A Question of Balance - Risk and Adventure in Society

“A QUESTION OF BALANCE” - Risk and Adventure in Society

Wednesday 29th November, 2000 Royal Geographical Society, London.

Verbatim Report

Conference aim: 'Speakers will challenge the trend towards excessive caution, explore the positive benefits of sensible risk taking and bring a sense of realism to questions of risk and safety. The conference will show how important it is that young people have the opportunity to develop balanced attitudes to risk and will highlight the need to maintain challenge and adventure in a healthy society'

‘A Question of Balance’ Risk and Adventure in Society 10.45 Roger Orgill, OBE: I have been asked to say a few words, my name is Roger Orgill and I am chairing the steering panel that has set up this event today.

This is the sixth in the series of National annual forums organised by a partnership between the Association for Outdoor Learning, the English Outdoor Council and the Foundation for Outdoor Adventure. This year we are very fortunate that we are sponsored by the Outdoor Industries Association.

It is my great pleasure to introduce the Conference Chair, Alan Blackshaw who in this gathering will need no introduction. Alan has made his mark in the outdoor world over many years and we are very, very fortunate indeed to secure his services as Chair for the day so thank you very much indeed and over to you Alan.

Alan Blackshaw, OBE: Good Morning Ladies and Gentleman and welcome to “A Question of Balance”. You will have seen in the biographical notes that I am put down as having been a Senior Civic Servant and I am never sure, as it was actually 21 years that I stopped being a Senior Civic Servant and it is amazing how these things stay with you. I am never very clear whether it is a compliment or not and I have got an idea it is somehow linked up with the risk taking which happens in Yes Minister. We also have a certain amount of risk taking on the part of the Government because we are still not clear on whether a Minister is coming, which Minister or whether there is a message going to come to us from the Ministry. We hope there will be.

I congratulate the Association for Outdoor Learning, the English Outdoor Council and the Foundation for Outdoor Adventure for choosing this topic: this is a very important issue for Society as a whole. The title comes from HRH The Duke of Edinburgh’s “A Question of Balance”, a book which he wrote in 1982 and which is of great interest and which Ian Lewis lent me. One common theme threads its way through this book. The importance and the central position of the individual and the crucial part that human nature plays in every aspect of society. What we are really talking about today is that and whether outdoor recreation, education, learning, adventure, whether that can give an insight into this broader question of the role of the individual in society and how the individual may flourish. It comes down to the question, if you have no risk, do you risk the future of society? Is risk an essential component of the human spirit which we tamper with at great risk? That is what we are trying to get an insight into. It is not just a promotion for outdoor education, it’s a bigger issue, and the Duke in fact says some interesting things about that in his forward to the Duke of Edinburgh Expedition Award Scheme. There are words like, “the expeditions provided the opportunity for young people to find their way though unfamiliar country, fulfil the special adventure and discovery, overcoming challenges and discovering hidden strengths and talents, there is risks and challenges, there is help to prepare and plan demanding adventures”.

Then, of course, there is the safety which is the absolute priority in all expeditions. If I think about risk in society, then it might comes under three main headings: There is A for adventure, there is R for risk and there is either D or S for either danger or safety. Now, adventure is wholly good, it is an ideal, it is part of the human spirit, endeavour, an essential component of life. The names around this wall are all names connected with adventure. Adventurous people - like Lord Hunt are linked also with enterprise. Adventure has to do with putting something in to get something better out. It is an active thing. It is really the opposite of the lack of adventure which is deprivation, some forms of poverty and a definite lower quality of life.

Perhaps the main opposite of adventure is boredom which is an anti-social thing. If you have a lot of boredom undesirable activities - in the Middle Ages society was so boring it was good to see if you could go and find a witch! At a recent UIA lecture in Paris a German Professor spoke about off-setting need for excitement because of the way that society has developed. This may come in various ways, spicy foods, drugs, climbing walls. You can have excitement on the climbing wall, a little fall on the climbing wall on a rope is a little death and very character forming so the some educationalists might say; others might talk of ‘best education’.

Now apart from adventure’s opposite in the form of boredom, the other opposite is mis-adventure which brings you to innocent or culpable. This in turn takes you into a wide range of issues with society, relationships with individuals - exactly what we shall be talking about.

There is risk itself, which is what some say most of it is to be about. This is good; it is not quite as good as adventure, but it is good. Risk is linked with important things like freedom - for example the freedom of the individual - an essential component of society and it is linked with choice and judgement. The question ‘Do you actually want to be at risk or do you want to understand risk so that you can avoid being at risk?’ is one of the main issues for outdoor education. Whether outdoor education does, in fact, enable people to have a better understanding of risk so that they can see how to approach it - and develop judgement of risks. That may be what we are talking about, not actually being at risk, but understanding risk and making appropriate judgements.

When you face risk you are into the social responsibilities. If you are at risk yourself it is OK, it is up to you; but it is not OK if it is others involved. In society as a whole there is the question of liability where the threat to society starts emerging. There are quite a lot of forms of risk which are totally undesirable - the recent ski-train tragedy in Austria or the Hatfield train accident for example - where you do not want any risk. Similarly with drinking-water, food and at some risks at work, especially health and safety in coal mining, or (in the past) whaling - the most dangerous industry, or in oil where the Piper Alpha disaster occurred: no one wants these risks. In these industries it is not actually possible to eliminate risk; there is a constant linked in with the question of boredom. I remember a meeting between the Chief Inspector in the coal industry and Lord Robbins, which I listened into. They were talking about reducing danger in the coal industry. The level of accidents had got down to about 130 deaths a year, and the Chief Inspector said that he didn’t think it would ever actually go below that level with the number of people working. The reason for that was, people in the industry actually found it boring and it was more exciting and quicker or better just to jump out in front of the machine. You see the same in climbing: the effect of all the better equipment doesn’t necessarily reduce the risk. It just enables you to perform at a higher level - in fact in a more dangerous situation at, say, a level of 98% - not quite up to the 100% where the accident happens. You can go along at that level; you are not wanting to put yourself in danger. But if an accident does happen in these circumstances it might well be worse than it would have been in the old days when you wouldn’t have been in such an advanced situation.

Lastly, about danger and safety. What you really want is to have lots of adventure, a fair amount of risk or the feeling of risk and a lot of safety at the other end. You do not want to have danger. It doesn’t have any productive aspects. It is purely the avoidance of actually paying a rather high penalty. You may remember the little notice in the maternity ward which someone had written as part of medical faculty practice. ‘The first five minutes in life are the most dangerous’. Someone had written on the bottom ‘The last five minutes were quite dangerous too!’.

You have to distinguish, of course, between subjective danger, under your own control, and objective danger under which you have no control. Of course you can avoid objective danger by doing things another time, way or place or not at all. Thinking of these dangers and risks we think not just of physical danger. There are psychological dangers, ethical & moral dangers and drugs and so on. These are much wider issues and here we start looking at society as a whole.

Speakers will make much more of these things through the day. But in the end, unfortunately, it comes back to the opposite of adventure being mis-adventure and mis-adventure can either be innocent or culpable. It comes back to the individual in society and the ‘Question of Balance’ as written about by the Duke of Edinburgh that long time ago in his 1978 book. The questions we really need to ask are - ‘Is experience in the world of outdoor learning relevant?; ‘Do we offer something which we understand and which we have a lot of experience in?’; ‘Has this got a wider relevance and if it has, will other people be interested?’ and, of course, ‘Where does the future lie?’.

The organisers should be congratulated on having organised this conference, and organised it in this way.

An excellent group of speakers now await us to address us on this wide theme.

With that, I would like to introduce Dr Frank Furedi, who is from the University of Kent, Sociology Department. Frank wrote the book ‘A Culture of Fear’. Frank tells me he is a mountaineer and skier. He has approached risk both from his sociological background, and also through his own children - seeing how they have been brought up in schools nowadays and the way the concept of risk exists there.

11.00 Dr. Frank Furedi WHY ARE WE AFRAID FOR OUR CHILDREN? Reader in Sociology at the University of Kent author of 'The Culture of Fear’ which looks at the impact of fear of, risk- taking on everyday life. He has written widely on the problems arising from the tendency to over-protect children. His most recent book is ‘Paranoid Parenting'.

There is little doubt that during the past two decades, parental anxieties have acquired pathological proportions. Since 1997, numerous studies have drawn attention to the impact of parental anxieties on children. There is now a significant consensus that parents' concern with their children's safety has acquired obsessive proportions. According to most of the available evidence the main focus of this obsession is 'stranger-danger’, a fear that has haunted British parents since the 1980s.

In 1993, the campaign group Kidscape produced a report, 'How Safe are our Children' which stated that 95 per cent of 1000 adults interviewed put fears about the possible abduction of their child by a stranger at the top of a list of concerns. In 1995, the charity. Barnardo's published a survey which claimed that nearly 70 per cent of parents felt their neighbourhood was unsafe and half said they never let their children play outside without adult supervision. In 1988 a Mori poll of more than 500 parents found that almost 80 per cent would not let their children play unsupervised in the park during their summer holiday. A year later, in August 1999, an NOP poll indicated that 78 per cent of the respondents believed that the reason why so many children were not allowed to play outside was parents' fear of harm from danger. Later that month, an NSPCC study claimed that eight out of ten parents were too frightened to allow their children to play unsupervised in the park.

Although the prevalence of parental paranoia is widely acknowledged, there is little consensus about its cause. Attempts at explaining these phenomena usually fall into one of two approaches. The most common approach is to emphasis certain changes to society that are seen to inspire and shape parental anxieties. The alternative emphasis is the argument that parental apprehensions are a response to the growing variety of dangers facing children. From this second standpoint, what is at stake is not parental paranoia but a responsible reaction to the perils of the childhood experience.

Explanations that emphasise the impact of social change on parents' perceptions of children's safety point to a wide variety of developments. Some observers contend that in our increasingly complex world, child rearing has become more difficult and testing. Others point to the impact of new technologies on family life: the impact of the media, particularly television, is sometimes blamed for weakening parental influence and for exposing children to negative influences. More recently, the Internet has been indicted for the potential risks it poses for children.

The changing character of community systems of support has also been identified as a factor in enhancing the isolation of parents. It is claimed that the weakening network of support diminishes parental confidence and intensifies their concern for their children's security. The so-called crisis of family life is also seen as an important development influencing parental anxieties. The instability of family life is often portrayed as intensifying the difficulty of child rearing. Experts also claim that contemporary developments force children to grow up faster than previously, thereby challenging the exercise of parental control. In turn, parents react to this challenge by anxiously trying to expand the supervision of their children's lives.

There is no doubt that we live in a changing world and that new developments have an impact on parenting But it is worth noting that most of the explanations outlined previously hake been used in the past, in an attempt to illuminate the problem of parenting. Throughout the Twentieth Century, experts have claimed that social change represented a major challenge to the exercise of parental authority. Explanations that were used to solve family problems in the forties end fifties are unlikely to provide significant insights into the specific question of contemporary parental paranoia.

Explanations that stress the emergence of the growing danger faced by children offer an important variant to the focus on social change. These explanations claim that children face an unprecedented level of danger in today's world. Proponents of this view point to a bewildering variety of new dangers facing infants.

Some claim that the growth of car culture has made the street a ‘no-go’ area for children. Others contend

that there is a massive increase in bullying, whilst some point to the escalating threat posed by adult predators. The continued discovery of new health risks is also seen to highlight the growing danger faced by children. A more subtle variation of the 'situation always getting worse' thesis is the claim that the issue is not the increase in the risks faced by children but that we have become more aware of problems that have hitherto remained un-acknowledged.

The claim that childhood has become a uniquely dangerous experience is rarely backed up by evidence.

Indeed, time and again surveys show that these claims are not backed up the facts. Nevertheless, the adult world has become converted to the belief that children, by definition, are 'at risk'. It seems to me that this belief is shaped not by the actual experience of childhood but by important developments that influence the world of adults. From my work, I would identify 5 themes that help illuminate adult anxieties towards children.

1. It is important to note that we live in a world where society exhibits a tendency to inflate danger in general. What some sociologists have called ‘The Risk Averse Society' and what I have described elsewhere as the 'Culture of Fear' impacts on life in general. We live in an era of permanent panics, be they about food, the environment, technology, health, crime or children. And discussion on childhood has to consider these wider cultural influences that incite an obsession with safety and a fear of risk.

2. The second theme that I would like to bring to your attention is the changing perception of adulthood.

Relations between adults are increasingly identified as inherently risky. There is a growing sense of mistrust of adult motives and this has important implications for the way that adults view one another's relation with children. I am particularly concerned about the erosion of adult solidarity and co-operation in the rearing of children. The relation of trust between parents, teachers, nursery workers and carers has become highly ambiguous. Instead of regarding other adults as a potential source of assistance in the task of child rearing, parents regard them with a degree of suspicion. In particular, adults who are 'strangers' are treated with apprehension. Since most adults are by definition 'strangers', concern for children can often acquire a pathological character.

3.Increasingly, adults have found it difficult to maintain the line that separates their experience from those of childhood. Problems of adult identity are intensely focused on childhood. Many of our dysfunctions have been redefined as the consequence of negative experiences suffered in childhood, most specifically due to poor parenting.

4. All these trends have led to a radical re-definition of childhood. The concept of 'children at risk' serves as a metaphor for conveying the sense of adult insecurities. The question 'At risk of what?' is in practice answered by the unspoken assumption of 'At risk of everything'. Anxieties are not only focused at the outdoors, children are deemed to face risks at home. And since children are deemed to be by definition vulnerable and easily damaged nothing can be left to chance. It is important to understand that this response is prompted by adult anxieties and perceptions rather then by the everyday world of children. The often repeated statement, 'I could not live with myself if something happened to ‌..' expresses a consciousness of how adults feel about themselves. Sadly, this problem of adult identify becomes a burden on children's lives.

5. Finally, the inflation of the problem of childhood leads to its professionalisation. In recent decades parenting has been transformed into a skill that requires continues professional intervention and support.

Paradoxically, at the same time, parents are held responsible for everything to do with a child's development and therefore their mistakes are seen to have potentially devastating consequences for their children. The redefinition of parenting and its professionalisation has led to a loss of confidence in the child rearing abilities of mothers and fathers. This loss of confidence often resolves itself in not taking any chances with the job of child rearing. It is easier to keep children under guard than to adopt a more 'risky' nuance and differential approach. That is why the parenting style of our times has become oriented towards restricting the access of children to the outdoors. The demise of free outdoor play is closely linked to this professionalisation of childhood.

The demise of children's freedom represents a major challenge to play workers. Professionals can either echo and reinforce the restrictive mood of our time or challenge it. Looking around the audience, I am sure that you will want to do what you can to help children re-claim the outdoors.

11.20 Questions of Dr Frank Furedi: Frank, could I ask you, your own children, what sort of things are they going to do in the way of outdoor activities?

Well, I have got one boy and he is now five and I have done two things. One was a terrible mistake, I took him mountain climbing and he was profoundly bored by the experience. I do not know if you have ever carried a three-year-old on your back. He is also very heavy and slows you down (I will not do it ever again). But I have been taking him skiing and I think skiing and the snow and the mountains are absolutely great for somebody who never sees snow. Also, it is a kind of adventure where young children really excel, because young children do better at it than we do as adults. They learn very fast and pick it up and they gain a phenomenal amount of physical confidence from going skiing that has all kinds of implications. For example, he is a very shy boy normally, but when he comes back from skiing he suddenly becomes, you know when Clarke goes like this and superman is revealed, it is a bit like that after a skiing holiday and learns very important coping skills, social skills and communication. It is a pity it is so expensive.

Question from Floor: I run a centre in the Brecon Beacons. It was an interesting speech that you gave there, but painted with a broad brush when you describe symptoms that are part of the whole of society as it is now. I am really here looking for solutions. I would like to ask you as a sociologist, “What do you see as a way to improve the situation?” Because it seems to me by what you have said that it is so integrated in all aspects of society that it may be a symptomatic of a cycle. The best solution may be to let it take its course and almost become destructive and destroy all that we have got in order to refresh rather than modify behaviours that appear to be very well established. So my question is really asking you, “Are we very much in a situation where we have to go one way or another?”

Dr Frank Furedi: I wish that you were right when you were hinting about cycles, I do not think we are in a cycle. I think we are in a situation where we have gone from bad to worse and even worse. I think things are so deeply entrenched. The reason for that is because, in the past, there have always been people who have been risk adverse and very worried about adventure. But there have always been sections of the society, especially at its leading edge who are the opposite, who inspire people, who took the initiative to challenge this particular sentiment. I think, today, you will find that those sections of society are conspicuous by their absence. I think you will find that these days, if you want to make a name for yourself as a politician or the media, the way you do it is by organising a campaign on some kind of safety issue. I notice a lot of British politicians who haven’t got very much overall credibility, who go back home and organise a local campaign against phone masts, against the size of British butter, or hamburger meat looking the wrong colour. When you have this kind of attitude that the way you make a name is by warning people, almost inflating danger, it is very difficult to get under that, the only way you can do it is to stand up and not make concessions about the kind of reactions.

For example, I was very pleased that these people who are being investigated, these four scout masters, in the tragedy in Scotland. Their representatives were very robust in defence as to what happens, and made the point that what they had done seemed to make a lot of sense but sometimes even when you make sensible calculations tragedies will occur. I thought that was a very good way of presenting the real issue.

I think if you can do that more often in a more popular way and also in relation to the everyday issue of adventures because for most people adventure begins the minute you leave home, that is the way people perceive it. If you can begin to demonstrate the importance of similar times in ones life then you can begin to create a current against paranoia. The one good thing is that the majority of people instinctively know that what is going on is very, very bad, but they feel completely impotent about doing something about it.

They too feel paralysed about it. It is very difficult to shed and I think as long as you understand that then the kind of dialogues that we can initiate can have some impact.

Floor: What happens when the risk is real? I am talking about allowing your son to go out to the shops if you live in a place where, like Damilola Taylor, that boy who was killed yesterday, where it really is dangerous and there are no police?

Dr Frank Furedi I have travelled round the world and have been to many communities that are far poorer than anything in London, where people’s lives are far more involved on a day to day survival than they are in London. They have no police and they have a crime issue: but the one thing that they have we don’t have is adult solidarity. All adults must take a responsibility for the welfare of children - a key missing ingredient in the UK. The problem that we saw in Peckham is a more intense version of a problem present in every part of the country. Fortunately, such murders are very rare, but when you have a situation where nobody takes responsibility, where adults regard children as pests, something to be avoided, as noisy little brats that play all kinds of games; they are vital young people whom we must take an interest in. When you have adults so weak, that is the real issue that we need to tackle in order to help them gain more confidence. You and I will become more confident as adults if you know that you can rely on other people.

Floor: You are addressing an audience of converts, but I wonder how the same sort of presentation would go if you were presenting this to an meeting of mothers. The problem is that the whole issue is a very emotive one. Whilst we can rationise thoughts like this, to actually get the message across we have got to separate the rational from the emotive issue. I wondered what you thoughts were on this.

Reply: Dr Frank Furedi This is something I have been doing for a while. I am particularly concerned with parents, merely because they are in an impossible situation. They are the ones who are responsible for bringing up their children and somehow they have been put in a spot where they are not given full responsibility. They do not feel in control. They feel under a lot of pressure. I think it would be wrong for us to blame mothers or fathers, they are actually quite sensible people doing a job, but their circumstances make it difficult for them to act responsibly as far as children’s risk taking is concerned.

What I try to do is talk to people and get across my message, and the message is allow your children to live their own lives. Basically to lay off. Give them some space and you can be entitled to have your fears, your emotional reaction and everything else, we all do as adults, but somehow it is for their own good that you behave in this way. I think if we can get that point across in a non-patronising way, in a way that relates to their experience of everyday life, that is something they really understand. Then the problem is not understanding, it is being able to act on it, to have the courage of their conviction. That is what we can do: help bring out the active positive side that many people do have. At the moment it is continually suppressed by most of the influences of a contemporary culture.

Roger Putnam: I thought the talk was fascinating, helpful and dealt with individuals and families, but one of my concerns is that the attitudes of the culture of fear are actually becoming institutionalised. Are built into legislation, and that therefore we are not into the business necessarily of changing individual’s attitudes, we may have to try to take down the structure we are creating gradually over time. I spoke to a senior policeman yesterday about outdoor adventure and he said to me well we use to do a lot of that when our young policemen were police cadets, we do not feel now we can do it. What he was actually saying was that as an institution, we are accepting the cultural fear and the culture that might lead to some criticism or even some court action if we take the risk of going beyond what is said. So, it is the institutionalisation of these attitudes which concerns me as much as the basic outdoors themselves.

I completely agree with you and I have given up on politics, when I look at all the rules and regulations which are brought in which verge on the inane, simply do not make any sense at all, I completely despair.

That is one of the reasons I very rarely touch on it. This kind of obsessive desire to kind of plan out

regularly, shape every possible outcome. But I think the area which these issues are more open to debate is with children. You see, institutions are just institutions in the sense that people just go along with it.

My students are mature, young adults so they are quite capable of understanding that thing with a knob on it is a door, if they weren’t they shouldn’t be at University, but now if I don’t do it then I am accused of being irresponsible. So institution is institution and there is no point in worrying about it, but parents passionately care about their children and ordinary parents would like their children to be robust, enterprising, creative adults, and I think because of their emotional concern there is a large space there to open up and discuss, and I think just to convert people out of these fears and whether it is impossible to live in an institution at the moment, then I would give up completely, maybe I am being a bit pessimistic at the moment but that is my experience.

Thank you very much Frank, and I understand you are going to stay for the rest of the day.

I am sure one or two of you before have heard Frank in panel interviews speaking on the issues of risk, dangers and so on and my question is to what extent do you feel the media is responsible for fostering this culture in which we are now living. Is it real or just a perception.

The question was to what extent is the media responsible for fostering this culture, is it real or is it just a perception.

Well, contrary to common prejudices, most people in the media that Know are as sensitive to the issues as we are. They are normal human beings, they confront everyday problems and many people in the media are extremely worried about these developments. I think the media are the messengers of the bad news, sometimes they amplify it. Some newspapers are really bad at it, for example, well never mind I am not going to mention it, but by and large I think the media just amplify the bad news and the bad news is in the end and this is the really bad news, that there is no individual to blame. I don’t want to believe anybody in Society, I think we are complicit in this, I think the very fact that we are not able to manage everyday life in a way where we can behave responsibly towards each other as adults and that we have allowed this to become more deeply entrenched is an enditment of everybody and I don’t think it is useful to blame any particular group of individuals. Obviously there are some professions that thrive on this that kind of live off it and play by a negative rule, but in the end it is down to us and I think we have always go to remember that if we are to blame we can also do something about it.

Thank you.

In fact there isn’t a Minister the Government expresses its regrets, we are going to get a message a bit later which are able to read out, so I am not trying to be hard on anyone on this, because I think, I see Richard Painter over there from the Department of Education, but I can imagine that in the Government it must be quite difficult to work out who is actually concerned with this issue in the Government and it is a general issue of society as a whole and in a way it is actually quite a good thing that there isn’t a Minister concerned with risk, there isn’t actually a Minister of Risk and there isn’t a Cabinet Committee on Risk.

Maybe you will need to have one, some kind of inter departmental group which will need to look at this issue and work out what is the Government policy to approach this and whether it is really a threat to Society and maybe that is something a year or two away but really it is not just something that is easy for any particular Minister to take responsible for at the present time, and we did say, we weren’t approaching it just as a matter of young people, so it is just not specifically a Department of Education thing, I am sure if we had said for a Minster to come along and talk about Outdoor Education then that would have been OK, but when we asked for someone to come along and talk about risk in society, then that is quite difficult to find a Minister I imagine, unless there is someone there who is particularly interested in this topic, but maybe there will be in the future, if people begin to see that this is an important issue. Roger, is there anything you would like to say, or Ian Lewis maybe. It is not for want of trying. An approach was made to the Prime Minister’s office in September on this issue, so they have had details from September. We wrote again in November and over the last several days including this morning, we have been in direct contact with the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary, but I think Alan has very well summed it up in terms of the difficulty that the Government might face at the present time in view of all the things that are happening in our Society at the present time.

Would you be willing to answer one more question Frank? We have one more question.

It is just that as we have got a real life Sociologist here, I would like him to open the can of worms about class, because there is a very strong class thing here, there is a kind of situation has often grown up as if you want to get really cold and wet and stressed and adventurous you have to pay enormous fees to Gordonstoun, and if you look at things like sailing on tall ships and so on, you can sometimes get the impression that in order to do it you either have to be a toff or a young offender and there is a whole area in between. There is this kind of RGS upper-class, public school, gritted determined adventure tradition which, of course, carries on because parents want for their children what they had for themselves. If you want to see a child really doing something incredibly dangerous with an axe or a bicycle you have to go to that top society or right down to the very bottom. I was wondering if part of this cultural risk was part of this ever growing middle class of society, where there is not that tradition, that tradition of outdoor adventure and outdoor adventure training. Do you have any view on that?

Well you raise a very interesting question, which is obviously, you are right to suggest that the different classes in society engage with risk very differentially and I think it has always been the case that it is more exhalting form of adventure for people who can afford it, but the interesting thing is that all sections of society learns to evolve themselves in risk taking at some level. That is part of childhood and you don’t need to go on an adventure to Burma or Tibet to be up against it. You could, for example, grow up in inner city London or Paris and walk across the town, in the course of walking across town you could experience all kinds of unexpected events and I have talked to mothers who are petrified when they discover, and this is mothers living in Lambeth, their two young sons and one of their daughters has gone on the train and went down to Margate to find out what was going on there, it might not be adventure in the way that we are discussing it here, but it is very much driven by the same spirit. The spirit of enterprise, of doing new things. There will always be that, you are getting at one very important point, because what has happened with the growth of the middle class is you have a lot of parents who retoriclically are committed to adventure but are physiologically are against it and the way they reconcile their problem is by making sure that their children are driven from one exciting thing to another. I do not know if you know the people I mean, these full time mothers and fathers become full time chaffeurers and they go from one adventure to another and you get these virtual adventure playgrounds very risky, the worst that can happen to you is that you can fall on the floor of the toilet while you are in there, anything else is not going to happen, but you have got this adventure institutionalised which then creates the pre-tense of adventure, but in reality is not only very safe, but is terribly boring for the children. That has happened, I think and as a result of that what has happened is that for example, phenomenon associated outdoor adventure like rain, is now seen as a problem, its raining, should we go out, that is one thing I have noticed, in some sense, I would say children of all classes regardless of what their parents do, have this inner striving for adventure and find and means, sometimes destructive ones as well unfortunately of realising that ambition.

I do not know if that answers your question.

Well I think it does partly, but there is also a furious thing about physical discomfort, dirt and all the rest of it, that families that have come up from a very working class background, ancestry, my father was working class Scottish and would never go camping, he said I had enough discomfort, I do not need any more discomfort there is this feeling, almost a gernerational thing, that we have come out of all that, we no longer need to struggle, we don’t need to walk, we have cars, we have made it, why should our children not be a comfortable as us. I do think, in this country it is always very difficult talking about class, but I do think there is a class perception and all people who said , my son crossed the Atlantic in the Tall Ships 2000 this summer and the posher my friends were the more they said marvellous and the less posh my friends were the more they said how pretty - it just is there and I think it is not in the children, and I do think you do have to look a the class thing in this.

Just one thing, a lot of people from disadvantages backgrounds might say how could you but their life is adventurous to them, but there are people who life is a day to day challenge and therefore incomprehensible getting into trouble, but I think essentially you are right. I have experienced in the school that my son goes to on a regular basis.

Well thank you. Sir Michael Hobbs, I wonder if you would mind starting a few minutes early.

Sir Michael Hobbs has a distinguished military background, Director of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme and then joint Director of the Award and Outward Bound UK and now developing Outward Bound UK. I would like to welcome Sir Michael Hobbs very much, he has had a major role in education and training over the last number of years and look forward to hearing what he has got to tell us which is about minding the gap.

12.00 Sir Michael Hobbs, KVCO, CBE MIND THE GAP THE ACCIDENT GAP When one of these accidents hits the press there is often a gap between what is reported and the truth. By and large the media treats this type of story badly. They are not a 'sound bite topic' since the issues are complex. The general public is often not presented with the full facts, which allow them to make a judgement about the validity of such activities. Often it is just 'another youngster 'dies' usually in an 'Outward -Bound incident (which infuriates me!)

THE MEMORY GAP This is the gap between the things youngsters were able and allowed to do twenty years ago and the things they are able and allowed to do now. This would include going out on their bikes on their own, cycling to school, walking to school, playing outside. Parents now see many of these things as taboo since something awful might happen to their youngsters.

This makes adventure even more important and yet it takes a very courageous parent to allow their child to walk to school in today's environment. This concept of "stranger danger" is more perceived than actual since the statistics don't support these fears. There is more danger from a relative or family member!

THE APPRECIATION OF RISK This is the gap between the need to have an appreciation of risk and the need to experience it. Most parents and teachers would say that it is a good thing to have an appreciation of risk and yet may not wish the young to experience risk at first hand. Parents themselves have led more risk free lives than their parents....

THE PERCEPTION OF RISK The gap between actual risk and perceived risk is obvious to all those who work as Outdoor professionals.

We try to maximize the perceived risk and minimize the actual risk. A non-technical non-outdoor audience may not always understand this. To them risk is risk.

THE SMOKESCREEN This is the gap between those accidents, which are genuine accidents and those. which are sheer incompetence. There are very few accidents when the person in charge has been appropriately trained and assessed. Accidents often happen when the leader is not qualified or if their knowledge is not current, or if they have gone into an outdoor environment, which suits their own agenda - not the agenda set by the needs of the young people.

THE LICENCE GAP This is the gap between the requirement to license organizations like Outward Bound and the absence of a requirement to license schools and some voluntary organizations. White there is often excellent guidance in place for schools going into the outdoors they clearly don't always take it.

THE RESOURCE GAP This is the gap between the fact that many schools recognize the value of outdoor education and the absence of any extra resources to make sure it happens properly. We know this is true in Outward Bound

because of all the Patron's Co. money we give away to schools that otherwise wouldn't be able to do it.

When schools do it themselves there is also the bureaucratic burden on teacher/leaders who often have to do this in their own time.

THE QUALIFICATION GAP This is a difficult one because it involves the Scouts and it would be difficult to name them. They recognize that National Governing Body qualifications are important especially in the wake of some recent accidents involving scouts. But the Regional Scout Councils have said no to getting leaders qualified. Perhaps the gap here is between what outdoor full-time professionals see as essential and what part-timers see as essential. (I may not have the courage to use this!)

Chair: Well thank you very much Sir Michael, any questions?

My name is John Palmer - I work with young children in North Wales ……. real risk and what we should be doing is teaching people to manage that risk and not give them the idea that …….

Yes, I think you are absolutely right, I think you are right. What I really mean is, that there are in management and risk, there are ways in which I believe we can heighten the perception within young people, without increasing the degree. Now that is a matter of degree and I am not suggesting we should abolish risk and only have the perception of risk, don’t let me even stray into that ground, but I do think again, Wally Key and I have quoted him once already, said a very true thing about young people on the expedition section. He was a man of few words and he simply got up one day and said solitude not altitude, and I know what he meant. He meant actually that if you feel alone with your own fears, even if you are in a group of four or five young people, and you have to manage those fears. The person who is leading you or has placed you in that position doesn’t actually have to put you at the top of the mountain into the most appalling conditions. All they have done is to give you an experience which you have never had before and asked you to cope with that experience and I think when I talk about perception and talk about real risk. I think that is what I am saying, I am not trying to make a definite line and say lets do away with one and have the other, but simply that there are ways in which we can, ourselves I think minimise risk and heighten perception of risk that is all.

Before we go on to the next speaker, could I say that we have been handed a message and we are very honoured because this is a message from the Prime Minister, and it is a very interesting message, “everything we do in our everyday activity, in our work and leisure involves some element of risk. Risk is an inescapable part of our lives. The challenge for all of us, both within and outside Government is to manage risk in a way which gives us the necessary protection we need without constraining what we do beyond a level that is justified. I very much welcome your Conference today as a vital contribution to this debate, I hope that you will enjoy what I am sure will be a very stimulating and productive day, signed by Tony Blair” and this presumably is all Roger Orgill or Ian Lewis’ connections, I imagine, but there we are, it is an interesting message which we will be able to put in the Conference proceedings.

Floor: Having had that message from Tony Blair, perhaps we should today have a message back to him at the end of the Conference.

Floor: *** Floor: I work with young children in North Wales. Life is about real risk and what we should be doing is teaching people to manage that risk and not give them the idea that risk does not or can be made not to exist.

Sir Michael:

Yes, I think you are right. In management of risk there are ways in which we can heighten the perception within young people, without increasing the degree. I am not suggesting we should abolish risk and only have the perception of risk, don’t let me even stray into that ground. Again, Wally Keay, I have quoted him once already, said a very true thing about young people on expedition. A man of few words, he simply got up one day and said ‘Solitude not altitude’. He meant that if you feel alone with your own fears, even if you are in a group of four or five young people, you have to manage those fears. The person who is leading you or has placed you in that position doesn’t actually have to put you at the top of the mountain into the most appalling conditions. All they have done is to give you an experience which you have never had before and asked you to cope with that experience. I think when I talk about perception and talk about real risk, I am not trying to make a definite line and say ‘Lets do away with one and have the other.’, but simply that there are ways in which we can minimise risk and heighten perception of risk; that is all.

Chair: We now have a letter direct from the Prime Minister’s Office. Thanks to Ian Lewis for his connections and to Roger Orgill for keeping at them - it is a very interesting message: “Everything we do in our everyday activity, in our work and leisure involves some element of risk. Risk is an inescapable part of our lives. The challenge for all of us, both within d outside Government is to manage risk in a way which gives us the necessary protection we need without constraining what we do beyond a level that is justified. I very much welcome your conference today as a vital contribution to this debate. I hope that you will enjoy what I am sure will be a very stimulating and productive day, signed by Tony Blair” [Annex 1 - Photo-copy of PM letter] **** Floor:ing had that message from Tony Blair, perhaps we should send a message back to him at the end of the Conference.

Chair: I agree and I shall make sure that happens.

Floor: I think I am one of the few people in the room who have nothing to do with the adventure education industry. I don’t work in a Centre, but I would like to say that the adventure industry is responsible for the problem that we have. I would like to say that 30 years ago when I was doing a Duke of Edinburgh expedition, there was a group of kids who got lost. I think mountain rescue teams have improved since then as it took them two and a half days to find them, but they were alright. I remember reading in the Daily Mirror (back in those days the Mirror was a reasonably good working class paper) the question, ‘What were these kids doing in the mountains to start with? They were 17 year olds maybe getting to 18 and they were learning nothing up there.’, and ‘What they should be learning was how to attract a barmaid’s eye in a crowded bar.’ I arrived at University and had no idea how to attract a barmaid’s eye. I was kayaking down the river in North Wales as you do, went for a swim and ended up on an island and somebody said you are going to have to swim for it, the following day my mother goes into the butcher’s down at Shrewsbury, down the road and the butcher said, Mrs Mandry, I am so pleased that your son is alright and my mother said why, she knew nothing of it and the reason was in the Shrewsbury Chronicle, “there was a boy aged 14 swims to safety, both these stories were years ago and the outdoor industry is still complaining about the way the media portrays it.

After 30 years we haven’t got our act together, or if you haven’t got your act together you are looking at the problem from the wrong point. Sorry for being so blunt.

Libby Purves: Yes, I go back 30 years as well, and my husband who was a working class boy at a school in Sheffield lived in terror of Outward Bounds, he had read about it somewhere and he thought everyone had to go and from the age of about ten to the age of about 27/28, I think is was cowering under the dread of Outward Bounds, and I think the fear of adventure training is something which has actually survived through to this

generation, there is still a perception you are going to get ???, there is still a perception that some enormous John Ridgway figure is going to sneer at you for not being able to run over a mountain before tea time and I think this fear and perception amongst young people who are a bit shy and not physically over sporty are going to be bullied and made to feel small.

But, I think I must start by saying that I am living proof that you never get over, when they finally got me for Outward Bounds, I was about 60 and it has frightened me ever since, but I think this is a very justified, a very good point and I think we did a lot to harm ourselves in that area, some who call themselves outward bound with no name, of course, did us enormous harm, by doing exactly what you have said, being bullies if you like. It really brings me back to the point I mentioned, which is the reasons for doing what we do. If we are not very careful sometimes we do do them for our own reasons, we set ourselves up as gun lighters, as bullies in our own area, those people who are in the mountains know them, they are on their terrority and they are bringing young people to where they are, and the first fear I think we all have, is going anywhere where the person who is going to greet us knows so much more than us and is so much in control of us and I think that is the first fear, now actually, I am delighted to say that for instance the number of people who come to outward bound, and I am sure the same would apply to any of you here who are in this sort of work, the number who actually continue to feel that to the end of their course or indeed very little time after they have got their, are minute, the trouble also is, of course, what they say when they come back because there is the second point that actually as you and I know we were talking about this perceive thing, when a young person comes back and talks to family, friends, peer groups at school etc, are they going to say, terrific, I really enjoyed it, the weather was lovely, we really had a great time, you know we were out there, the wind never really got up and we never got lost, I haven’t met a single Duke of Edinburgh’s award expedition in the whole of the 10/12 years I was doing the thing, they were talking about their Gold expedition, I didn’t meet one that didn’t do it in the rain, if not snow, that didn’t get lost,that didn’t nearly have a death in the group, and yet I think to myself, the Duke of Edinburgh’s award expedition doesn’t take place in the winter, its astonishing, we had the driest summer in the world and yet every single Duke of Edinburgh’s expedition took place in the wet, so there is, if you like the problem also, I think of the peer group who inflate, if you like risks, because they have been through it, that is part of the fun isn’t it, that is the awful thing. So, there is a worry there and I think we, the group here have to try and put it over to people that we do not bully, that we have got to get better at explaining what we do, and I think that actually is a very good point.

Nigel Haines, Fairbridge I think what we have discovered at Fairbridge, is that we as an organisation aren’t particularly good at how we get round the barriers…………………………………the major of Asian communities, then outdoor activity to a young Asian, female or male does not response immediately within their thoughts, but if you can make another way, passage or a path to it, you can find eventually all the things that Michael has captured will happen. I think as an industry one the gaps we are looking at is how we connect the vitality and purpose of outdoors with community of young people who have lived in a virtual environment and do not want to step out of their comfort zone and face that challenge. I think we ought to think how we market ourselves to our public audience more effectively.

Floor: The outdoor life is becoming more and more comfortable for more and more children, are not experiencing real adventure I think to be honest with you, I am not sure the demand was ever there, I think you are suffering from what is called a memory gap and I believe we all like to feel, that when we were young, we immediately charged off and said I really want to go and do this, we didn’t. We had to be forced. Do you know, one of the major changes, if of course that parental, parents said you will do this - go and do it and we did and I am sure that may be true, but I think young people are just as keen, quite a few people nodding their heads, quite rightly.

I believe, that people are just as keen to do it now, they have to be accessed, I think Nigel is quite right, we have to find a way, an attractive way of getting to them, that is our job, that is marketing, but actually, I believe that certainly once they are there, they are just as keen. I think there is only one problem that I do feel does get in the way of this sort of thing and that is a decreasing level of fitness and I think that is a serious problem, that quite a lot of the young people who come forward at this stage, probably are

considerably less fit, they may suffer from obesity, they may suffer from a lot of things, like that and that is a problem because it also affects their enjoyment of what happens initially when they get to the outdoor pursuit or whatever it is, so I think there is a problem there, but frankly, I think it is a failure on marketing on our point.

Alan Roberts from

Outdoor Centre

Can you tell us why for example there is no mention of service of community in your own outward bounds publications any more or project which were part of your institution, those things have disappeared, so the impression you are giving now is just one of an outdoor centre that does outdoor activities, and this comes down to the perception that people have, no longer service to the community, no longer …………., those have disappeared.

I think that is a good point, I think there are a number of different reasons for that, the first is I don’t think it has disappeared from what happens, I think you are talking about what you market to the people who want to come and I think there is no point in marketing something that you can’t sell, if you see what I mean. So one of the sadness is that you, the way we market things may have changed, but I do not believe the underlying philosophy has, I have to say that, that is the first thing and, of course, the second thing is that regrettably the speed of modern life. The length of time that young people now spend on an Outward Bound course, you are talking, the original Outward Bound course took place over four weeks, and there was very, very much more time to incorporate a great deal more that probably was of great value, but again were I try to market the four week course in that way, Outward Bound would not be full regrettably.

One of the great things……………………is if we press down for ………………..one thing that has happened is the great…………..of the gap year and that young people are taking rucksacks and suitcases and actually just taking off. My own daughter went off to Nepal and somebody, a neighbour looked at me full in the face and said how can you let her go and it was said very very strongly and we talked about it, but she still looked terrified and I knew what was behind it and I said look even if she dies out there which frightened me when I said it, she has had a fantastic first 18 years, but I do see young people taking off and going and travelling, China and Tibet and I think people like Outward Bound. …but I think the only thing I would say, not to refute that is just that we must be very careful that we deal with all young people, I think with the people that Nigel Haines was talking about as well who may not have the opportunity to do those things and we must give them the opportunity as well which I know you believe in, there was a lady just behind you…..

Anne West ……………we do still produce service to the community and projects……….but that does obviously attract the Gordonstoun type youngsters. I am also a Governor at a state school for 1,000 boys and I am most disturbed that they no longer can go ………to do field case work because it is too ….. it is too dangerous, now on one hand I am dealing with youngsters whose parents are sticking their necks out and allowing them to go and do all these dangerous things and then the ordinary majority of youngsters are unable to do field work. I think really we have got to get this sorted out somehow, Iam not sure how we can do it and I would be very grateful for ……

You are not going to get coherent from me, I am afraid, but the point, that you have had is absolutely right, of course, we have got to do something about it and, of course, you are absolutely right about the change, the difference between those two groups of young people and I think it is one of the things that I take up about the business of the gap year and young people going off, I think it is astonishing that some of those young people go off, if you like into real danger, moral danger, appalling problems that they are going to face when they go off on their gap year, if it isn’t in any way organised properly and I know yours was, but isn’t it odd that parents are prepared to allow that to happen, that they should go into those sort of moral dangers and to a much greater extent than they would to allow them to go to Ullswater, that is the odd thing.

Michael Ridd I went on an expedition nearly 50 years ago and unfortunately we lost one person, and I remember at the time there was no question of people being blamed, now if it happened the first thing that we all do is seek to blame somebody and it is part and parcel of a changing society, we are all a very litigious society and …………….reserval.

Well, whether it is reservable or not I don’t know but in the case of the soldiers was partly apt in that case, for those four soldiers. I have to tell you that it had a happy ending and that the cases against them were flung out. The fact is that now you look on ITV and you will see that excellent, nice looking chap telling you that if you have had anything happen to you which is even vaguely nasty in the last week, you should ring a number and they will almost certainly get something out of somebody. I am sure all of you know that, you know you are like me, that you have to pay your insurance and the insurance companies don’t much like the thought of insuring something like Outward Bounds any longer. I am told that in America, the Outward Bound schools can no longer insure against the costs that might be incurred, the eventually costs that would be incurred in any trial. They can only insure themselves against the cost of the litigation up to that stage, the cost of the lawyers, if you like. What can you do about it - well I wish I knew, I am caught in the same world as everyone else, the one thing I know is if you cower and say I am no going to take responsibility for the people who are at my centres or for the people who go and do the work, if you say I am not going to take responsibility for them, and go one stage further and say, in fact I will place the responsibility on them one is in my view being a coward, even though it may end up in disaster for oneself, I am sure of that, but mark you, I am so old I can do that now.

I would just like to make a couple of observations ………………………………….attributing blame to the media, attributing blame to ……………………………….and one the ………..Dr Feradi made was about parents,…………………………………..what I see a lot of the time is……………………………………..and I think as I watch this going on, it makes me wonder if people do how why we are doing what we are doing ……………………………I think part of the equation we need to think about is, if people are making judgement about risks themselves………………………………………

A very good point, and in fact, I think it ties in with this business of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award expedition, where the young people take responsibility for, ownership of an expedition and I think, if I may touch wood when I do it, the reason why there is such a very small accident rate for those expeditions among a very, very large number of people doing it, is because they have taken responsibility for it themselves. You haven’t got a sometimes board, a sometimes patronising adult in charge actually leading them, you have got a very nervous adult out of sight, and that is I think a very good combination, I mean many of you have done it, the sheer appalling thing of being a supervisor or whatever on a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award expedition, but the great thing is that they have taken responsibility for themselves and I think they act responsibly as a result and that is a great lesson to us and I agree with this point about programming, I think that is right.

Well, I would like to thank Sir Michael very much for that, if anyone has got any other questions, perhaps you don’t mind spending some of your lunch.

Would you like to say something about the Development Award, Roger.

Thank you Alan, two points that have been made at the tail end of this morning, one is ownership which has just come up and the other is all young people, not just the elite and I would like to just draw attention to the fact that the John Hunt Award Trust is being revitalised. John Hunt, of course, was the leader of the 53 successful Everest expedition, was for 10 years, a first Director of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, and we know him in many other contexts. He was a patron of many of our organisations and supported young people throughout his life. The Award Trust came into being some time ago to help young people, and was greatly funded through the intermediate treatment fund. However, that source of funding ceased and the good work that was done by the Trust came to an end because there was no more money.

We are re-launching the Trust, there are leaflets up in the area where you are having lunch, so do take one, and the aim of the Trust is to provide opportunities for young people, if I just read this briefly, it is directed at socially excluded young people who have little access or understanding of outdoor adventure. Its development of a programme on the basis of understanding was works, it is cost effective by working through existing networks and it is fully monitored with a view to promoting good practice. Now in the past twelve months, the foundation for outdoor adventure has funded Mobex, which is an expedition based organisation operating, in this case in the North East of England, and Mobex have enabled quite a number of young people to undertake their own expeditions and this is what I mean by ownership. They have been successfully completed and on the 20th of this month, they were able to give a presentation in Newcastle, a civic presentation of retelling their stories, and I have no doubt Michael, that they told it with great gusto, about the risk, about the adventure, about the perils of the outdoors, but they were able to talk to their community who had sponsored them, to their parents and re-engage and relive that experience and that is something I would draw to your attention as being very very important in terms of what we are talking about today, and it is also an aspect of rights of passage which is also being addressed at this time, that opportunity to retail what happened, so we are talking about young disadvantaged, in this cased, we are talking about the ownership being theirs and in this year, one of the group’s that conducted their own expedition was a group of disability young people who did quite a lot of canoeing off the west coast of Scotland, so there it is, the John Hunt Award Trust and it is very appropriate that we have the opportunity of announcing this today in this room, because Lord Hunt was, of course, President to the Royal Geographical Society for many years.

12.30 Lunch 13.30 Afternoon Session: There were two requests we had during lunch time from people who would like to say something.

My name is Peter Smith - I was very interested in the question from Ann West from the Round Square which was about field work and the problems of risk assessment for field work on the south coast and one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors with responsibility for geography, and, of course, this is something dear to my heart and I just want to make one or two points about this as an issue. I think the first point is that responsibility for what goes on in a school is with the governing body, governing bodies have a responsibility to make sure that staff are trained and that they have got to take responsibility for that training in service work and there are subject associations, the Field Studies Council, the Geographical Association, the Association for Science Education which put on risk assessment courses which can help teachers. The other point is and this is a slow one coming through from the Teacher Training Agency, every young trainee now, as part of their requirement to become a teacher undertakes a risk assessment criteria which they are judged against as part of their training, so certainly any teacher, whether it is modern languages or something on risk assessment, those involved with field work type teaching also have additional work which they are expected to do and that is checked, so governing bodies, subject associations, teacher training agency. Thank you.

13.30 Libby Purves - THE REPUTATION OF ADVENTURE Presenter for the BBC, Writer, Sailor, commentator on Education, citizenship and society Well thank you for asking me, I think it is a very good Conference. I did an instant eyeball of it when I came, I wanted to check out the balance of suits against fleeces and there are quite enough fleeces for credibility.

I am a media hack and I suppose what I know about best is how things seem. But these days how things seem is very very important to any set of professionals, any charitable educational cause, any industry and I suppose that the trouble with adventure is that it is so very, very personal. You cannot very easily sum up or communicate the thing that happens to you when you peer through the flap of a tent in a howling gale at three in the morning and see the stars in the gap in the clouds, or the thing that happens to you when, for the first time, you step out on the foot rope of a square rigged ship and stand in a line of people whose

trembling you can feel through the rope and the spar and you all pull in the sail together. You cannot readily explain to someone who doesn’t do it, what it is like to get to the hostel and pull off your boots after 24 hours of being really quite seriously lost, or what it is like to bring a yacht into harbour after a gale, or a horse to the end of a long trek and, although you are dropping with tiredness, you want to spend an hour grooming or tidying the horse or the yacht, because you are so heartburstingly grateful to it.

All these feelings are things which you have for life, you have for ever to hold on to. They enrich everything else that ever happens to you and this curiously applies even if you never do it again. I have lost count of the number of kids that I have met that once did a tall ship’s race and when speaking of it with great relish, say it taught them a lot and have absolutely no intention of ever going again. The richness of it has stayed with them, and the human dimension has stayed with them and they do have reunions: the people who led you into these experiences, who shared these experiences, are your brothers and sisters for life. The Tall Ships 2000 Race last year was the most stunning achievement. There were kids from all over the world who are now brothers and sisters for life, but none of these very personal feelings are things you can easily weigh or measure or tick off in a nice little book of achievement set out on a National Curriculum Grid Key Stages, 1, 2, 3 and 4 of personal fulfilment.

It has been fantastic for the whole movement that girls are doing it more, because girls are much more gabby and gushy and prepared to talk about how they felt when they stood on that foot rope. Boys just say, ‘Yeah it was brilliant, it was good, it was cool’, and of course, people who were not there do not respond much to that. They think huh another teenage pleasure, another expensive teenage treat. Kids these days always having fun, and so the kids settle back in the routine of the exams and worrying about jobs and whether they look good. It gets fatally easy for the adults around them, the parents and the people who make educational decisions and the politicians to underestimate what the adventure has actually given in this very private, secret modest way to individuals.

Of course, sometimes the individual might not look much from outside, but if you are partially disabled and have been canoeing off the west coast of Scotland, my God that is the equivalent to someone else sailing the Atlantic. It is very hard to quantify and justify the good effects of these things and it is hard to quantify and justify to the policy makers and funding authorities. The adventure is private, it is an individual stretching and self discovery of the people around you.

Now on the other hand, if an adventure should happen to go wrong, my God that is public. When there is a Marquis, or a Lyme Bay or a Lands End or a drowning, when a parachute doesn’t open, a walker slips off a mountain: that is public. If people are killed that is public, even if nobody is killed or even hurt, but teenagers are lost for a few hours in blizzards like the 1996 Ten Tors race, and are later found rosy cheeked and smiling in their bivvy bags by a Army Search helicopters and are very proud of themselves. There are still questions asked, there are heads shaken: ‘It was rash to let them go up there poor babies, a long way from the nearest Macdonalds’. That awful publicness of things that go wrong is intense compared to the private unpublicised satisfaction of all the adventures that go right. Disasters are a very good copy.

Litigious, angry, wounded, grieving, unhappy parents and relatives make excellent copy that goes on and on and on.

Now I was very pleased that Sir Michael agreed that sometimes it should go on and on and on, and sometimes the industry, if we must call it an industry, itself should be slightly less ready to leap to the defence of its own before one knows what has happened. Lyme Bay is the classic example: at first I was asked by The Times to comment on it and I was very, very reluctant to, because I did not know enough and then, of course, in the days afterwards, no off shore wind, no escort boat, a very slovenly reporting system and one of the escorting adults a teacher with absolutely no canoeing experience. Really step by step you came to realise this was a bad one.

We have to accept some regulation, certification, things like that; but on the other hand, we also have to stand fast when the blame is less clear and sometimes there is no blame: it is just one of those damn things.

But ‘just one of those damn things’ is a very poor headline in the Daily Mail and even if the school or scout troop is exonerated, the story will still go on and on for another very interesting reason: there will be a popular feeling that the death or the injury was “unnecessary, senseless”. There is this feeling that being

injured or killed in an expedition or adventure is worse than being run over by a bus on your way to work, or to school, because it still gets seen as some kind of frivolity. This again ties in with what we were touching on this morning, the business of it being ‘posh’. This is some sort of upper class fol de roll - they shouldn’t have been there, s/he should have been at his/her computer.

Obviously, we must all have some sympathy with the gut feeling about a senseless death; because my brother use to parachute at County Shows dressed as a gorilla - he was sponsored by the Milk Marketing Board, it was a very long story! It is true, and I know that I always felt that it would be extra dreadful if he was killed in the gorilla suit. I sort of wanted him to be dressed in something a bit military. It is a stupid comparison but a lot of people do feel that way about mountains and sail training and wild camping and all the adventures that you talk about and they think it is sort of unsuitable for the 21st Century and a bit silly.

I remember being interviewed once by a media reporter, Tim Willis. He was working for the ultra cool Daily Mail, Night and Day Magazine and he was kind of pale and sort of unhealthy looking and droopy and he kept asking about the sailing trip we did around Britain when our children were five and three in the 80s.

He kept saying ‘Why do it, why sail round Britain, I mean why, you can get to all these places by road now.

I mean why do it in a boat and especially with sails, there is no sense and it is just perverse really’. If you have never had experience of that kind of thing, and an awful lot of today’s parents and teachers have not, people do think outdoor education is perverse. That is part of the reputation that needs to be addressed and corrected.

One way it could be addressed is by pointing out, more forcefully and more often, that without outdoor education, people actually put themselves in more danger through life not less. Outdoor illerateracy is an epidemic. We have lost largely the culture of respecting the power of the natural environment. Because, unless we are fortunate to live in an area flooded up to knee level this winter, we don’t really see much of it. I used to go out with my husband in the Land Rover in the winter evening in Suffolk, when we lived near a very drift prone road, to haul people in their cars out of snow-drifts. They were generally sitting there in tee shirts without a map, without a shovel, without anything they could have got themselves out of trouble with. They would always be rather irrate when you rescued them. They would think you were some sort of service that had arrived late. We felt it was unkind to say we lived down the road, we couldn’t let you die; it would have been more fun in many ways.

But this sort of outdoor illiteracy is all around us. There are adults who sit drinking hot chocolate while school ski parties wander off piste and go down ravines, because they are on holiday, because it is pretty, because it is a nice place, so no bad thing will happen. We used to have a pair of ponies which we occasionally took to public events. I remember one Christmas the ponies drawing a cart and at one stage we had a hot potato stand on one side of the ponies and a steam organ on the other and we stopped. A women pushed a buggy out and stopped in front of their legs to talk to her friend behind her. We said please could you move the buggy and she said who do you think you are. We said ‘It’s just that it is dangerous.’ She looked at us as if we were mad and, of course, horses are not dangerous, horses are pretty, horses come off chocolate boxes, like the outdoors, mountains, they are ever so nice. So people wander off up mountains in their tee shirts and trainers and blunder off on bank holidays and parents let their children float on the beach on inflatable toys without even thinking what an offshore wind is.

Even those rather jejune risk assessment forms that teachers keep filling in are often exercises in pure bureaucratic theory. They do not actually replace instinct and experience and common sense and training on the spot. Teachers will only ever get that if proper resources are put into their training as leaders, whether it is for geography, field trips or for longer journeys. We need experience and confidence and wet feet, no even tighter form filling regulations designed purely to cover the backs of Local Authorities to stop people being sued by sharky lawyers. Invisible benefits in the depths of invisible hearts and all too visible drawbacks and disasters happen. We need to get across the real private personal benefit of adventure training. We need somehow to have that expressed more openly.

I also think we have to make an important division here between sport and the outdoor education which we are talking about and I may be very unpopular. Sport is great, sport keeps you fit, it wins you personal victories, it wins great acclaim, it is entertaining, but sport happens within easy reach of warm showers and

hot food and first aid tents and physios. Outdoor education probably often needs a great deal less physical skill, but it insists that you confront real uncertainty, on the mountains, on the moor, or on the sea, in the forest. So it is not showing physical excellence, it is a kind of doggedness and horsesense. Sport has rules, governing the angle of the hockey stick and hardness of the ball and so on. Out in the real natural world the sea and the mountain obey absolutely no rules; they cannot be whistled off side, or low ball, a mountain doesn’t shake hands with you at the end, doesn’t give a stuff. It will kill you if you let it. Hillarie Bellhop once said, about sailing, that ‘This salt of reality is the best thing I find in it, out here sailing the sea we play every part - control, direction, effort, fate - here may we know ourselves and know our state.’ A real adventure shows children the real eternal truth of everything that lies under the thick skin of civilisation; it takes you out of the shallowness of fashion, it points out basic truths about food and shelter and fear and co-operation without which a great deal of history and literature and art will be completely inaccessible to you: it will never touch you properly.

You have to feel that clothes are for warmth and protection not just style, and that food is fuel and that heat and cold can kill you, and that you have to watch your companions and your equipment as closely as your own comfort and happiness and that in the end the selfish are more likely to die. I get very irrate about this distinction between this leisure century sport and outdoor education, because I think often the leisure centre is sport, being driven from event to event, takes over and people think it is instead of.

Once my son was in a little river dingy with a friend and they capsized in a race. They got back to the club house and were all very wet and giggling - you know, 7 or 8 years old. The dingy lived (it was a borrowed dingy) was about 200 yards up stream. The tide was flooding so that was fine and the wind was behind them and I said OK just sail it round there and we will meet you there and we will tidy the boat down. The other mother flew into a terrible temper and said ‘No, no they have been wet, they must come straight into the club house now and have a shower.’ I said ‘No, they must get their boat back and get the cover on it.

They are all right, they are not in any danger.’ ‘No, no, absolutely not.’, and as two mothers we had to haul the boat by road all the way round, because we could not sail it because we weren’t insured to sail it because it was somebody else’s boat and so on. It seems to me that what I was proposing was outdoor education and what she was proposing was sport. We must make this distinction, because there is a terrible tendency to say that boys and girls are best off in the leisure centre: playing five a side, that scout and guide camps must always take place in the vicar’s garden, no further afield, that even adventure centres should be carefully designed climbing walls and carefully designed courses with rubber matting underneath, rather than places which take you out to confront anything raw and inconvenient and natural.

I have talked about the bitter irony that tough outdoor education is getting too much associated with expensive fee paying schools (or young offenders) but the bitter fact is that the independent schools can afford the insurance, the trained leaders and are often better than some state schools at latching into independent charities that offer adventure: this gap must be bridged. What will help to bridge it is when, in general discourse in the media because politicians read media the whole time, it is accepted that there is a real and central place for adventure training - it exists and there is a purpose for it in the modern world, even where nobody actually has to use sails or live in a tent or melt ice in their sleeping bag for the morning tea.

It is a very hard message to spread for a lot of reasons, I won’t trouble you with them in great detail. It is a hard message to spread because we live in a world of risk illiteracy. We whiz around the M25 where there is a 1 in 500 chance of being dead and then we shrink in terror from a hamburger which gives us a 1 in 5 million chance of getting an imperfectly understood disease in the future which we might get anyway. It is not easy historically because we are such a long way away now from the stoicism and quiet heroic fatalism of the war time generation. It is not easy in a post Christian society, this is something I think we might perhaps discuss a little bit at some stage, that if you no longer have a sort of cultural norm of something happening after death and trust in God then you are a pagan society and a pagan society is always full of fear: it cowers in the woods when terrible things await it in every shadow. If you don’t have that sort of cosmic sort of trust and that sense that even if somebody dies life continues there is some purpose, then I think you have a harder time spreading this particular message. I think you also have a harder time spreading it in a society that is so short of fathers, of male teachers, of male role models, and where male role models are the bravest men in the world: they could be accused of paedophilia - a few dodgy people

who like taking little boys camping. It wrecks it for all the undodgy people who need to take little boys camping, because little boys need to go camping.

I just want to leave you with one image which I was able to pass on a few years ago to Times readers. An independent girls school in Suffolk decided rather eccentrically to hire a survival instructor from the SAS for its Upper Fourth and send the entire year of 12 year old girls out into the woodlands for two nights. We couldn’t sent them off to adventure centres, they are far too expensive. So they pushed them out into the woods for two nights with nothing each but a bin bag, a candle stub, a razor blade, and all the usual SAS stuff - they didn’t take the condom, because the parents would have objected. They were all given a rabbit to skin, except for the vegetarians who just had to make spinach soup and be informed that Linda McCartney’s ready meals do not hop around in forests. I went to see these little girls in the incessant rain.

They had already done a night hike and a day in the woods and a few of them were being rescued because they had proved totally unable to make a waterproof shelter. They learnt a lot of new respect for primitive tribes which again was good, because it was geography, and a few of them were sort of sitting, crouching toasting bits of rabbit on a sharpened stick under the eye of a very, very pissed off looking SAS man. He had never met that kind of competent combination - sort of vague competence and sort of total mouthiness that a 12 year old girl can display. But one group had built a brilliant shelter and had lit a viable fire and declared themselves totally happy. As dusk fell, I went to one of the other groups about to be rescued. I found this wonderful elegant visibly hopeless creature with long rain soaked hair, that the rain was sort of running off, which was all loose, and she was sort of standing there with her head on one side waiting for the rescue bus. I said, you know you have been out 24 hours, what have you learnt from the experience?

She said “Not to go out when it is raining.” I think it is very sad that it is actually quite possible in a modern society to reach the age of 21 without ever even getting that far.

Questions of Libby Purves: I agree with what you are saying that as a young member of staff I say if I was stuck at a river with my geography class, and I might say, well we might get quite a lot out of working across this river, but it might be that one of us slips and gets close to death and wouldn’t that be fantastic, because we have had that experience and my personal opinion wouldn’t be fantastic because my governors would not back me up at all nor would the headmaster and my feels are this that should we be saying that we need to take it further and some of the teachers to take it further and it is up to them to make sure they value, they look at this perceived danger and they take their judgement and the risk assessment form means nothing in the eyes of a lawyer, it means nothing, the answer is no, I do believe that we should take it further, I am not prepared to put my job on the line and I am asking anyone here, would be actually willing to put their job on the line while walking across a river.

Somebody wants to answer that here before I do…

What you have to do is open the framework of safety into that perceived risk…………….

I say you should have a rope with you myself (but I haven’t been trained to use the rope) - well that is exactly what I am coming to, I think you are in this hyperthetocial position, or maybe a real one, who knows - I think it is a very unfair position. I think before you are in a situation where you had to make a choice like that, somebody should have paid for you to go off and be one of these guys in fleeces hereto sort you out. At the end of the weekend, and somebody else should have given you a rope, but the reason that I get a bit sort of whingy about risk assessment and so on, is that very often it is just damn generalised.

I have seen people doing this about boats and they have a huge long list of things, things which might concuse you, blocks, gaff, if coming down suddenly, but that does not, you know the safe person is the person who just has that instinct, because he has done it before, and I think teachers need that kind of training impute if they are going to be asked to do this kind of thing. A structure to make that universally available would be very valuable.

Could I slightly challenge you assumptions of risk illiteracy, I think we could be in danger of being quite elitist and quite pleased with ourselves. I put it to you that if you took a car, was chased, and then had it

torched, you might move into a risk area where you were experiencing in like a …….. term, the rush, if you were doing drugs and were pushed to the edge of limits there, you are in a risk environment. We could go, I suggest collectively down the way of dinosaurs, we are not beginning to realise and accept that this elite outdoors is only a part of a process of rejoining, it is a natural path, if you like and I think as a sector, the danger of this as a sector is we are creating our own elitism by saying………….. it is different experience.

I totally agree with that and I think in a way we shouldn’t be only talking about risk, I think we should be talking about the positive. I mean to me, I began with what it is that you feel when you stand on your foot rope or you look out of your tent and see the stars, we should be offering these opportunities, but the point about interacting with nature and setting yourself out into the wild is to appreciate the world and the need for you and your companions to work together to kind of humbly make a challenge to that world. I think we should be talking about showing people these things, showing people the way out of the rut, rather than just lets give you a rough time. I think this is one of the things that has been wrong with adventure training, sometimes, oh we are going to give you a rough time,you will hate me by the end of this week, you will thank me for it all your life boy, which is outdated and which shouldn’t happen any more and of course, people have real risks, real hardships and so on in their lives, but you may be enabling them to face them better if you have taught them mastery, and mastery if a word we have not used enough, mastery of a difficult environment, a child that has learnt to sail a boat against the tide up a river, has got something which helps him the next day when he is being bullied at school. I think that again is a message which should be got across.

Can I just add to what you said, I think quite a lot has been said this morning about opening opportunities to all young people…………but I think the responsibility of that ….. and I think it is very easy………. And the onerous on us as organisations is to actually find something to create those opportunities for young people who don’t have them and will actually fly when they get into them.

There are budding schemes where the more affluent kids raise the money and the sponsorship and so on to support one another, I know in the sailing world and I know this happens and that seems to me to be a reasonable, you know, if it is tactfully handled, a reasonable way to do it.

I think there is huge number of alternatives, I think it is just down to the creativity of organisations to actually figure them out and create those opportunities, I think that is what we are about. ……………………………………..?????????

We should be just equipping them, I mean they are on an expedition for God sake, this is the RGS, people sit around here for months and months and months poring over the library and trying to equip themselves for their journey into the unknown, every baby is taking a journey into the unknown and you equip them, you are quite right, there are ages when they need to be warned, that they should stay within reach of a reliable adult and there are ages when they should learn how to walk through a town, take a train, handle themselves. I think you have to think in terms of the journey, equipping them for the journey and there is a point when outdoor education is an important thing with which to equip them, but it takes enormous sensitivity and nerve in a parent to know at what stage you are going to equip them with what.

I know today is all about risk, but I think perhaps it is also about trust ……………………….

How do you think it can come back in a sense………….

Well the religion thing, it is not something for which there is any quick easy fix, but I think one has to be honest and accept it as part of the picture about the whole business of the culture of fear, I do not know how I would have got through five weeks of my son being off across the Atlantic in the year after a quite serious illness with a load of strange Dutch men if I hadn’t been able to say the quick decade of the rosary, I may not have been operating as a particularly devote catholic most of my life, but you need that sense of in God we trust and I think that is part of what humans need, and I think as a group if they are going to reject organised religion, are going to have to work out what else they trust, you might trust in honour, you have

to trust something, it may just be other people, but do you then stop trusting them when it goes wrong and the rope breaks, you have to trust there is some wider purpose or meaning, but I mean that is taking me off into areas which are way beyond what you can solve today. I would just say one other thing, if I were still going to be here when the Duke of Edinburgh came, I would be backing him into a corner and saying if there is anybody who can be a Patron Saint for the new generation of this Outdoor Adventure thing it is his eldest grandson, he is off on his gap year having all these visible adventures, the effect this is having on kids nation-wide cannot be underestimated, every classroom is abuzz with girls who want to go off on Operation Raleigh and boys too, I think Prince William must be drawn in rapidly.

Do you have a question?

Yes, I wanted to challenge what you said about sport and adventure, there are much more adventure related sport,…………………………..

Yes, of course, I totally accept there is an overlap and there are areas of overlap, but the areas, the kind of neighbourhood areas that I am talking about are where what happens is someone says well he doesn’t have to go off and do the scout camp, he gets lots of exercise just play five a side in the leisure centre. She does her swimming in the pool, she does her canoeing in the pool and therefore I do not think she needs to go out on the sea, that is the kind of area that I was talking about, but yes, of course, if you are talking about fell racing, orienteering - I have seen these fell races - terrifying, yes, of course, they are and they are going far from help and they are carrying first aid kits and all these things which give you that real sense, so yes there is a border, but I do think, dingy racing is the classic - you can dingy race and be a really, really athletic and fantastic trapeze artist dingy racer, but still you know you get back and your mother puts the cover back on your boat for you and I just hate that, I think this is atrocious.

14.00 BOB BARTON: International consultant in adventure safety management and Mountain Guide NEW ROUTES TO CHINA - RISK MANAGEMENT AS OPPORTUNITY "Columbus set out to discover a new route to China. . . . but he discovered America. Adventure rarely reaches its pre-determined goal."

Hodgkin Genuine adventure is essentially unpredictable. Without uncertainty of outcome, Without risk we no longer have adventure.

We are in danger of risk being sidelined as an undesirable by-product of so-called adventurous activity.

The balancing of risk and benefit has always been at the core of adventure activities. We seem to be under threat of this being widely replaced by the virtual elimination of risk.

We should give no encouragement to the gratuitous taking of risk but the active ba1ancing of risk with benefit is too precious a commodity to be lost The diminution of adventure is due in part to an over-dependence on regulations and guidelines.

Systems-based approaches to risk management tend to focus on the things that are easily systematised and tends to ignore the things that do not conveniently fit into lists, safety rules, procedures and so on.

The systems-based approach is powerful. but it tends to ignore the human factor and gives the impression that if we get our guidelines right then the main threats will have been addressed.

The real difficulty is a combination of the way people behave (and people are difficult!) and a wonderfully uncertain wild environment.

There may be a fundamental difference in attitudes towards risk between industry and adventure education.

In the industrial field a level of risk close to zero seems to be the aim, but in outdoor education, if we entirely remove risk before participants engage with an activity we may kill the adventure.

Adams has described this difference as being between the Formal sector whose objective is to reduce risk and the Informal sector whose objective is to balance risks and rewards "The best safety lies not so much in the avoidance of danger, but in learning how to deal with it."

Price Balancing risk against opportunity is a key life skill. Adventure can give young people a superb arena in which to develop these skills, as long as we leave enough uncertainty of outcome for their risk management to be real.

We can help young people to learn and apply basic concepts of risk management.

These have wide applicability and can help attain: o o o

better education in life skills better management of risks -~ even the unanticipated ones risk adventure

We may have little immediate influence over a shift towards risk aversion, but by a restoration, a defence, of real adventure we might give future generations of young people the adventures they deserve and that the future of all of us needs. It is all a question of balance.

Thank you,

14.30 Young Persons Panel: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, my name is Steve Lenartowicz, I work at the Brathy Hall Trust and it is honour to introduce, probably the most important people here, this afternoon, because they are the people we have been talking about all day, the young people. I think all too often we talk about what young people need, rather than ask them and to engage in conversation with them and this is an opportunity for some young people who have been involved in some adventurous experiences to tell us about those experiences of risk and adventure. I would like to introduce, Fiona Barley, who has been involved with the ‘Tong’

achievement group in Bradford and with Outward Bound on the Department for Education Summer Activities scheme. Shart Hussain who is a youth worker in Bradford, Holly Morton who is 14 and Charlotte Upton also 14 who have been involved in a community project with the Brathy Hall Trust in Cumbria. Andrew Smith who is 18 and Chris Murray who is 24 from London who have been involved with expeditions with Raleigh International. First of all, can I say how very brave you are to be up here and perhaps this is one of the biggest adventures you have had, I don’t know how it compares with your adventures you have had in the outdoors.

Fiona, can I start with you. Could you tell us a little bit about how your journey started about the achievement group you are involved with.

Well, I joined the achievement group a week before they were going on the Outward Bound and a friend of my asked if I could join and they asked me if I wanted to go and I decided to go. I didn’t know anybody in the group apart from my friend, so it was pretty scary to go back. I did it and I am now friends with all the achievement group.

So what did you think you got out of that experience?

I think team work, brought was more close together and being able to say that you have done climbing, rock climbing and canoeing and stuff like that, I think it was scary but you do it.

You said to me earlier on, that you learnt some things without people talking. What did you mean by that?

Well, most of my life I have been told that I am not capable of achieving anything at all, I am very weak and I cannot do things, but when I went on a two week course, it didn’t talk to me, but it teached me that I was capable of doing things and I can actually stand on my own two feet and do things for myself.

What sort of new opportunities have you got from being involved in your Outward Bound experience?

What would you like to do next as a result of that?

My ambition is to go on an Outward Bound trip abroad and do that one.

Thank you, Sharon, you are a Youth Worker in Bradford and a young person yourself, and you also work with young people, can you tell us a bit about your experiences of working with Outward Bound and the young people of Bradford?

Well, I was just working with the Youth Club and I received a phone call from a police officer called Lee Homes, he works with the inner city young teams - he said would you like to go to one of the Outdoor Centres in the Lake District. I said to myself it was a good opportunity to go out there and find out what really is the outdoor environment so I went out there and from there it gave me so much opportunity, just gained so much confidence, give me the self -esteem , we worked in groups and I didn’t know where they came from, so it was a really good opportunity to meet other people as well as a challenging experience.

Early on we were talking about the fact that sometimes we can see these activities as being something for middle class people. You work with inner city people, Asian young people in Bradford. How do these kind of activities, what do they have to say to them.?

It is a hard process to get the young people interested - to go on these outdoor pursuits, the problem is money at the end of the day and there are funding bodies out there but we push and push for them all the time, but from my side we are pushing all the way and providing these opportunities for young people from the inner city to go out there and have a good experience and enjoy it and see what outdoor adventure is all about. Also to get them to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are as well, so it is a good opportunity for young people to experience.

Thank you, Holly and Charlotte you have been involved with a Community Project, one of the things I know you have been trying to do is to get a youth café established in your village for young people and you have been involved in some adventure training as part of that project, can you tell us something about, Charlotte the risks you have been involved with in the adventures you have been involved with there?

Well, I have been working with Brathay for two years now, we have done lots of different physical challenges like high ropes courses, rock climbing and we have done lots of presentations as well which are quite scary. One thing we did was a sculpture, we designed and produced it to go in the local park and there were lots of negative and positive comments published in the local press.

Holly, some of these things, did you see them as risks.

Well, the physical things that we had to do was fairly risky because you could hurt yourself, but the presentations didn’t seem like an obvious risk, but looking back we realised what could have gone wrong and you could have made a fool of yourself and forgotten what you were supposed to say and stuff, but the physical things we saw them as risks, but there was a better sense of achievement afterwards because you know that you have overcome it.

Thank you, - Charlotte what do you think you have gained from going through those things?

Well, we have developed better social skills, I think having the chances to join in these activities changes the perspective, and makes you appreciate every day better. I think our friends have become a lot closer through the trust we have gained, this foundation is going to enable us to venture into new things in the future. We have been doing lots of other things, like youth councils and trying to get skate parks in our area and school newspapers and things like that, I think that has made it easier.

Thank you, has it made it any easier getting up here today.

A little….

Thank you.

Andren - you only just made it to the Conference can you tell us where you have been?

I have been on a expedition in Bruni for three months and on our expedition I did an community project, an adventure project. In the community project we built an outdoor school all for the locals and in the adventure project we built a suspension bridge across a river and finished a canopy walk where tourists can walk through the jungle and view the waterfalls.

What was the biggest challenge for you about going on this expedition?

It was dealing with different people from different backgrounds……………I had to share a room with this girl that I did not, we did not get along, and we kept on bitching at each other and then we sat down and said that we did not like each other but we had to make the best of it and after that we just got on great.

What do you think you have gained from all of that.

I have gained leadership skills, on a day to day basis, they allocate a person to be their leader for the day and that person has to get up at 6.15 in the morning to organise and give people work to do for the day and make sure the day is full and also gain a lot of confidence.

What next, I know you have just come back from the expedition and you finished college last year - what are you going to do next.

First, I want to go…….and then I am going back to college and finish my course.

Chris, I believe you actually work for Raleigh as a youth worker - tell us a little bit about that.

Before I actually got involved with Raleigh, I actually got involved with Raleigh the Youth Development Programme, the at risk programme and before I got involved I was heavily into drugs and alcohol which led for me to get kicked out of my house by my parents and I was homeless. It ended with me overdosing and ending up in hospital in a bad way, from then I got my own flat and I thought right this cannot go on and I have got to do something about it, so I tried counselling and counselling didn’t work so I thought what can I do, I did the Prince’s Trust and I got a bit of confidence and motivation and that was when I heard about Raleigh International - it sounded good fun - a bit of excitement and get out of London. So I did that and what I had to before I went on the expedition was a series of residential in the UK. A weekend sleeping under blue bin bags, caving,walking for 10 miles instead of getting a bus, which I thought was fun.

After that I had to fund raise a certain amount of money to go on to an expedition and these residential gave me the motivation to do the fund raising. Went to Belize, three months - had a fantastic time - come back after that I volunteered with Raleigh for a year and dedicated all my time to Raleigh from there, I got a post as a youth worker and after that I got offered a six months to start my own project called The London Project.

You have obviously come from a background you might call at risk and you are now working with young people at risk. What do you think you would be telling them about the kind of opportunities that risk and adventure can offer them.

I have been there done it, got the tee shirt!!

Thank you, We have ten minutes or so to ask these young people….

Any questions…

The gentleman on the end - I was just wondering what was the most important part of the …. Programme I know it is a 12 week programme.

I think the best part, the thing that always attracts, especially people from London or any inner cities are is the residential, - a week away, getting out your environment, the council estate,the drugs, the alcohol - get taken to Wales for a whole week away from everything. All there is is sheep, trees and water and it is an experience that I never experienced before it was brilliant and I loved it.

What would you say to all those who would say it is just a holiday?

I would say it isn’t - you met loads of people, we made a bridge and finished a canopy wall and you just do things that you wouldn’t normally do - it was lovely. I met a lot of interesting people - you are having fun but you are doing something.

What was it like coming back to your own environment.

You have a wonderful trip you go away, you catching snakes, your chopping down bush in the jungle and stuff and then you come back to a red brick building and you know, it is like hitting a brick wall. What do you do? You can only make that choice and the challenge you had hopefully what we try and do is educate young people when they come back, is like take it one step further - everything you do in your life is a challenge and only you can overcome those challenges and make realistic goals for yourself.

All your experiences as far as I can gather have been outside an educational system, am I right. Has anybody taken part in any adventure experiences during school time - no.

Do any of the young people have anything to say about that - should schools be doing more to give young people more opportunities for adventure experiences. What about you Charlotte. Do you have ideas on that.

Yes, I think they should through the projects we have done, we have learnt loads and developed a lot and I think it helps to get on when you leave school. I think it would be better if they had things in schools as well.

Thank you, ………………….anybody had any experience of that situation.

For me, there is a lot, especially from the Asian communities to go out there and sell it to the parents and telling them what they gain and what they will benefit to other youngsters within the area and to me this is a hard job and selling it to parents - what they do is get knocked back a lot - there is an element of risk involved in it - in what the media portrays - one job is to go out there and say it is not as bad as what it sounds like - we actually do it when we go out there - it is about personal development for young people they come back full of confidence and full of enthusiasm as well which then they can go out and use to other youngsters which can then become a chain. In terms of the Asian society - it is very difficult telling the parents what you have got to do - because they don’t really know what goes on. As far as they are aware, it is just trees and water - you are just walking around, they believe you could do that in a local park.

It is hard, but we are getting there.

Another reason why you don’t see many Asians and you don’t see many black people doing that outdoor pursuit stuff because if you look at the advertisement on outdoor pursuits it is always a white man or a white woman with a full grown beard or something like that!!

Thank you….

The kind of adventures we have focused on is going on an expedition or you mention going climbing - is there any other kind of adventures that you have had in your development that you want to talk about, other kinds of activities, are they all about physical risks.

Holly - we took lots of psychological risks when we made the sculpture. We got lots of bad comments printed in the press, and we knew that might happen and whilst we were planning it and that we knew that we would have to face other people’s opinions. Only four of us - it quite hard to overcome but once you have done that - you ignore people like that.

One final question:Any bits of your programmes that were not so useful - that you recommend people didn’t work with young people.

Sometimes young people have this image that when they go out on expeditions or a residential it is like a chilling out place and they get to see what their strengths or weaknesses are. For youth workers it is always an ongoing process to keep promoting the young people to go out there and check out the outdoor environment.

Can I finish off there and thank you all.

I would like to welcome His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh who has come to us. We have had a very interesting morning - we have talked about adventure and society as a whole and whether risk is an

important element of society and that if there is undue suppression of risk then that is a loss for society. I think that is one of the things that hascome out of our morning’s discussion. We have had a message from the Prime Minister who did think risk was an inescapable partof society. (He ought to know), I read it out and the words are very carefully written, I think we all understood that, but I would like to welcome you and if I could just read something from John Hunt himself in 1953 when he was writing about his ascent of Everest he said one of the last and most thrilling events just before leaving was a visit to Buckingham Palace by myself and R W Lloyd, we were commanded to give an account of the expedition’s plans and prospects to HRH The Duke of Edinburgh who had graciously consented to become our Patron, it was vastly encouraging that we should be watched with interest by one who places such a value on the spirit of enterprise and high endeavour and I think that is really the feeling I have had this morning about this Conference.

15.00 HRH PRINCE PHILIP ‘A QUESTION OF BALANCE’ I am delighted to have been asked to speak at this very important conference. I only wish I could have found the time to attend from its start.

Ever since I was subjected to outdoor education while at school, it has always attracted my interest. I am sure that some of you will know that the Headmaster at Gordonstoun while was there was the redoubtable Kurt Hahn. He not only insisted that everyone undertook a challenging expedition of some sort, he was the founder of the Outward Bound Trust and the inspiration for my Award Scheme.

As had a rooted antipathy to long walks, my expeditions were usually by boat, and I have some pretty vivid memories of sailing through the Pentland Firth and along the west coast of Scotland. At the end of one summer term, we sailed a 60 ton ketch - an ex-collier - to Norway. By the time we got to Norway we all looked like coal-heavers, but it was a great experience.

As the first Director of the Award Scheme was Sir John Hunt, you can imagine with what care and forethought the expedition section was planned and controlled. Few people could have had so much experience of living under canvas as Sir John, hut even then it did not save us from making a significant mistake. In the early days several young people were to suffer from hypo-thermia and it was only after John Hunt had asked for the advice of his doctor on his Everest expedition, that he was able to put things right.

Doctor Pugh eventually discovered that many of the participants were wearing 'jeans' on their expeditions and that when these got wet, they drained the heat from the body. He then recommended more appropriate clothing and since then we have had virtually no further cases of hypo-thermia.

I mention this because it just shows how difficult it is, even for experts, to get every thing right first time. I think it also demonstrates that risk management depends equally on knowledge and experience knowledge of the risks and experience of when they are most likely to arise. The ability to foresee the possibility of danger is essential and this is only possible with experience.

Every activity in life is full of risks for the ignorant. Anyone trying to drive a car under present conditions without a knowledge of the Highway Code and the experience of driving a car under instruction, would be a menace to themselves and to all other drivers. If the perceived risk of road traffic accidents were to be treated in the same way as accidents in adventurous activities, the motor-car would be in danger of being banned.

However, genuine accidents do happen and it is important to differentiate between incidents, which are due to lack of knowledge and experience and those, which are genuinely unforeseeable accidents.

I believe that it is therefore unwise to generalise about risk in outdoor activities. Not all of them entail serious risk of injury anyway. Most sports, games and recreations take place out of doors, but they are not

necessarily adventurous or subject to the same sort of risks as in 'Outward Bound' type courses. They are nonetheless liable to accidents. The value of adventurous activities, as a means of developing initiative and responsibility, is not in doubt.

The problems Are that there is no such thing as absolute sa1~ty and no way of estimating what the acceptable risks might be.

The very first requirement before undertaking any physical activity - particularly adventurous activity - is an adequate level of physical fitness. This is difficult to achieve when there is such a demand for academic qualifications while so many school playing fields have been Closed in recent years and when there are so few specialist Physical Education teachers.

At the same time, there is to be legislation on the right of access to wild country. Has anyone, I wonder, considered the risks attached to such unlimited access?

There is a very popular 'Munro' on Balmoral. Most of the people who walk up it are sensible, but there have been cases of ladies trying to walk up in high-heeled shoes and of climbers setting off in doubtful weather conditions. There is a Mountain Rescue Service at Braemar, but in spite of that, Lochnagar has claimed an average of one life every year in the last 40.

The second requirement is competent instructors and leaders. It is all very well to demand appropriate qualifications for leadership, but the value of any qualification is only as good as the knowledge and experience of the instructor.

Some or you may have seen that remarkable television program about Sir Ernest Shackleton's expedition to the Antarctic in 1914. It was only in hindsight that it proved to have been a mistake to press on to the south and get stuck in the ice.. However, the members of the expedition were saved by the Shackleton's extraordinary qualities of leadership.

In spite of having to drag their boats for miles across the ice and then sail to Elephant Island. Most of the expedition had then to wait 10 weeks on this inhospitable rock while Shackleton sailed one of the lifeboats to South Georgia, some 900 miles away, to find help. In the end every soul returned safely to this country.

There is naturally an emphasis on the risks inherent in all adventurous activities, but this needs to be balanced against the risks of not being allowed to take part. We should take into account the consequences to young people of not being exposed to any form of physical challenge.

It can result in a lack of fitness, obesity and resistance to disease.

It can lead to the choice of alternative 'thrills', such as drugs, drink and crime.

It can lead to the choice of alternative 'thrills', such as drugs, drink and it can lead to alienation from the family and to becoming unsuitable for employment. The question that the safety-obsessed need to answer is, are the risks in adventurous activities more or acceptable than the risks of the alternatives?

It seems evident to me that much of the anxiety about the perceived risk in adventurous activities comes from people with limited knowledge of the facts. I am certain that there is much to be said for the proposed "Campaign for Adventure" which I hope will result in a continuation of this conference towards greater understanding of risk and adventure by society at large.

Thank you, 15.30 DISCUSSION WITH WRITTEN QUESTIONS: One question, if I were the Fairy Godmother what single wish would you ask me to grant in order to maximise the benefits of outdoor activities for young people in Britain today‌.

Well on my wish list number one would be to provide resources for bicycle lanes up and down the country.

There use to be a time when bicycling was a mode of transportation for children and young people. It is becoming increasingly difficult. From my experience. I find that bicycling is one of the first adventurous things that relatively young children can do on their own, which opens them up to other possibilities, it is a starting point for the really big adventures in life and that is what I would wish would happen.

I think if I could have a wish it would be that suddenly every headteacher and boss of education authorities in the country would be enlightened as many of them are and realise the great values that can be gained and then would be allowed by a benevolent Government to satisfy the certain amount of time from a curriculum which had no time in it at all to allow these young people to get out and enjoy what we have heard them enjoy.

Funnily enough I was going to say almost exactly the same thing, to enlighten teachers of the value of adventurous activities. The thing that fascinates me is that in the Award scheme for example the tremendous initiative that is shown by young people and very often the teachers who are running the Award scheme to get out to all sorts of places. They go to Europe, they go to South America and somehow they manage to raise the funds amongst themselves and I think that it is that belief in the value of that sort of adventurous activity that is really necessary in the whole teaching profession..

I can now answer by saying that I agree with the two previous speakers, but I think what I would say would be for adventure to take place within a different kind of culture, for it to take place within a learning culture, rather than a blaming culture.

We have a question from, it is actually signed, Roger Putnam, can you remember it for shall I read it out.

One of my concerns about the Conference so far, it has looked very much at the needs of the individual and the needs of the family and young people, but it hasn’t looked broadly at the needs of the society. My thesis really is that society has made painful progress over centuries , it has been erratic, it has been slow, sometimes for instance on the environment………but I think undeniable progress has occurred and that the essential requirements for that are a spirit of enterprise and creativity which has enabled progress to take place and the thesis theory continues without risk taking, there is no creativity and no enterprise, they are absolute …. And therefore if we create a society where risk taking is not encouraged the thesis is that progress stops and the question is how can be change that, how can we make sure that society does not become risk adverse, so that progress, whatever that means can continue, the question is, first of all, do you accept the thesis and secondly, if you do how do we change the culture?

I take you point, earlier Libby Purves was focusing on the issue of religion and I can see her point about the importance of being certain about a thing being very very important. I think that for me the key issue is not a revival of religion or a revival of belief in a general abstract phenomenon, but the fact that we have lost believing in ourselves. I think if there is one phenomena that you see at all levels of society from politicians down to parents is a real failure of theirs, a reluctance to make hard and difficult decisions and continually finding excuses as to why you have to postpone the difficulties until tomorrow or the day after tomorrow and I think a lot of that comes down to not believing in ourselves. The risk aversion is ultimately a statement about the human condition. It basically says that we as people are pathetic sort of negative destructive creatures that cannot cope, cannot rely on one another and it is like a belief in our human potential, I think which is so damaging which leads this negative attitude towards enterprise and taking risk, towards particularly experimentation, in many respects the core content of every idea that we have ever had about progress.

Could I make one point, an entirely practical one. I entirely agree with the thesis incidentally. I think one thing we could do absolutely straight away, the Prime Minister has been kind enough to write to us and I do think we should write back and I do think we should tell those who have been kind enough to organise this Conference that a letter back is not only courteous, but might be a good idea anyway.

Can I just say that one of the reasons why this happened is that when you are swimming against cynical criticism, you tend to give up after a bit and it takes a lot to keep going, in spite of an endless nagging by

people either out of maliciousness or whatever simply do not think it is a good thing to do. The sort of terms, you know like you play games and people say, jolly hockey sticks or the sort of attitude if you go out on an adventurous activity, it is a jolly, it ridiculous, how could people do such a thing, it is extraordinary, the peer pressure, or the peer pressure amongst the cynics, that doing anything active or different is just weird.

On Michael Hobbs’ suggestion of a letter to go back. That was actually put by someone over there this morning, so I have scratched out a few notes which we then have to agree in detail, but will just say what I thought we might say and see perhaps if anyone has any comments.

Thank you for your message the Conference, “A Question of Balance” on risk and adventure in society which we were very pleased to receive. The Conference welcomed your view that risk is an inescapable part of our lives and that the challenge is how to manage it. The Conference also identified that an excessive concern about risk may itself oppose a danger to society and the ability of young people to manage risk in their future lives. There are a number of issues here on which we would welcome the opportunity of presenting to you or one of your Ministers and we hope that this may be possible… so it really is a short courteous reply, thanking him and suggesting that a dialogue would be a good idea and if we could identify which particular Minister it is, then we could get on with it. I do not think we need to draft it in, but if there are any other broad ideas, then please do say.

May I suggest that the young people who talked today also write of their remarks incorporated in the letter.

It would be very good to compliment the Government on the initiative they put forward, one for 16+ young people and secondly the connection service - they are fantastic opportunities for outdoor education.

I have got the best question and thank you to whoever submitted it. How do the panel answer the following question, posed to me recently by a 10 year old, “if absailing is so safe why do we need all these ropes”.

What is the answer..

It is a kind of unanswerable question. I think the first thing I would say, it is clearly a very smart 10 year old and one hopes that they go far. We have spent quite a lot of time here looking outside of the provision of adventure and seeing problems with the interface of ourselves with the world out there, but I think we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there are some problems of our own making and I think there is a tendency to present fantastic activities like rock climbing in a rather dull and mechanic way and that is it actually possible to present rock climbing in a safe way without removing all the joy from it and I have seen too many sessions where people take these enthusiastic 10 year olds through the breaking strain of the rope and the UIAA test before they set hand and foot on rock and we have got to escape from that and remember that these things are fantastic things to do.

There is a question here, which I will read out - we tend to think of motor cars in terms of what they can do for us, opportunities, independence, freedom, rather than as a problem or as a danger. How can we as adventure facilitators encourage society to view young people in the same way, i.e. appreciating what they can do, rather than treating them as a problem to be solved what they can’t.

I agree, they should be treated as being, and I think that is what most adventurous activity is designed to do, is to help them discover what they can do or make the best of their talents, which is the important part. I think all the young people here probably discovered when they did go out on these adventurous activities that they did in fact do very much more than they every expected they could do. It never dawned on them that they had the capacity or the courage or initiative to go through this, so that the whole point of your activity or adventurous activity is you take people who you know can do it and then convince them they can do it, which is, then the result it they feel so much better for it and so do you.

One question is, you seemed to be agreed that there is so much to be gained through sensible risk taking, do we need to be clear about what is specific benefits of adventure are in order to sell adventure education to uncertain parents.

I think in some sense, yes - it was mentioned that the more imaginative in the way these things are marketed, but I think if you think through the logical of Prince Philip’s point about the point, that often these kinds of activities are stigmatised and there is a very strong anti-heroic kind of culture where things to do with the outdoors are seen as being really, really un-cool, so not the kind of thing you want to be involved in. I think we are talking about a cultural pressure here and I think the real challenge is to make all these activities really cool. It is the kind of thing young people almost directly wouldn’t want to do themselves, they are pressurising their parents to say hey mum, hey dad, I want to go on an overseas expedition, I want to go and do something like that and I think if you recognise that as the problem then the key issue is not the parents, but the key issue is to resonate with the experimentation that young people have in any case. They are going to be the ones that are going to have the strength to challenge these cultural pressures, the key thing is to really bring out a sense of adventure that ever single child has, but that somehow gets surpressed, I don’t know why by all these forces around us. That is the thing to really bring out and that is what is going to make the difference in the long run.

Question: We seem to be agreed that there is much to be gained through sensible risk taking - do we need to be clearly about what is specific benefits of adventure are in order to sell adventure education to uncertain parents.

I think that does bring up what Libby Purves was saying this morning to some extent, and I think we ought to illicit help from people like her to some extent we do have an image, or we have cultivated or got an image, some parts of us which are unfortunate and which do make it less easy for parents to want their young to go and indeed in some cases for young people to want to go themselves and I suspect that is to put it in business terms, a marketing thing, but we really must get it right if we deserve to get the maximum number of young people.

We have got a question here - from Marcus Bailey - shall I read it out Marcus - there is broad agreement today about what we should be trying to do, do panel members have suggestions given the diverse opinion and the very real issue of parental concern as to how these aims can be achieved, in particular what steps would you like to see the Government taking. There is also another question from someone who says there is a three point plan, one part is to disabandon the AALA. So the question is, do panel members have suggestions given the diverse opinion and the very real issue of parental concern as to how these aims can be achieved, in particular, what steps would you like to see the Government taking. ……………Is there anything that the Health & Safety Executive would like to say.

I am Jane Willis, I am from the Health & Safety Executive, I Chair the Adventure Activities Industry Advisory Committee, which is a advisory committee of the Health & Safety Commission, I am a mother, I am a Guide Leader, I am an Duke of Edinburgh Award winner ,so I came to this Conference with a lot of hats on, but I guess I am here because of the role I play for the Health & Safety Commission in chairing their advisory committee on adventure activities and it is fascinating to hear the debate on risk today, it is a debate that has gone on within the Heath & Safety Executive since it was first set up and a lot of the issues raised today around risk perception, risk communication, the whole language of risk, societal risk, individual risk comes to the fore. In my own field, with my own division we deal with a lot of public safety issues and I was very interested in Bob Barton’s comparison between the industrial set up of risk management and risk management within adventure within outdoor activities, because they are different, but they come, if you like within the same band of law and the adventure activity licensing regime, which didn’t illicit a great deal of positive affirmation ,of course, came in after one of the incidents of the type that has been talked about by Libby today others an incident that actually, the current law at the time took action against. An enforcement action was taken by the Health & Safety Executive but none the less there was further views in the media, the Houses of Parliament and further legislation was passed which is now the

province of colleagues in the Department of Education and Employment but which, of course, the Health & Safety executive takes a close interest in and does get engaged in. The Advisory Committee is a committee of the Health & Safety Commission and it was set up to advise the commission on issues around adventure activities and the debate which has been waged today has been waged by the committee through several meeting and in several forms. I would be very happy to take back from this debate today a lot of the views that have come and talk with my advisory committee about how best to put that to the commission and we can clearly feed that through the Ministers. The debate on risk goes much wider and I mean there is, I think somebody was saying there was a,Government Department or Minister for risk, there if, of course a Governmental Committee on risk, there would be wouldn’t there, and we have been there, there is a lot of risk right across it and so there is a Government Committee on it as well and it will be interested in your views and I do believe, thought I am sorry I haven’t got the title of it, but there is a Government paper from the Cabinet office due out on risk. So this debate is timely and there is a lot of ways to feed in your views ,but I think it is important to reach some consensus today where you talk about coming to some resolutions. I think the letter to Mr Blair in view of his letter to you is obviously timely and I think you particular interests and views in the debate which wages right across Government at the minute on the balance, the balance between protecting people and reducing risk, protecting people as a Health & Safety Executive. So people like the Department of Health are only to keen to have a healthy nation, There are the issues to face the ministers and face society as a whole, so I do think you need to engage in a debate and to contribute a lot of the views of the conference to them, but I am certainly very happy to take them back through the channels that I can.

Thank you very much Jane.

Could I just ask, do you think it would be a good idea for your Committee, the Outdoor Advisory Committee perhaps to meet a group and discuss these things, actually get people to come along so that you don’t have the full burden of conveying the message, we could actually have a discussion with them and they could ask questions and perhaps some volunteers might come from here who might be willing to go along, half a dozen people and have a talk with them Would that be helpful.

It would be very welcome, some of my members are here today, we are actually representing the community. Yes, we are planning an open meeting, we have had a successful one in Scotland, we are planning another one in Wales next year, which obviously we will publicise very widely and this will be a very timely debate, to be in there and continue this debate at that meeting.

One of the interesting things that you said is that there is a very active debate on this and it is obviously must important and we are very grateful for your help in feeding these things through.

Two things, I think there is an awful lot of chat about risk, as if somehow or another that was a thing in itself. It is not because risks depend on knowledge and experience and some inexperienced are at a much greater risk than people who are experienced, so I do not think we should concern ourselves just with the concept of risk and who is at risk for instance. What we really need to do is to analysis the accidents and the injuries so that we can then establish at what level of risk there is, the tendency is to say, there is a risk in outdoor adventure when it is patently untrue. There are rights, obviously you can have an accident, you can have an accident walking out of this place and trip over the steps, its the consequence, it is the injuries and the accidents that you want to analysis and if you see a pattern of the same sort of accidents taking place, like for instance in the 50s when the hospitals had special wards for motorcyclists who had fallen off their motorbikes, of course, and damaged their heads because they were not wearing helmets, well people put two and two together and said well the risk of an accident, of hurting your head if you are going to ride a bike with no helmet is obvious, so therefore wear a helmet and you will reduce the risk. It is only by putting the two together, you cannot go out and say that driving a motorcycle is a risky business period, because quite evidently it isn’t. People can ride them until they are a great age and not come into any difficulty. Just one thing that worries me slightly about the Health & Safety Executive and I do not mean this in any critical sense, but if you set up a body of that kind, there is a tendency for it to justify its own existence, this may not be true of the Health & Safety Executive, but if you are given the responsibility for looking for something wrong, you will find it. Just one other point, someone said what should the Government be doing, well the short answer is nothing in my opinion. In the 50 years that I have been

around in this sort of business, I have seen goodness knows how many Government initiatives right the way through all the different shades of Government and there is a tremendous enthusiasm, it is launched, there is great sort of hue ha, and six weeks later its dead, you have never heard of it again, and nine times out of ten, everything has progressed and then suddenly, terribly sorry we have not got the funds for it, so it is much better, I think, if you want my opinion what the Government should do, they should facilitate, they should understand what we are trying to do and make it easier for all these voluntary organisations to do the jobs which they want to do and to do the jobs which they have to justify to their donors. You cannot do any of this work unless you can persuade parents and employers to support it, so that is the measure of what we ought to be doing, we ought to be making sure that we have our community, our parents and everybody else on our side and actually paying for it. What we really need from the Government is facilitation to make it easier to see where there are economic disadvantages, where the tax system is awkward, this business of every single person who wants to have anything to do with young people has to go through a screening process, well, you know, you wonder, it is just mounting bureaucracy, mounting regulations, sort of a nanny business gone mad, so I think if they can just help If Imay say something about the question that started this discussion. There seems to be general agreement here it is all about balancing risk with benefit, risk with educational benefits and benefits to society and so on and this is a very big issue and I think one of the difficulties in giving a short focused answer on what we would like to see the Government do, is that it is such a big picture, but what I want to say is that I think it is unfortunate when the issue in front of us gets narrowed down to simply being a matter of licensing and so whilst I welcome dialogue with the industry advisory committee todo with the licensing authority, I believe that the issue that we have all been talking about is very much bigger than that simple relatively small part of the whole thing and that we do not want to lose sight of the big picture and that really is what the dialogue with Government has to be about, but who do we go to.

As somebody outside of the industry altogether, I think it is generally recognised that risks are best negotiated informally, because most risks are highly specific and they relate to specific circumstances, now the minute you begin to regulate risk taking and the minute we begin to license certain activity, we immediately formalise relationships that up until now have been informally fairly spontaneously regulated and negotiated. The trouble is no matter what society, what time in history, or when, the minute you begin to formalise risk taking you are going to intensify suspicion, you are going to intensify people’s fears, you are going to make an incentive for people to litigate, you are going to create an incentive for even more rules, because no simple form of regulation can cover all specific circumstances and all you need is just one exception accident and it would mean even more regulations and even more licensing and the trouble is that once this process begins to sort of create its own dynamic, it creates a phschology we can all ….. which makes us even more scared, even more scared than we were yesterday, or the day before yesterday and that is why I think we can understand that at the end of the day, regulation or licensing cannot help the problem, it might create a parameter in which sensible decisions can be made, but it can very easily create a very damaging environment for us where risk taking becomes even more difficult to experience.

We have got a question the Government in particular, Richard Painter may want to comment….

The previous Government by introducing local management at schools, LMS, directed money from LEA’s directly out to state schools, LEAs were forced therefore to remove funding from many centres offering outdoor education. Isn’t it time we asked the Government to recognise the importance of outdoor education by allowing LEAs to fund outdoor centres along with the schools.

Would anyone like to comment We will note this as a valid point, which we will note as part of the action programme.

I was only going to say that it has been aggravated by the reorganisation of Local Government, I think whereas there was a set pattern that had developed before the whole thing was up-eved as it were, and I think it may take a bit of time before Local Authorities get around to possibly considering this again, because their relatively new system is relatively new and there is quite a lot of, I am talking from the Awards Scheme and Michael Hobbs can confirm, but where as we had established a very good liaison

network with all the local authorities, once it was reorganised and their responsibilities changed, we had to reconstruct this network and it is really quite a time consuming business and with any luck, I think future Local Authorities, when they have settled down will begin to see the value of these outdoor pursuit centres and might come round to it again or as they have done, to make use of, or to find the funds to make use of the centres that do exist and simply fund children to go to them,‌‌ I am a little ambivalent about this question because I feel myself as being a competitor, but I am not really, but in the case of North Lanarkshire, we have a very good agreement with the Director of Education, whereby 1000 young people from North Lanarkshire come to Outward Bound Lockquell on week long courses every year and it has, I think they have actually an answer to another question, a little bit earlier, we have discovered and they have discovered that used in conjunction with other things that they are doing, it has had a very noted effect on a number of young people who were either failing or at risk of failing at school, and they have been able, if you like to see there is real categorical evidence, it think also there would be enormous virtue to a structure and network of Local Authority Outdoor Education Centres.

There is a question here from Andy Williams - to ensure that future generations of young people experience genuine adventure, we have to ensure that leaders, instructors and teachers of outdoor education are experienced, trained and qualified. Do the panel feel that the current process of training the future guardians of outdoor adventure is adequate.

I think it is a very good question which gives me a bit of thinking time, but I think that the schemes of training provided by the National Governing Bodies are extremely good in all sorts of ways, but I do feel that there are some issues which are not, which need to be addressed, and I mentioned them during my talk and they are real issues if you like, seeing risk management as a process, recognising the influence of the human factor in the development of incidents and so on. I do think that those are most relevant topics that I would like to see addressed, I suppose the final thing I would like to say, is that I am aware that the training and development of leaders takes place across a much wider range of organisations and situations than simply the National Governing Bodies, although those organisations are ones which we reach rather more easily.

Could I perhaps add one thing, and this may sound controversial, and that is I think where the training does take place and where it is necessary and seen to be necessary and qualifications are seen to be required, I am sure it is admirable, but I am sure there are a lot of areas, perhaps particularly, and there was one teacher who mentioned this, in schools particularly where perhaps they escape from or are not subjected to any form of training at all before many of the things they do which would be classified as adventurous training and I think one of the areas that we have got to watch is not where the training is taking place, whether it is good enough, but whether the training is taking place in the right place among the right people and giving them the experience and the knowledge to be able to take groups out from school.

I think it is also a question of identifying what is an adventurous activity and I think if you, I am sure it is slightly anecdotal, but I am sure you have read of the number of rather unfortunate accidents on expeditions and in many cases the expedition has been led by a teacher who is enthusiastic about giving students or children outdoor adventurous activities but don’t really know enough about it, and I think it is difficult for them to assess how far they should go without being qualified. It may sound very easy, there is a recent case, where those two girls were swept away, anybody could have said lets go out for a walk, but when they got to the point who was to say that crossing this place was risky unless you knew about it, unless you had been across, you knew that the rocks were slippery, that the water was high, so I think it is very difficult for teachers always to assess quite how far they should go, or in a sense be allowed to go, without actually going out themselves as part of an expedition before they lead another expedition. I have to say, Michael Hobbs will confirm this, but to do the Awards scheme, at bronze level you have to spend one night out,, silver, two nights out and gold, three nights out. We have had really astonishingly few accidents on these and people have gone to the most extraordinary places and certainly in the hills of Wales were the weather can change dramatically. Some expeditions have been caught out, but they have managed to do the right thing. Well that is because they all do a practice expedition, they are all supervised, you have to have done first aid, you have to have learnt how to use a compass and map. So, we have been lucky, in a sense lucky, they have done things which in ordinary circumstances would have been very risky if you were just

vaguely walking up the hill and getting stuck in the fog or at night or something because we have always taken great trouble to always give them appropriate training, they have been able to get away with things which if you were to just do it casually would be very risky, I’d like to add that it seems to me that one of the most important areas of course is the training of leaders in the voluntary sector too, training volunteers and that I think there are considerable efforts going on from voluntary organisations and also from the National Governing Bodies and the National Outdoor Centres and so on to allow that training to take place, but there is still an awful long way to go and anything that brings those different parties together seems to me to be entirely desirable.

Marcus, I think you wanted to say something….

His Royal Highness referred to the tragic incident in Yorkshire recently, I don’t know whether it is relevant, but I wrote to the Director of Education for Leeds City Council yesterday, urging him not to over react in such difficult times……………. and this whole issue, can we afford to expose …

It seems to me that the last question includes many of the factors that because of our …………It is presupposing that adventure can only be led by older people and adults and one of the things we are trying to get away from, older people should not……..although that is a role ………..which should enable us and facilitate, getting out of the way of young people, so the young people can have their own adventure, and I would like to see greater emphasis placed on young people taking their own initativies.

When I was learning how to ski properly, my trainer told me one thing which I will never forget and basically he said, there are things you have got to learn, absolutely important that you learn, but they cannot be taught and I think that is crucially important when it comes to adventure, that there are certain things that nobody can teach you, there are elements of leadership within all of us that need to be nurtured and cultivated, but in the end somehow it is your responsibility to make sure that process occurs. Obviously other people play a vital role in facilitating that process from occurring and it seems to me that if you understand that in the end its an individual orientated enterprise that we are involved, that education is ultimately about allowing people to find themselves, and realise their potential, then I think that educative development of outdoor adventure can be sold and marketed and understood in a much more relevant way than is often the case, in a sense it is the ability to find yourself through learning through yourself, that is probably the most petagoritry device in any area of education and that is another area that needs to be brought to people’s attention.

I think there was a question…….

I work at the University of Edinburgh - ………….one thing that might interest people to know is that the young people who were researched who were studying that particular project, may well have been defined as being at risk, but they did not think they were at risk, that is the first point, as far as they are concerned they are just fine, the second thing is, we discovered that those young people had very high self esteem which was not improved by going on an Outward Bound Course, that was because they were regarded very well by their peers, this brings me to the point that Frank has just made, that it relates to the nature of the education transaction, we are trying to get people to become more self aware and perhaps in the end take responsibility, the outdoor sector devises a whole range of ways in which it endeavours to do this, we are very very …….at trying to work out, what works, how it works, and why it works and indeed there has been a great deal of talk so far about mountaineering, expeditions, sailing and so on, there has been very little talk about what actually happens when …….which is a very short sharp ……often …….now I would just like to ask Frank if those activities are ……….. to learning or self responsibility or ………………………

First I do agree with the point make by the questioner over there and I do think that the training of leaders and instructors should include something about handing over responsibility and standing back. To answer your question, I think you are absolutely right to point out that there is probably a difference of kind between the kind of short sharp group activities and the longer duration more traditional adventure

activities. I suspect that there is a considerable difference in the educational impact that they have. I think the short activities are very effective if you like at reaching the thinking part of the brain and letting people learn about team work and so on, I think they are fun, they are very exciting, but I do not think they are adventurous, I am cautious about this, I don’t think they are adventurous in the term that I understand it. It seems to me that the greater duration of the traditional activities offers a great deal, that is the great issue of the uncertainty of the outcome, the fact that there is some sort of ………..involved, some commitment involved. I would be very sorry if we ended up with all outdoor education occurring in 20 minutes units.

I agree with that except for one point, there is a danger of kind of ………………..and they each have their own role. Probably for me the most important element of education is consistency, because it is doing things on a regular basis over a long period of time that is the real challenge and the real developer of the individual and I think if you understand what adventure is all about you don’t go on out an adventure, at a certain time adventure sneaks up on you and that may catch you unaware when you ask for 25 minutes just to go round the corner as much as when you are going down the Amazon, so I think a consistent element in education is quite important because it makes it less artificial, it becomes more part of your life and therefore it internalises more as a broader education process.

I think Frank has put his finger on the ultimate paradox about people who provide so called adventure experiences and that is to say to someone I will meet you at 5.30 and we will have an adventure and it will finish by 9.30, it has got a slightly unreal quality about.

Could I just take up the point that was made about getting young people to take up their own adventure.

Take sailing, for instance, a lot of very young children are very competent in small boats, but that isn’t by natural talent, somebody has to teach them and they have to learn how to sail a boat, obviously once they have learnt to sail they can have their adventure, but at some stage they have got to be shown how to do it, I would not put any of you on my carriage and tell you, here ride these four ponies, you can just image what would happen. I do agree you would have an adventure.

We have got to move on to the conclusion. The question now is any conclusions we may reach and there was the question of Prince Philip mentioned the campaign for adventure and I think Randell you have done some thinking on this …

16.00 THE WAY FORWARD The English Outdoor Council started thinking about this issue a couple of years ago, but was actually stimulated by Frank’s first book and we thought that its a huge issue, we must not simply bemoan, someone has got to do something about it and the values, if you like of risk aversion and litigation are so diametrically opposed to ours that it might as well be us. Now raising the profile of the whole issue was the first thing and this conference has most certainly achieved that and may I express my very grateful thanks to everybody that has contributed to this conference, but we are adamant that that should not be seen as an isolated …………….but it should be seen as the start of an ongoing process, a longer and harder process of preaching to the unconverted. We have got some outline plans to do that and we would like to carry that process out over a two year period, but it is clear that we cannot do it alone, the Council is a small voluntary organisation and it needs the help of others so we intend first to seek partner organisations that are working to change attitudes with national campaigns and just as importantly, we are seeking one or more sponsors that may help us to do that, so if you know of any. I am actually delighted that such a clear core for an ongoing campaign has come out of today’s conference, so watch this space and help us to fill it with the views that you think should be articulated.

Thank you, Well on the conclusions, Ian Lewis is going to arrange for a summary and there will also be verbatim report that will also be available on the Web site, is that right Ian. Can I say that some of the ideas which seem to me to come out of today’s extremely interesting discussion, and then if anyone has got anything they would like to add, we have got a bit more time. The kind of things which came out of it for me were, first of all, like Randell said, people are at the start of an ongoing

process, it is maybe a landmark, people do seem to have agreed that the question of risk needs to be correctly identified and it is potentially important to Society. We have this letter from the Prime Minister that we can respond to, so it may well be that today is a bit of a landmark and maybe it is a landmark at rather a good time, because Ian Lewis said that this was really meant to be Millennium kind of idea, and when you think about it that is actually quite good, because the auspices were really quite good in the 1960s for the big movement forward that took place at that time, there was the ascent of Everest, it was a time when there was very interesting people around, Jack Longdon, and it was a very creative time and now maybe it is time for another leap forward and therefore the idea of having had this conference and quite a high degree of unanimity at least the issue is worth pursuing. I think that is very constructive. The things that struck me were, there were quite a number of things on the, if we divided it between the outdoor movement, society and the future and government, on the outdoor movement, I think we discussed the need for a greater understanding of what outdoor activity is and the benefit to society of avoiding what was called outdoor illiteracy, there is a range of issues there, it is both analysis and also explanation. There was a distinction drawn again by Libby Purves between sport and outdoor education. I do not know if that really stood up too much to the later discussion, the point about…….was strongly made, but maybe the two ought to go together, really that sport has great benefit to society as well as outdoor recreation. Michael Hobbs mentioned the point about resources, we have not discussed that in great depth, but obviously there is a point there about resources and the point was made from the front here when we were talking about a letter to the Prime Minister that we should express recognition and appreciation of the considerable amount of resources that the government has been sending in this direction recently and then the point was also made by Prince Philip about the responsibility to be well equipped and organised for mountain access and the obligation with the new legislation that there is an obligation that we do what we can to make sure that people on Loch Ll……… are well equipped and organised themselves, of course, this is something we have been trying to do for a long time but we do need to realise that there is a responsibility within all of us who are interested that society itself does have a view on the value of the mountain activity and part of that view is in terms of the cost of accidents, so between us all we do have an interest in making sure that as Prince Philip says there is a good understanding of what is needed. Now in terms of society, Frank Furedi was very strong, of course, on the danger of an increasingly risk adverse society and I think that was something which I think everybody was very enlightening to be able to understand that issue. The point was made about the question of the ranking of risk, you have 300 odd deaths on the road which people, they don’t seem to make as much of a fuss about that as they do about some deaths in outdoor adventure or maybe on railways, there is some need for a more general understanding of ways of putting things together so things are seen in better proportion and I think that was the point that Marcus Bailey was making in his letter to the Leeds Education people. It is not in any way to brush things under the carpet or diminish them but there is a whole question that society does take a lot of risk anyway each and every day, every member of society is taking risks and it is a question of getting the risk that we are dealing with into proportion.

Then there is the point about, an issue for society about the point was made, there is a question of poor physical condition and this is seen also in recruitment of the armed services and so on and if there is an issue there, it is something that society needs to think about and then, it is a question of the issue that Bob raised when he was talking about the importance and the value of outdoor education, he did say that in the end that is something on which society must take a view, the balance between the value and the benefit of outdoor education and the risks is actually an issue for society but it is an issue on which society’s views need to be well informed and we cannot ask for more that people are aware of the issues. Now on the future, the things which emerged as far as I was concerned is that we were grateful for the message from the Prime Minister and there was a need to reply to that, and I suggested some points and there were three or four other points which were put in, so that can be done. One of the questions there is the awareness of the question of the funds on which we might get some help from Michael Hobbs on, and then the other main question on the future was the question of some sort of coming together or collective effort and Randall explained about the campaign for adventure and me understanding is that people do see this as in the Millennium as the beginning of a new process and it is necessary to get on with something in that direction that, it does seem to be a general agreement that we must continue with that and doubtless some suggestions will come out from the Foundation and you will communicate with people about it. It was good that you had actually taken the trouble, following the discussion with Frank a couple of years ago you have obviously carefully thought and this conference itself is part of that, so thank you very much for taking that initiative. Those were what seemed to me the main points which came out, I don’t know if

anybody would like to add anything or alter anything, they were just my ideas, otherwise I will go on to thank everybody. ………………………..and I think we should make the most of that ………………

Well that is absolutely right, part of the letter that will go is going to be the young people’s point of view, maybe Steve will help us to co-ordinate that and say something that people agree with, do you want to say something.

Is that something that AfOL would offer to do..

I am Editor of Horizon magazine, you have got a copy of that in your pack, most of the time I am an outdoor practitioner, so I am out there in the ……. And part time I do some other stuff,…………. I am interested in some of your opinions of adventure. Adventure comes from a Greek or Latin word ad which means before and venturous which means about arrive so the adventure happens before you get there, before you arrive,. We have all been on a journey, some of the…………..that started here have appeared in this magazine and I would like to say thank you to Chris Lyons……………..so I would ask people both to contribute to the magazine and also put hands in pockets, the more of these that are bought, our circulation can improve and we can get the word out………………the risk of eating a burger is now seen as fairly high……………………

The web site is …. Actually it is in here.

Thank you very much Chris.

So the question from Liverpool, about is it right that you can send things to AfOL and they will make sure they go on to…….

The web site is www.outdoor-learning.org and anything sent to that site will be mentioned, put in, passed to Chris and shared.

Well I would like to ask the panel members is there anything you would like to say, any general conclusions, other ideas.

I think it is marvellous that it is taking place and that somebody took the initiative and Ithink it is something that has been enormously valuable to the whole of the sector and if it can be carried on through whatever that curious thing is, over the horizon here, so much the better.

Well just coming from the outside, it has been a real learning experience for me, I am stunned to see so many people who are not risk adverse, so have go a robust attitude towards life, are open to new ideas and that is really nice to see that and I think given the fact that there is a lot of people out there as well who have a fairly common sensical share many of our concerns that we have been discussing, campaign that can have a huge impact on the future is an entirely realistic proposition. There is no need for a paper campaign, there is no need for going through the motion of creating a campaign, we have got the possibility of doing something that can have a real influence on people’s lives in a very positive way, so I think we should be encouraged by this and do a bit of work to make sure that this plan is actually realised and the next time we come back there is not three hundred of us which is a really good sized conference but there are thousands of people who are being turned away because there is not enough room for them.

I must say that looking around everybody here grew up in the period before people had through of risk and the fact that you are here does indicate some how or another that you can avoid the worst injuries.

16.30 CONCLUSION I would like tobring the conference to a close, I know people will have travel arrangements and so on, I would like to give most sincere thanks, especially to Prince Philip, we did very much appreciate your

contribution Sir, Libby Purves who had to leave, to Frank Furedi, to Sir Michael Hobbs, and to Bob Barton.

We very much appreciate those contributions and the large amount of work which into them. I would like to thank from all of us the young people who came and that was very interesting and gave a special dimension to the day and I would like to Steve Lenar… and then there is the administrators who made the whole thing possible, Cath and her team from the offices in Penrith who have worked extremely hard well and are most grateful to them. Then there is the planning group, Roger Orgill, Wendy Johnson, Shane Winsor, Ian Lewis, Randell Williams, we very much appreciate all the forward thinking which went into this, this has been going on for a long time. I hope that you feel the day has been worth all the considerable effort that they have been put in to it. There is Melanie at the bookshop, the bookshop is there and we thank Melanie for her work on that. There are the partner organisations and there is the sponsor, Go Outdoors, the Outdoor Industry’s association. I would like to thank all of them and I would like to thank everybody who has taken the trouble to come and all the people who have spoken during the day and I would like to say that I have enjoyed it very much and I would like to wish the campaign great success for the future. Thank you.

‘A Question of Balance': Risk and Adventure in Society Ian F. Lewis, Association for Outdoor Learning Conference Press Release published in Young People Now [October, 2000] The place of risk and adventure in our society, but particularly in education, has again been brought into sharp focus by the tragic accident in which Rochelle Cauvet and Hannah Black, on a geography field trip to the Yorkshire Dales, drowned. The loss of two young lives in a normally safe river, dealt with safely by thousands every year, forces every youth worker involved with young people outdoors [or in any challenging or 'risky' experience] to search their soul for the answer to the question: Just what should we do?

We have legislation, inspection, qualification, training, experience, judgement and responsibility, registration and exemption. Is there something still missing? The answer is not by any means clear, and long may it remain so.

Taken to its basics and to extremes we can quote some fine statistics: in Britain, 20 people are killed (electrocuted) every year by their bedside light. 20 are killed falling over as they get out of bed and 30 drown in the bath. Not much in the papers about these then, but we do have to have baths, light and sleep. Yet annually 200,000 die of smoking, alcohol related diseases and driving 'accidents'; not much about these either, but we could do without alcohol, smoking and a lot of driving. Life would be different - and some would even say better without, but the answer cannot lie in 'necessity', then, or could it?

A year or so of headlines in our newspapers offers a sanctuary of balancing views: 'The dangers of taking the soft option with children', 'Children becoming 'softies' as red tape halts adventure', 'Too cosseted for comfort', 'Safety first, second, third, fourth...', 'Are active kids becoming a thing of the past?', 'Isn't the future of our children worth the risk?'. Is this the middle ground, where some risk is necessary in real education? E. M. Forster, in his 'The Machine Stops', wrote in the early days of television, of a permanently cubicled, screen viewing society that had decried the rebels who secretly weight-trained with pillows to become fit enough even get outdoors, an adventure illegal in itself.

Was Forster's short story a more accurate vision of the future than 1984? With current fitness levels dropping, obesity rising, the ability to judge movement in unfamiliar circumstance diminishing, couch potato syndrome/tv soap adhesion/web addiction all on the rise, can we say for certain that hundreds will not be showing up in future statistics, and of course amongst the acceptable 200,000 - if they are not already? Perhaps quality of life would also ask a question here.

Perhaps it is also possible to look at the source of the problem: poor judgement. Judgement may be technical or common sense in origin. Technical judgement often [but not always] requires experience; common sense does come from experience and awareness [of groups and situations]. Is it right then that the

less young people experience in life, the less common sense they will have; thus we will slowly evolve an educational cadre incapable of even the most basic common sense judgements, requiring all situations to be super, super safe?

Most youth workers are daily committing themselves in the balance debate, fighting or shouldering increasing personal responsibility to 'let/take them out?'. Who should we quote? A retired Outward BoundÂŽ Director of School 'Every day the young people went out my fingers were crossed. Not that I was doing anything incorrectly, but I knew that by not letting them out I would certainly be doing wrong. On my retirement I breathed a huge sigh of relief.' She had not lost anybody in 30 years. A LEA Outdoor Education Advisor 'They' would prefer us not to walk out the door. What sort of education for life would that be'. Sir Christian Bonnington: 'After every crisis there are screams to make things safer, but at what cost to education?'.

On one side we have parachuting grannies and fully risk-conscious doctors who hang-glide; and we have the safety & cotton wool brigade looking to remove all risk from our lives - and perhaps life from our lives as well. We also have the new 'anxiety industry' increasing the GDP by persuading us to prevent risks that scare us but (statistically) should not and to ignore risks that (statistically) should.

So where is the balance? Perhaps Professor Gerald Wilde of Queens University has it: "The art of life is not to reduce risk to zero, but to take the right amount of risk." Dr Frank Furedi, in his book 'The ulture of Fear' states: "The worship of 'safety' represents a profoundly pessimistic attitude towards human potential".

To reach this equilibrium demands experience, judgement, knowledge and skill, much of which must come from first hand [experiential] learning: actually going out and living life!

From Ian Lewis, Chair, UK Outdoor Institute [now a part of the Institute for Outdoor Learning] and a Director of 'Sprito', the National Training Organisation for Sport, Recreation and Allied Occupations.