News How Wristbands Can Keep Your School Trips Safe

February 15th, 2021

Schools trips can enrich the educational experience for children of all ages, but planning a trip is a serious undertaking for teachers, support staff and parents. Taking a large group of children out of the classroom and making sure they all make it home on the bus at the end of the day is a challenge, but wristbands can help to make things easier.

Before embarking on a school trip, teachers and support staff have a lot of planning to do. During the required risk assessment, they will need to explore how they plan to keep track of children and make sure they don’t get separated from their group. Wristbands can help to answer a lot of these questions and help parents to feel more confident.

In this blog post, we’re going to look at some of the essential steps required when planning a school trip and how wristbands can help to improve safety. This information is useful for schools, parents and any business or organisation that regularly hosts school trips. If you’re looking for high-quality child safety wristbands, trust The Wristband Company to deliver.

Planning a school trip: things to consider

When children are in the classroom, it’s easy to keep track of their movements. When you take them out of the school grounds, you need to be on high alert and pay attention to the risks. These are just some of the things you need to consider.

• There need to be enough supervisors to be able to keep track of the children. When moving in groups, it helps to have a leader, someone in the middle of the group and then someone at the rear. The person at the back is responsible for making sure they are always the last person and no child is left behind.
• Every school trip should have a qualified first aider and they should be easy to identify. Using brightly coloured lanyards for staff can help the children to know who to ask for help. This is also helpful if the supervisors are parent volunteers, as the children might not know them.
• Older children can be left to explore, but they need to have clear instructions of where to meet and when so they don’t hold up the return transport. Printed instructions might get lost, so consider lanyards with clear plastic wallets so the children can wear the instructions and avoid losing them.

Child safety wristbands are excellent for keeping track of children and making sure they can be quickly reunited with the group if they are separated. Here are just some of the excellent uses for child safety wristbands during school trips.

Make it easier for supervisors to identify children

When visiting a place with children from different schools, it can be very easy to lose track of a group. If the children aren’t wearing a uniform, wristbands are a helpful visual cue for teachers and volunteers. The supervisors on the trip aren’t always familiar with the children; they might be parents or teachers from other classes. When counting children at the start and end of the trip, it’s helpful if supervisors can quickly confirm they are with the correct group by their wristband.

Children are known to follow a crowd and don’t always pay attention to the group they are with, so easily-identifiable wristbands can make it easier to move around as a group. If you have multiple groups from the same school, you can make it easier to keep them in the correct groups by using colour-coded wristbands. This information will be helpful for the children as they can easily see if they are with the correct group.

Include contact information

Your school trip wristbands should include contact information for the group leader. This will ensure that any children separated from the group can be found easily. If they get lost, children should be advised to approach an adult and ask them to call the number on their wristband.

Parents may feel nervous that their child is wearing something that identifies them, so it’s important to reassure them that there is no information specific to the child on the wristband. Instead, all of the wristbands will be the same and the child’s name is not included.

Include allergy information

Leave space on the wristband for the parents to include any allergy information or medical alert requirements. If there is a medical emergency, the first person to give help might not be the child’s teacher, so they might not be familiar with any allergies and medical requirements. 

In this situation, it’s helpful if the information is included in their wristband. This information may be added to the contact information wristband, or these children could wear an additional brightly-coloured wristband. 

For example, if you are visiting a factory and you have a child with a peanut allergy in your group, you can make staff aware that all children with a lime green wristband are allergic to nuts.These are just some of the ways you can make school trips safer using wristbands. To start designing your school wristbands, get in touch today.