Some practical notes and observations on the planning and operation of school trips: The Coach

Did you know, seats on coaches are numbered? On older coaches the numbers are often on the overhead racks (more on these later) on newer coaches they are typically on a small sticker by the window of each row. These are often found on both sides of the coach, but may only be on the right hand side, they are never only on the left. There isn’t a standard configuration for a coach, but as a trip leader you can learn the configuration of the coach that you’re going to be using. For journeys of under two hours, I would suggest putting in place a seating plan; for longer journeys you might not want one, but you should still consider the coach as a space that you need to run effectively.

The coach is a fascinating space to me, and the space that I think is most consistently poorly staffed and managed by schools. While many of the principles of the coach journey remain the same whether you’ll be on the coach for thirty minutes or thirty hours, on very long coach journeys the coach becomes accommodation and evolves as a space into an entire self-contained community with its own rhythm. It has day and night cycles, moments of rest and wakefulness. Sun rises and sets on your journey. There is an evolving scenery through the windows; hundreds of miles of vineyards, mountain ranges of jaw dropping beauty, great lakes, deserts, but mostly pure tedium.

You live your journey to the needs of the coach, the switching of drivers is a factor, but the biggest one is the beast’s need for diesel. Every few hundred miles it takes an eye-watering amount into its cavernous fuel tanks; as the coach is refuelled, you and the students get fifteen minutes to go to the toilets, buy whatever is on sale in the service station, and generally amuse yourselves. Each toilet across an international trip is an adventure in and of itself.

The coach is a space and it needs to be managed, as you would manage any space in your school. You need a set of rules and a schedule which works to the benefit of all. When you think about very long journeys, you should place reasonableness at the heart of your decision making. Electronic devices are fine, loud voices are generally tolerable, playing music loudly on a good Bluetooth speaker is fine – as long as there’s only one and the music is agreed by consensus of the students.

You also need to create time where the music goes off, electronic screens are dimmed, conversation may only happen in whispers – if at all. I would suggest that for a secondary trip, you allow no music, bright screens, loud voices, or use of a mobile phone flashlight, between the hours of 10pm and 8am. If any rule which pertains to a device is violated on the coach in these hours, the device should be confiscated and returned in the morning. If a student is unreasonably loud, put them at the front of the coach next to the trip leader. It must be possible to sleep in these hours.

Everyone does this wrong

The worst coach journey goes like this: the coach door is opened and all of the kids pile in. The back row has the most desirable seats and the kids with the highest social capital make a beeline for them, there may be a little tussle over who has the right to those five seats. Then the teachers follow and occupy the front two rows of the coach. The trip leader takes a register, and gives a list of expectations as to how the students are to behave on the coach. Then all of the adults settle down to spend the next few hours with their backs to the students.

You wouldn’t run a classroom this way.

Every now and then the noise will become unbearably loud, things will be thrown, they might even hit a teacher in the front two rows, a glance in the mirror shows that a bunch of kids are standing, some on their seats, nobody is wearing their seatbelt; a glance goes around the supervising teachers and one teacher is sent to deal with it. They stand up at the front, bellow at the whole coach, walk with a Terminator stride to the back row, demanding seatbelts be put on as they go. They reach the back and find that none of the trip leader’s expectations are being followed, they make sure a few are followed, rebuke the kids, and return to the front having done their job. The clicking of seatbelts being unfastened again follows their journey back to where they belong.

This resetting of expectations will happen a few times during the journey. On arrival you will see that the coach is an absolute mess, it will be full of litter, it will be at its absolute worst towards the back of the coach, it will be disgusting on the back row. You may also discover from disclosures that students were bullied during that journey.

I think that the worst coach journey is the most common coach journey. It isn’t safe, it isn’t enjoyable, and it’s entirely preventable with good planning and management.

Break the back row

The first and most important issue in coach management is the placement of teachers. You would not hope to run a classroom with your back to the students, you cannot run a coach journey with your collective back to the coach. You need the trip leader to be in the front row or the jump seat as they will need to communicate with the driver(s), the next most senior person on the trip should be as far away from them as possible to ensure that the space is controlled.

The back row of a poorly run coach is a nexus for the worst behaviour and exerts a gravitational pull on your most difficult students, why would it not? It’s the place least visited by teachers, it has five seats together that they can occupy with their friends and control the space. When you place a teacher in that space, especially when that teacher boards the coach first, you stop the problem of the back row and all associated problems in their tracks.

With a teacher on the back row, the only students who will take seats on the back row are those who don’t mind sitting next to a teacher, these will generally be easier students; more difficult students will take seats further forward where they will always be observed by the teacher on the back row with a generally panoptic principle. Occupying the middle seat of that row gives the teacher an uninterrupted view forwards of the whole coach and easy passage along the length of the coach where necessary. The teacher at the back will not get conversation with the other adults on the trip, but can always be in communication through the trip WhatsApp group which is a prerequisite of any complex trip.

You live here now

When I’m not trip leader, I always position myself on the back row of the coach. I have learned many things from this location, but while fluency in MLE and a fondness for some bits of drill music, are things I will leave readers to discover by themselves, I do have some universal advice for those taking the back row.

As it’s unreasonable to enforce monastic silence on a very long coach journey, you will get very little reading done. You will be subjected to a lot of music that you don’t particularly like; remember that you are still a teacher, you can instruct the volume to be turned down or call a halt to a lyric that is truly obscene; but often the music being played is not music you can reasonably object to on grounds of propriety, it’s just not your taste. Bring comfortable headphones, and if they’re Bluetooth make sure you have a way of charging them too. As well as having a way of listening to your own music, audiobooks, and podcasts; putting on your headphones works as a signifier to students that you don’t want to be disturbed for a period of time, generally this will be respected.

You should be able to charge all of your electronic devices, and these are your priority, but it is also worthwhile to be able to charge some of the electronic devices of students should they request. A few 10,000 mAh battery packs go a long way, unlike in school, banning smartphones is neither viable nor desirable. Being ready and willing to provide a few hours of charge to an iPhone or Nintendo Switch will gain some kudos, and help prevent your rest being interrupted by bored students.

With your battery packs you should carry only the cables you need, but you should carry all of the cables you need. On one educational visit in recent years, forty hours of coach travel saw my Bluetooth headphones run completely flat. I had to resort to amusing myself during the day by pointing the reflection of my watch face at the back of the head of everyone in the coach in quick succession until I’d got all 48 in 30 seconds. I had the battery packs, I just hadn’t considered that my headphones used the old microUSB rather than the now ubiquitous USB-C.

On a very long coach journey the coach becomes the confines of your world, you need to plan for this and explain this to students. While you should do seating plans for shorter journeys, and you can require silence for the length of the journey, this is unreasonable for long journeys; moreover there is no reason for a student to undo their seatbelt in a two hour journey, there are plenty in a twenty hour journey . From the back row you should be able to see that students are wearing seatbelts, but there are times in a twenty hour journey where they will need to remove them, tell them this, and require that they raise their hand if they wish to remove their seatbelt. The teacher on the back row should see and give permission where and when it is reasonably safe to do so. If the teacher on the back row is asleep then it is incumbent on a student next to them to wake them up; you will get very little sleep on the back row.

They live here now

Day and night cycles, ablutions in motorway service stations, some truly primitive toilets, you need to prepare your students for all of this, this is an epic journey and they need to be equipped psychologically and physically. One thing that will make their lives much easier is a stocked carry on to be put on the overhead rack.

Specify what they need in a carry-on. They will certainly need a toothbrush and toothpaste, I use an electric toothbrush on long trips, but most students use manual ones. They will also need an antiperspirant. You might wish to require this to be a roll on rather than a spray to prevent the likelihood of them spraying antiperspirant in the coach, I’ve not found this to be a problem in my personal experience, but colleagues tell me that it can be an issue. A bar of soap and a flannel is always helpful; you might also suggest that they bring a spare T-shirt in their carry on, although many of the places you stop at won’t be places where they would be inclined to change shirts except in an emergency.

In some countries toilet roll will also be a necessity in their hand luggage, you will know this likelihood yourself and should advise student sensibly about the privations they may face. They won’t believe you until they find themselves squatting over a hole in the ground in a rural French truckstop.       

Students should dress comfortably for the coach, T-shirts and light trousers, tracksuit bottoms or shorts are all advisable. But they will sometimes be getting out into climates, which are, particularly at night, very cold. This means that on the coach they should always have a jacket and, ideally, a zip up hoodie. All of these things need to be stowed with their carry-on bag on the overhead shelf.

How you stow coats, hoodies, and carry-on bags will determine how many of them fall on your head as the coach navigates a twisty road. You should never have a loose football on the rack, it should always be in a bag. If a football falls off the rack (and it will) it will be ages before you recover it and will always be as far as physically possible from where it was initially stowed. Unless you know of a place on your route where students can have a fifteen minute game of football, I’d put all footballs in the hold under the coach.