School trip, zero liability insurance??

[devonianBiatch]

I've attached a letter from my daughters school about a school trip at the end of the month. Quite shocked to see at the end that this trip is not covered by the schools instance, but rather by the councils and as such has no liability cover if my child is injured , regardless of if they are actually responsible/negligent?!

This can't be right can it? What if they have a minibus accident? Can they just not insure the kids they are responsible for during school time?

Anybody know where you can even get cover for this for a 14 yo?

Exclusions of liability for death and personal injury caused by negligence are not enforceable.

If there is not negligent it's different.

that said, i think it's unusual to get specific insurance for this? Would you get it to, e.g. get on a public bus? Or a train?

Do you get specific insurance for every time your child leaves the house?

So they are telling you that you need to get your own insurance for the trip, with the price of insurance this seems totally reasonable.

as such has no liability cover if my child is injured , regardless of if they are actually responsible/negligent
You're reading it wrongly.
What they are saying is that there is cover for legal liability, but nothing else.

It just sent me into a bit of a panic. I mean, I know an accident is that. But they've never actually told us before that our kids aren't insured (even if they cause them harm). It just doesn't seem right to me? Do I NEED insurance for her?

I'm on holiday and may have a bit of sunstroke so I'm not surprised I may have read it wrong. Funny how when you feel a bit under the weather everything feels huge.

Do I NEED insurance for her?
That's up to you - they even mention in the message that, for example, there isn't Specific Personal Injury insurance. That is the kind that pays out if an injury happens to a person, regardless of how it happened. You might want to consider that or other kinds of insurance - there are many kinds.

It's weird of them to write that in the letter for a uk based trip. Everything we do at our school is covered by our county council, I assume through their public liability insurance. We have an online system that we use for risk assessing trips and we have to use LEA approved providers. It would be the same as if they are in school. You can't claim on school insurance if they lose their iphone for example but if they slip on a wet floor and there's no sign up then you would be able to make claim.

This has been standard for a while here. If you want full accident cover you need to take out your own policy - our school offered it for £10 a year to cover all trips

So the school/ council have Public Liabiltiy insurance. So if a pupil got injured and needed something (from taxis because they can't walk to school while they recover, to the more serious end of carers and home adaptations) then you would sue the school / council and their liabiltiy insurance would pay out. Although there has to be negligence, the duty of care required towards children is much higher than for adults so in practice if children are injured in the schools care, they are likely to pay out, but it does require a court process

Then there is Travel insurance. This covers medical expenses (if outside the UK, so if the trip is in the UK it's not needed), cost of baggage and cancellation etc and also personal accident. This isn't liability based but is injury based (so end up in a wheelchair get £50k, break a limb get £5k etc). The accidents have to be pretty bad before anything is paid out e.g. require a hospital stay. And you can buy this yourself, schools often have schemes for PA for pupils. You can buy her travel insurance but most of the time an overnight stay is required for it to be a trip that counts (so day trips not covered). There will also be an excess so whether its worth it or not depends on how much of value she is taking with her. An overnight bag with a few old clothes for an outward bound course is not going to be much more than an excess for example

Congrats on the most able trip, well done.

Our school offers personal insurance to all kids. €14 per child for 12 months covers any sort of injury, whether occuring in school or not. Well worth it, I would have thought most schools would offer it.

It wasn't about that. My kid is just a very happy typical teenager. I wasn't bragging.

So our annual travel policy will cover this, even though it's through a school trip?