Whether it is kayaking or trekking, students at Raffles Institution have a variety of choices when it comes to leadership courses. But before embarking on any expedition, the school will conduct a rigorous risk management assessment.
Said Head of Department at the Raffles Institute for Experential Learning Kuak Nam Jin: “MOE (Ministry of Education) has a very well-established risk management matrix. We follow that very closely. We go on recce trips to look at the place. The staff would often embark on the entire route of the destination to find out how vigorous or intense it is. We have to find out in history whether other schools have used it before, what is the feedback?”
Once a place has been chosen, training to prepare the students physically for the trip begins, according to Mr Kuak: “We would prepare our students physically for the trip which often involves general physical conditioning pretty much like PE conditioning. And then there’s also specific training.
“For instance if you are climbing a mountain, then you really need to get students to be climbing the stairs, carrying their backpack so that they develop the right type of muscles in the physical conditions to allow them to perform on the mountain.”
The safety of such expeditions is in the spotlight, in the wake of a tragedy where six students and a teacher from Tanjong Katong Primary School died, while climbing on Mount Kinabalu in Sabah as part of an overseas learning journey, called the Omega Challenge last week. Their Singaporean adventure guide was killed as well, and a teacher and a student from the school are still missing.
Another school head said scenario training will be conducted to equip students with necessary skills to react to emergencies – such as dealing with an injury.
“We have to think about many categories of risk, covering issues from whether the children have enough food and water, to where the nearest medical facilities are,” said Ms Haslindah Bahrom, Vice-Principal and Chief Safety Officer at Eunos Primary School. “If there are possible risks, we discuss how to mitigate them. It’s not just for overseas excursions. We do this for learning journeys within Singapore – and even for activities within school, like Sports Day and carrying out experiments in our Science labs.”
The onus is also on educators to assess the student’s ability for such physically demanding programmes.
Said Ms Haslindah: “As you train your students, you are able to identify which students are having trouble keeping up with the training or they may have old injuries that may come back to haunt them or they are struggling with that. I think as educators you have to make a decision whether the student should drop out of the programme or we make a decision to moderate the intensity of the programme so that every student can participate in the programme.”
HOLISTIC LEARNING EXPERIENCE
Educators encourage parents to send their children on overseas expeditions as they contribute to a holistic learning experience. Some students who took up the Omega Challenge at Tanjong Katong Primary told Channel NewsAsia that the expedition had taught them valuable life skills.
“It teaches you perseverance and discipline and it pushes your limits and tests them,” said one of them, Zara Karim. “Mount Kinabalu taught me a lot of skills like how to work with people, how to communicate. And that’s been very useful in project work and working within CCA with people.”
The students added that the six-month training before the expedition was sufficient to prepare them for the physical challenges.
Source: www.channelnewsasia.com
