It’s late April which means once again I enter the national cat-herding competition. The challenge – set 13 students off on three days of camping and walking to complete their silver Duke of Edinburgh.
Since this is no longer the 1980s and simply kicking kids out of a minibus and saying “see you on Sunday” is frowned upon things are more precise and organised.
We kick the kids out the minibus with a GPS tracker in their bag and say “see you at the camp!” instead. We then follow them about the countryside using the GPS trackers to see where they’re going and checkpoints to .
If the trackers can’t get a signal or our phones have no mobile broadband we then start having to do it old school, predicting how far along their routes they are and finding the closest road to that point to go and wait.
The kids think it’s magic that we just appear seemingly from nowhere. I appear to have perfected the art of arriving at a checkpoint exactly as they do. Almost like I’ve been sat in my car just the other side of a wall waiting, looking at the trackers. Although sometimes it is just good timing and coincidence.
Risk assessment – Risk: Students might get lost. Mitigation: Watch students with tracker, drive around country lanes like a local trying to catch them when they go off course.
Risk: Tracker doesn’t work. Mitigation: Estimate where they probably are, go a bit further along, begin a determined Fitbit pleasing route march/jog up the route until you meet them. This never works, but does guarantee that once you’re about 10 minutes from your car the tracker does update and the kids are stood by your car looking puzzled.
This is a spring/summer activity, so obviously it was snowing on the practise expedition wasn’t it.
