School Incursions That Students Actually Talk About Afterwards
An incursion should be the easy option. No buses to book, no venue to risk, no headcount to lose in a car park. But easy is not the same as forgettable, and most students can tell the difference within about ninety seconds.
Great Race brings the whole event to your school. Our hosts are professional actors, not facilitators with a clipboard, and they are very good at turning a room of self-conscious teenagers into a room of people competing hard and enjoying themselves. We have been running events since 2009 at a rate of 500 or more a year, for schools alongside corporate and university groups.
What a Great Race Incursion Looks Like
We arrive with everything. Equipment, challenges, sound, scoring, and a host who runs the session start to finish. You need a hall, a gym, a quadrangle, or a cluster of classrooms, and a bell schedule for us to work within.
Sessions are built around formats students already recognise from television, so nobody needs a ten-minute explanation before the fun starts. Teams form, the host sets the first challenge, and the room is moving.
Our most-booked school incursion. Teams become tribes and compete through a run of strategic, mental and genuinely fun immunity challenges to be crowned Survivor Champions. No tribe is eliminated along the way, so every student is still playing at the end. It scales to a full year level, runs indoors or out, and the tribe structure does something useful: it puts students in groups they did not pick, and gives them a reason to make it work.
The Amazing Race format adapted to run inside school grounds. Teams work through clues, checkpoints and challenges across the campus rather than the city. All it needs is room to move and a bell schedule to work within, and it leans hard on communication, group decision-making and a fair amount of running.
Incursion or Excursion?
Both have their place, and the honest answer depends on what you are solving for.
An incursion wins on logistics and cost. There is no transport to fund, no travel time eating into the session, no risk assessment for a public site, and no students unaccounted for between the gate and the venue. You can run a full year level through it inside the normal timetable, and the per-student cost is lower because you are not paying for a bus.
An excursion wins when getting off campus is part of the point. A change of setting lifts the energy on its own, the city becomes part of the challenge rather than the backdrop, and for a cohort that has spent the year in the same four buildings that matters more than it sounds.
If you are weighing the two, tell us your year level and the window you are trying to fill and we will talk you through both honestly.
Where Incursions Earn Their Place in the Calendar
Start of year and transition.
New Year 7 cohorts, new class groupings, new houses. A session where students have to talk to people they do not know yet does more for the first term than another assembly.
Student wellbeing and connection.
Belonging is built by shared experience, not by a poster. Our sessions put students into mixed teams and give them something to do together, which is a more direct route to connection than most of the alternatives.
End of year.
The stretch after exams and reports where the timetable is loose and the energy needs somewhere to go.
Reward and celebration days.
Attendance milestones, house competitions, fundraising targets met.
Child Safety
Great Race is a child safe organisation. We implement the 10 Child Safe Standards, and verification of a Working with Children Check is part of our recruitment process for anyone working with students.
We maintain a Child Safe Code of Conduct, a Child Safe Recruitment, Induction and Training Policy, a Child Safe Risk Management Plan, and a Child Safe Reporting Policy. Coordinators can request copies of any of these. Our full Statement of Commitment to Child Safety sets out what we hold ourselves to.
What You Need to Provide
Very little. A space, a time, and a rough headcount.
We bring the equipment, the challenges, the scoring, and the host. Teachers are welcome to join in or to stand back and supervise, whichever suits the group. There is no preparation required from staff and nothing to print, set up, or pack down. The one thing we do sometimes ask for is teams sorted in advance, with the list passed to your host on the day.
Format, duration, and group size are all adjustable. We build the session around your bell times rather than asking you to build your day around ours.
Frequently Asked Questions
Turning Mondays into Fundays since 2008
It’s hard to keep up with the the stats but at our most recent!
Book a School Incursion
Tell us your year level, your rough numbers, and the window you are trying to fill. We will come back with the format that fits and what it costs.
Get in touch with Great Race and let’s get it in the calendar, or call 1300 504 152.
