If your school’s EOTC policy still links to the old TKI page for the Ministry of Education’s Education Outside the Classroom (EOTC) Guidelines, it’s worth checking: the guidelines were refreshed in 2025 and have moved to a new home. Here’s what we can confirm, and what we’d recommend checking directly rather than taking on trust from any second-hand summary, including this one.
What’s Confirmed
The guidelines now sit on the Ministry’s Tāhūrangi curriculum platform under the title “Bringing the Curriculum Alive: EOTC Guidelines 2025”, replacing the old eotc.tki.org.nz location many schools have bookmarked or linked to from their own policies for years. If your school’s own EOTC or health and safety documentation links to the old TKI address, that link is now broken and worth updating.
The guidelines continue to sit alongside (not instead of) several pieces of legislation schools already need to comply with: the Education and Training Act 2020, the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, and the Children’s Act 2014. The Ministry’s own framing is that EOTC activities should support the delivery of the New Zealand Curriculum while meeting these existing legal obligations, and that the guidelines exist as good-practice guidance rather than as a standalone legal requirement in themselves.
The core documentation a school is expected to produce (commonly referred to as a Safety Management Plan) remains central to the guidance, consistent with the risk analysis and management approach schools have used for some years (the same structure our own RAMS Safety Management Plan template is built around).
What We Can’t Confirm From Here
We haven’t been able to verify a plain-English list of specific clause-by-clause changes between the previous guidelines and the 2025 version: the Ministry hasn’t (as far as we can find) published a changelog, and the detailed toolkit content sits behind Education Outdoors New Zealand’s (EONZ) own resource pages rather than the public guidelines page itself. If your school’s EOTC policy or risk management plan was written against the old guidelines, the responsible approach is to check it directly against the current 2025 version and EONZ’s toolkit, rather than rely on any summary (including ours) to catch every detail that might affect your school specifically.
What We’d Suggest Doing
Update any links in your school’s own EOTC policy, staff handbook, or board documentation that point to the old TKI guidelines address. Check your current Safety Management Plan template or process against the 2025 guidelines directly, ideally as part of your normal annual policy review rather than only when planning a specific trip. And if your school is due to renew or write new EOTC documentation, EONZ’s Safety Management toolkit (linked from the Ministry’s guidelines page) is the primary resource to work from.
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