When you have managed to keep the four wheel drives away from your well planned coach hire trip, your next important item on your coach hire checklist is to organize the little darlings. By little darlings, I am not referring to the children, I mean their parents’. Once we have left school we seem to find slotting into any pre organized system fairly taxing. For children it’s like second nature. If the parents would just leave the children to get on with the next step pandemonium could be averted. However, when the coach trip requires luggage the leaving children at the school gates bit could be a bit impractical. Particularly as children going away for a weekends coach hire field trip seem to need to bring their entire wardrobes, including teddies.
For coach hire trips requiring luggage you need to cater for the needs of the parents. Put yourself into the shoes of a first time coach trip parent. You don’t know the score, and you are emotional about parting with your child. You are desperately trying to be grown up and confident, in order to help your first time coach trip child get away with not crying in front of her piers. What, giving all these factors, would you this fictitious parent want? Well you would want to know that the coach hire trip was efficiently run. Efficiency gives the impression of professionalism. You don’t want to know that it’s the teachers first ever coach trip with a class. What you do want to know is that your child will be safe. The coach needs to look road worthy, and the driver dependable. The teachers need to give the impression of confidence and being in control. Flustered, disorganized people do not instill confidence. The parent trusting her child to the coach hire trip needs to be confident you are not going to lose any students in London for example! If they are given the impression you couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery, they will go away stressed and worried. These worried people will talk with other worried people and the confidence factor required for happily waving off their children on the coach hire trip will plummet.
Given that you know that pupils and their parents will be arriving anytime between 08.00 and 09.00, plan in for a member of staff to be available at anytime for emergencies, which will occur. Someone is bound to be sick, overwhelmed by emotions, hit or any mixture of the former and a hundred and one other possible permutations. This frees up the remaining class teachers to sign in the children. It might sound common sense, but, be sure that you put up a clear sign (that can be seen at all times) with the name of each teacher on it. Again, it might sound silly, but be sure that the teacher stays put under, his or her sign. Teachers are always trying to sort out situations, but that must be delegated to the designated trouble shooting person.