Fiona Byrnes, Compliance & Risk Officer at St Mary of the Angels Secondary College in Nathalia, Victoria, shares how she is solving the challenges of excursion risk management with SafeExcursions.

What are some of the challenges your school has had managing excursion risk?

Our school does a LOT of excursions, in fact in normal times, we rarely have a full school!

One of the challenges I have is that teachers don’t really understand how to do risk assessments for excursions. They’re educators, so of course they understand that risks have to be managed for excursions, but when it comes to sitting down and completing a risk assessment for an excursion or a camp, many of them spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they need to write.

Many don’t understand the difference between a consequence and a control, or even understand what the risk is. I could see that SafeExcursions would prompt them to think about things they usually wouldn’t think to include. SafeExcursions lets them spend their time focusing on planning education outcomes and thinking about how they will manage the risks, rather than fretting over the specifics of a correct risk assessment.

At what point did you know that SafeExcursions would solve your problem?

It’s no surprise that some teachers are more skilled than others at completing risk assessments. I worked with one of our teachers who is more challenged with writing risk assessments to see how she would fare with SafeExcursions. She found that they system made sense and it simply walked her through everything she needed. I knew that if she could have a good experience, then my other staff would as well.

Why did you implement SafeExcursions now, when excursions are on hold?

I was keen to get set up now because when we get back to normal, it’s going to be full-on! We’ll be sending kids everywhere and it’s great to know we’ll be set up, staff will be trained and we’ll be ready to go.

What was your experience with implementing SafeExcursions?

It was great! The implementation was smooth and the CompliSpace team was so helpful. What I’ve done so far is put together three groups of staff – with varying skill levels – to test SafeExcursions. Next, I’ll be rolling this out to all staff.

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