TripAid was designed specifically for school trips by two teachers with over 30 years of combined experience. While other apps offer messaging or location sharing, none of them were built with school trip safeguarding, EVC oversight and student privacy at their core. Here’s why that difference matters.
Reason 1: The EVC is always in control
Every TripAid group is created by the school’s Educational Visits Coordinator. The EVC sets the start and end time of the trip and receives an automatic notification whenever a teacher makes any changes during the visit.
This keeps the EVC in complete control of all communication between teachers and students, ensuring that safeguarding responsibilities and user privacy are maintained throughout the trip and after it ends.
Reason 2: Students can only see and message teachers
TripAid is built so that students share their location and communicate only with teachers, never with each other. Students cannot see other pupils on the map or read messages sent by other students.
A student’s live location is essential information on a school trip – on a ski slope, for example – but it must be shared with great care. TripAid ensures that location data is only ever visible to the responsible adults in loco parentis, not to other pupils.
Reason 3: The trip is locked once it begins
When distributing join codes before a trip, it is impossible to guarantee that codes won’t be shared beyond the intended group. TripAid addresses this directly.
Before starting the trip, the teacher checks the register of users who have joined and removes anyone who shouldn’t be there. Once the teacher presses “Begin Trip”, the join codes become permanently invalid. If a code has been shared with someone outside the group, they will be unable to access the trip once it has started. If a new student needs to be added during the visit, the teacher can generate a fresh single-use code directly from the app.
Reason 4: Trips shut down automatically
When a trip ends, it is essential for the privacy and safeguarding of both teachers and students that all location sharing and communication stops immediately. Teachers’ loco parentis responsibility ends with the trip, and everyone deserves their privacy back.
When a school coach pulls in late after a long day, nobody should be expected to remember to update their privacy settings. TripAid removes that risk entirely by automatically shutting down the trip and ejecting all users at the time designated by the EVC. Because no phone numbers, email addresses or personal contact details are ever shared through the app, once the trip ends, teachers and students can no longer locate or communicate with one another. Automatically, without anyone having to think about it.
Why TripAid?
TripAid is the only messaging and location sharing app designed from the ground up for school trip safeguarding. If you’d like to find out how it could work for your school, visit tripaid.co.uk or use the Get in Touch form to arrange a short demo.
