Standards Development

Scope

We envision a new ISO standard which will provide guidance for managing risk for youth (in particular. minors due to their particular vulnerabilities) and school trips for both domestic and international travel. The standard will gather best practices to address typical risks for this sector such as behavioural breaches and carelessness of students, weather-related problems, requirements for those with special needs (such as travellers with disabilities), technical elements such as mechanical failures of equipment, etc. The standard will benefit both the travellers themselves and the organizations that serve them by covering:

• Safety and security of groups of young people travelling (specifically but not limited to school groups);

• Risk management for organizations such as school boards, tourist attractions, tour operators, service providers, and recreational activities, etc.

For more details, see Appendix A of the outline. This proposed standard will not include how to organize such trips and it will not be limited to adventure travel.

Purpose

Purpose and justification of the proposal Each year millions of young people around the world take part in school trips (day trips or excursions that see the group staying one or more nights), for educational field research, sports events, church activities, training, and so forth - domestically and increasingly travelling internationally with their classes, teams or other special interest groups.

As the volume and complexity of organizational needs required constantly increases, both for the groups planning and travelling and for the tourism organizations hosting these groups, so too do the potential risks and hazards associated with these trips. While it is true that risks like vehicular accidents or natural disasters are hard to predict, many risks are avoidable if appropriate checks are carried out. Many injuries and even fatalities are a result of lack of knowledge or carelessness which could and should have been mitigated with more careful planning.

Our recent empirical research indicates that many travelling school children do sustain injuries, harm and even fatalities during their trips. For example, in Canada we have identified several media stories and other resources: in 2008, 13 students were killed in Bathurst, NB in a collision: http://bit.ly/2f1wATb ; and in 2017, a school trip to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario resulted in the drowning death of a high school student: http://bit.ly/2urdSrk (in 2018, the supervising teacher was charged with criminal negligence and the case is pending : http://tinyurl.com/y6n57lqp ; as well, the government of Ontario had a third-party review of its school boards‘ outdoor education policies by Deloitte, and one recommendation was to create a centralized policy support centre http://tinyurl.com/y4qvuflz ; the complete report can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/yy962qdo ). Public authorities have begun to improve their policies in light of past incidents – Calgary-area schools and Parks Canada have made changes since the 2003 deaths of seven students in an avalanche during a ski trip: http://bit.ly/2tRQHpy. We intend to conduct some research with Parks Canada for school-organized field trips to see some of their incident data that we can collect to support this view. Very recently (as of this writing), two 18-year-old university students on a field trip on Vancouver Island were killed (and seventeen others injured) when their bus rolled over on a remote road: https://tinyurl.com/y4ohbf9l

As well, a survey of tools currently available to and used by school boards across the country shows a wide range of differences in detail and scope. This suggests that the health and well-being of students is being addressed with differing levels of diligence and confidence across the country. Some examples include: the guidelines for school trips from the Strait Regional School Board in Nova Scotia: http://bit.ly/2tWB9VE ; procedure on risk management on school trips from the Conference of Independent Schools in Ontario: http://bit.ly/2vfT7ll ; the guidelines for the East Central Alberta Catholic Separate Schools: http://tinyurl.com/y2massmy ; and the politique sur les sorties et les voyage en milieu scolaire from the Commision Scolaire-Rene Levesque in Quebec: http://bit.ly/2uR0pK2 . As will be seen, these documents range in length from five pages to 54, with a widely varying level of complexity and thoroughness. One risk manager from St. Michaels University School, a private school in British Columbia, shared with us having considered using BS 8848, but ultimately decided to continue with the school's own internal policy. The Canada Safety Council has a single page on its site regarding field trips: http://bit.ly/2upDODx

In the UK, 2018 saw the death of a 16-year-old Scout in Conwy, North Wales when the scouting troupe split up and it was unclear where the Scout was and thus he was left without supervision (https://tinyurl.com/u2ywptn). In news from Japan, 2016 saw three deaths of students in separate incidents on school trips: in February, a 12-year-old girl was struck by a V02/2019 Form 4: New work item proposal (NP) Page 4 snowboarder and killed: https://tinyurl.com/y4kjtueh. Later in 2016, at least two more deaths on school trips were recorded: in September, a female sixth grader in elementary school died by drowning in a bathtub in the hotel room in which her school group was staying, while in November that year, a male third grader in junior high school died after falling off a cliff while hiking during his school trip to the USA. Furthermore, in December 2018, a 16-year-old Japanese high school student on a school trip to Australia drowned while snorkelling (https://tinyurl.com/y5gkjhh7 ).

In Germany, the youth hostel association in Bavaria (Deutsches Jugendherbergswerk Landesverband Bayern e.V.) organizes an annual training camp for five days for approximately 1000 teachers in how to organize safe school trips. This initiative illustrates interest in guidance for best practices from the field. The Deutsche Gesetzliche Unfallversicherung https://www.dguv.de/en/index.jsp (German Statutory Accident Insurance Association) has produced a 40-page guideline document for teacher organizing safe school trips and excursions in Germany. Link in German here: https://tinyurl.com/yyz7huuu

We have identified an Indian document on safety of school children, an elaborate document on how school trips in India are being planned.

In France, the government has developed several safety-based regulations on how to handle youth groups and school trips but they do not have any specific national standards on the matter. See here for more information (text in French): https://tinyurl.com/y3rp7mc5

Examples in other countries include: a recent annual report by the Ministry of Education of Israel reported six deaths of students on school trips in a single year (2013). Furthermore, any swimming activities in nature were banned in Israel as a result of several drowning cases, as some major safety rules were totally ignored. There has also been a growing outcry of parents that they are being ignored by school managements or provided very little detail as to arrangements made by contractors hired to safeguard their kids while on school travel - this is an intolerable situation in today's reality where parents expect to be as updated as frequently as possible as regards their children‘s welfare. Additional reviews of media stories around the world indicate that casualties and incidents are frequent for groups of young travellers in the framework of their annual trips - where issues of liability, insurance and school reputation as a whole could play a significant part. In other countries (Zimbabwe, for example) we see such incidents as the 2013 death of a 16-year-old -- http://tinyurl.com/y2nq8u9f -- (the third student to die on a school outing that year), as well as a 1991 crash that killed 87 passengers on a school bus (http://tinyurl.com/yxf8f7v5 ).

Of course, the potential for accidents exists everywhere, on trips across the city or across an ocean, in school settings or youth groups. It will vary greatly depending on local conditions, but no one is immune to tragedy. By gathering best practices from as many sources as possible, we can make the proposed standard one which will reduce incidents and, we hope, save lives. We must be careful to make our standard as widely applicable as can be.

Consider the following: Is there a verified market need for the proposal? What problem does this document solve? What value will the document bring to end-users?

See Annex C of the ISO/IEC Directives part 1 for more information.