Education Outside the Classroom (EOTC)

• This topic has been edited to reflect the introduction of Education Outdoors New Zealand’s Safety Management Plan template as a key resource and best practice guide for schools. SchoolDocs acknowledges Education Outdoors New Zealand (EONZ) for use of content from its EOTC Safety Management Plan (SMP) template. The SMP is referenced directly and indirectly throughout this section as appropriate.

EOTC Safety Management

• This topic hosts your school's Safety Management Plan (if you have one), and lists the main policies and procedures relevant to EOTC safety management systems.

EOTC Planning and Review

• This new topic outlines how your school monitors and reviews EOTC events and safety systems.

EOTC Risk Management

• We have removed references to activity types (A, B, C etc) as there has been a shift away from this type of classification. We have used general terms to describe safety documentation and removed specific reference to SAPs and RAMs.
• The health information that was in this topic has been moved to EOTC Health and First Aid.

EOTC Risk Assessment

• We’ve added content about risk management and assessment planning. There are many resources/tools schools could use to carry out risk assessments and we haven’t specified which to use. If there’s a particular tool/form your school uses, we can add it to your new Forms page.
• We have updated our matrix to reflect the one EONZ uses in its SMP template. We have kept property damage in the matrix.

EOTC Incidents

• We’ve added a simple incident reporting process to this topic, and added that incident reports should be reviewed annually.

EOTC Roles and Responsibilities

(also see the specific role topics)

• This is a new topic that introduces the roles and responsibilities involved with EOTC.
• If you supply a Safety Management Plan that includes these details, you can choose to link to that plan, and we’ll remove the role subtopics.

EOTC External Providers

• This is a new topic that describes the checks carried out before engaging an external provider, and how the school will work with the external provider.

EOTC Staff Competence

• This is a new topic to emphasise the importance of assessing staff competence so staff can safely perform their role.

EOTC Process

• This new topic gives an overview of EOTC event planning, implementing, and reviewing processes, and links to relevant topics.

EOTC Proposal and Approval

• This new topic outlines the high-level steps required for seeking initial approval for an activity.

EOTC Event Categories

• This new topic adopts EONZ’s event categorisation: low risk, high risk, and overnight. This will replace the Ministry Guidelines classification that SchoolDocs currently uses, which is based on location and whether the activity is lower or higher risk. We expect further changes to the Ministry Guidelines to bring them into line with EONZ’s Safety Management Plan template.

EOTC Event Approval and Next Steps

• This is a new topic based on the previous Organise a Type D Activity topic. It outlines the EOTC process, including who is responsible for what, from initial approval through to event review.
• The forms listed refer to EONZ’s sample/template forms.

EOTC Final Preparation and Implementation

• This new topic prompts schools to think about what checks need to be carried out before, during, and after an event.

EOTC After the Event

• This new topic prompts schools to think about what needs to be done after an event.

EOTC Communicating with Parents

• We’ve edited this topic to remove references to category types (A. B, C, D).
• We can still include whether your school uses blanket consent or not. Our default will be uses blanket consent.

EOTC Parent Help

• We've made slight tweaks to this topic.

EOTC Logistics

• This new topic gives an overview of the logistical information needed to plan and run an EOTC activity/event.

EOTC Transport

• We’ve added a bullet point for secondary and composite schools about student drivers. Tell us if you’d like this additional text, it won’t appear on your site automatically.

EOTC Health and First Aid

EOTC Supervision

• We've changed the way we refer to the forms.

EOTC Forms

IMPORTANT – We have changed to using EONZ’s EOTC forms, which constitute the TKI Toolkit that supports the Ministry’s EOTC Guidelines 2016. You need to access these forms via EONZ’s or TKI’s websites to ensure you are using the latest versions.

You can still send us tailored forms to add to this page, which will be shown with green highlighting in the table. You will be responsible for keeping these up to date.

We have kept links to some SchoolDocs forms and resources we think will still be helpful.

All forms will now be on this page. Previously, forms were in four topics: EOTC Type A/B/C/D Activity Forms.

Topic Number: 26084

Last Modified Date: 18/02/2019 10:03:59

Topic Version: 1

Published Date: 30/01/2026