2023 EVOLVE Advice Snapshot
It has been our privilege to support our community of schools over the last twelve months. Although it’s not the end of the academic year, it’s still a good opportunity to look back over the last twelve months and to reflect on a busy and very positive year.
A year in numbers
Your advice and support service - a snapshot of 2023
Everything we built in 2023 is designed to support our schools to confidently deliver safe and memorable educational visits. It is based on our core commitments to provide:
Fast, in context, competent advice on all aspects of educational visits.
High-quality training to equip you with the skills and knowledge you need.
Useful resources developed for, and with, EVCs to help you day-to-day.
Find out more about what was new in 2023.
(If you’re impatient to know what’s coming next, you can jump straight to 2024 here!)
Growing your team of advisers
Have you met our new Educational Visits Advisers? Our small but mighty team has grown this year. We welcomed Angela and Simon, both experienced teachers and visit leaders, in September. They join Jake, Andy, Emma and our other associates to provide the excellent advice and training you’ve come to expect from EVOLVE Advice.
As the number of schools we work with grows, we stand firm to our commitment to ensure we always provide responsive, professional and high quality advice. 96% of our advice queries are answered within one day, usually much faster, and we promise you’ll never get an ‘out of office’ from us.
We’ve also welcomed colleagues to our support team this year to help with the day-to-day management of your accounts and systems.
Raising the bar in training for safer visits
This year, we introduced new courses on Snowsport Visits and Risk Management for Educational Visits. We also launched an e-learning course on Preventing Incidents and Managing Emergencies – our on-demand e-learning courses give schools more options to train whole teams at very low cost.
We pride ourselves on raising and maintaining standards in educational visits training. Feedback from our learners in 2023 showed that 99% of our learners recommend our training. What’s more, this year our EVC, Visit Leader, Snowsport Visits and Risk Assessment for Educational Visits courses were accredited by the Institute for Outdoor Learning (IOL), recognising the high quality standards that underpin all our training.
Our support, your way
We listened when you told us you wanted more ways to get in touch. This year we introduced a telephone number and online chat option via our website. We still get most of our enquiries by email (and that’s important for advice queries) but we know that sometimes you have a quick question, contract/invoice query or simply want to sense check something you already know, so now you have even more ways to reach us. The online chat is managed by our advisers and you’ll get a super-fast response (look for the icon at the bottom of the website).
More Tools for Schools for your teams
If you haven’t already downloaded the EVOLVE Advice app, ordered some educational visits emergency cards, or signed up for new visits fundraising ideas then you haven’t discovered our Tools for Schools®. They’re all designed to help you find resources, stay updated, and feel supported in running your educational visits.
Join The EVC Register
The EVC Register is a single online register of EVCs. It’s your opportunity to show off (and verify) your EVC certification, easily share it with heads or networks, and raise your profile. The role of the EVC can be an isolated one but it carries a lot of responsibility for safety and compliance. In a challenging period, when funding for educational visits is difficult to find, EVCs also have to make the case for educational visits in schools. We know it’s tough, but together with a wider network of EVCs you can help show the impact of your role.
The EVC Register went live in November 2023 and already has 3,800 EVC listed. Avoid FOMO, join today!
What’s coming next?
We can’t wait to see you in the new term, and we’ve got more exciting things in store for you, here’s a sneak peak…
Don’t miss the National Educational Visits Conference on 13 June 2024 in London.
Register for webinars led by our advisers on useful topics like: funding educational visits, making the case for educational visits, and training your visit team. We’re also planning a STAGED series covering the key areas of educational visits planning and management.
New e-learning courses for heads and governors.
Wondering how to stay updated whenever we introduce new resources or services? Subscribe to EVOLVE Advice Digest for regular emails.
We can’t wait to share new developments with you. If you’re not already subscribed to get news and updates straight to your inbox, sign up below for our regular e-newsletter and The EVC Magazine.