As we hurtle through the Summer term, among the excitement of the end of year sports days, assemblies and moving up afternoons, there are classrooms where staff are quietly checking permission slips, poring over room allocations and fretting about whether there will be enough space in the coach for the excess luggage. In my own case, I will also be obsessively checking weather apps, plural, because if I don’t like what one is saying I’ll keep going until I find a more promising outlook. But more on the weather later. For those in the know, this behaviour is normal in the run up to a residential trip.

Residential trips are not a luxury addition to a school timetable. They are, for many girls, among the most formative experiences of their entire education. And yet they are difficult to justify on a spreadsheet. They do not appear in league tables. You cannot measure a girl’s growth in confidence against a national benchmark. What you can do, if you are lucky enough to be there, is watch it happen in real time. That privilege never gets old.

There is a particular moment that every teacher who has ever led a residential trip knows well. It comes somewhere between the coach journey and the first activity briefing, when the group of girls who boarded the coach suddenly look up and realise that the world is rather larger, and more interesting, than the one they left behind. That moment, quiet as it is, is worth every permission slip, every kit list reminder and every 11pm dormitory whisper campaign quelled by a staff member sitting quietly in the corridor (yes, really).

Take coasteering. At 10am on a grey Welsh morning, standing on a rock ledge above the sea in a borrowed wetsuit that fits approximately nobody, the intellectual distance between knowing you are brave and discovering you are brave collapses entirely. Coasteering asks girls to jump, to scramble, to trust their footing on slippery rock, to surface from cold water laughing rather than crying — and most of them, to their own visible astonishment, do exactly that. Abseiling tends to produce the most memorable faces. The moment of commitment, leaning back over the edge, trusting the rope, trusting the instructor, trusting yourself, is one that girls describe years later with the same precise recall they give to nothing else from school. Not because it was terrifying (though sometimes it is), but because they did it anyway.
Being away from home is its own education. For some girls this will be straightforward; for others, the first night in a bunk bed in a room of six will feel like an expedition to a foreign country — and in every way that matters, it is.

The routines are different. Breakfast is at seven-thirty whether you are a morning person or not. The food is not your food — it is shepherd’s pie from an enormous tray or chicken curry in a dining room that is also your briefing room and chill out space. It is fine. Better than fine. Girls who have never willingly eaten a hot meal before noon find themselves ravenous and grateful and not especially concerned about the fact that a mountain of scrambled eggs is not their usual Wednesday morning fare.

Wales, in particular, has a way of making its point. The rain, that famous Welsh horizontal rain that somehow finds its way into ears, down collars, and through every seam of even the most expensive waterproof, is not something you can negotiate with or opt out of. It is simply weather, and you are simply in it. We can have a tendency to spend our lives in temperature-controlled environments and are, for the most part, shielded from genuine discomfort. When they find themselves on a wet Welsh coastline, girls usually discover that they are rather more resilient than they suspected. That walk can continue. The wet socks are unpleasant, but not fatal. Morale, somewhat miraculously, often rises in inverse proportion to the quality of the weather. There is a particular brand of hilarity that only soaking rain and shared suffering can produce, and a school trip is where many girls first encounter it. The teacher watching this from inside a jacket that stopped being waterproof sometime around Tuesday knows something the girls don’t yet know they know: that this is what resilience looks like in practice. Not the idea of coping, but the actual thing.

Let us be honest about something that every teacher privately suspects and that the evidence quietly confirms: a great deal of what we teach is forgotten. What does not dissolve: the rope in your hands at the top of a cliff. The moment you pushed off. The sound of your own voice, surprised, from the water. The girl in the bunk below you who turned out to be extraordinarily funny once you were both too tired to be anything other than yourselves.

For staff, residential trips are professionally unusual and always exhausting, whatever age group you take away. You are asked to be both in charge and in it. You share the weather. You eat the same food. You are there at nine at night when homesickness quietly arrives and at seven in the morning when it has, mostly, passed.

To watch a girl find, for the first time, a version of herself that is completely competent and capable, that is not something you tire of. It is, if anything, the thing that reminds you why the job is worth doing.

A school that invests in taking its girls beyond the classroom is a school that understands something important: education is not only the transmission of knowledge. It is the construction of a self. And some of that construction can only happen on a cliff edge in Wales, in the rain, with a rope and a wobbling first step and the sudden, irreversible knowledge that you can.

Lower III depart for Wales on Monday, waterproofs are packed!

Sam Clark, Assistant Head