life, it probably doesn’t sound like much, but the first time can be a big deal.

I remember one of our pupils who had struggled with attendance. He came with us on our London trip, where he visited a museum of medical history in London and saw a Victorian operating theatre for himself. A few weeks later, Victorian medicine came up in a history GCSE mock exam. He remembered the trip, brought what he had experienced into his answer and passed the paper for the first time.

Now, I don’t want to overclaim on that – one trip didn’t suddenly change everything, but it gave him something to connect the lesson to, something he had actually seen. Another pupil told us that, if it hadn’t been for the London trip and the new social connections and friendship groups he made during the trip, he would have found attending school much more difficult.

That’s why I get frustrated when school trips are talked about as an extra or a nice-to-have (or, worse, a “jolly”), as if the proper learning happens in the classroom and everything else is a bonus. True, for lots of children, going somewhere new is just part of growing up. They may already go on trains with their families, or go to restaurants, museums, theatres or other cities. They might get used to new or unfamiliar places without anyone teaching them how. But many children don’t get chances to do that, and sometimes school has to provide them.

At Highfield, we want our pupils to have those opportunities and, fortunately, funding makes it possible. Support like the Clore Duffield Foundation’s School Trips Grant has allowed us to offer experiences the school, and many of our families, could not otherwise afford.

I often say that children can’t be what they can’t see. Ask a child what jobs they know about and they will usually talk about the world they already know. Take them to a theatre, and they realise how many jobs sit behind what they see on stage – from lighting and sound to costume and set design – suddenly there are careers they may never have known about. We saw that after a group of our pupils went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of “Matilda” at the Liverpool Empire. Many had been involved in our own school production, and on the way home they were already talking about the performances, the staging and the set design, comparing what they had seen with their own work. One pupil even reflected that one of their classmates had made a better Miss Trunchbull!

You’ll never get the same thing from watching a clip. A screen can show you a place but it won’t give you the experience of getting there, working things out and knowing you managed it. For young people like those in my school, that confidence matters every bit as much as what they learn on the trip.

School trips aren’t time away from education. Sometimes education means putting your shoes on and going out to see the thing for yourself.

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Kim Greenwood is the Principal of Highfield Leadership Academy in Blackpool.

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