Their names should be said. James Holloway was 11. Ricky Lamden was 11. Robert Ankers was 12. Nicholas Hurst was 10, and he had been swept away after trying to rescue the others. Heather Price, who was 12, was washed into a cleft in the rock face and pinned there long enough for a parent to reach down and pull her up onto a higher ledge; both of them were eventually winched to the clifftop by helicopter. The four other children were never recovered alive. A Royal Navy helicopter joined a minesweeper, two lifeboats and a fishing boat in the search through the afternoon and into the evening. Only two bodies, those of James Holloway and Robert Ankers, were ever found. The seven surviving children were taken to West Cornwall Hospital in Penzance, treated for cold and shock; Heather Price was kept in with head injuries and hypothermia.

The children were pupils at Stoke Poges County Middle School in Buckinghamshire, a hundred-odd miles from the Cornish coast, on a week-long adventure holiday based at the Duporth Holiday Village near St Austell. Fifty-one of them had come for the week. The Land's End visit was one of the lighter days of the trip, a stop at the famous signpost to be photographed. Three teachers and two parents were responsible for the group. According to Heather Price, none of those five adults was on the rocks with the eleven children who had wandered below the cliffs. They were at the top of the headland, near the signpost, organising the photograph. The headteacher, Alec Askew, was on the trip. He said later that he had not thought the children were in immediate danger, but had sent another pupil down to call them back when he realised they were there.

Parents asked the obvious questions almost immediately. Why were children that age allowed onto rocks usually frequented only by experienced climbers? Where were the adults? Why had nobody warned them, given them safety briefings, kept them off paths that had no railings? At the inquest, Askew and a teacher named Robert Harrington both denied negligence. Harrington stated he had not been aware of the cliff path at all and had not seen any child go down it. Askew insisted the party had been given no warning of the dangers because there were no warning notices in place, which was true and was about to become a problem in itself. On 19 July 1985, after considering the evidence, the jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure. The affected parents called the verdict 'disappointing' and demanded that the school dismiss Askew. He resigned in the days that followed, citing the press attention.

Buckinghamshire County Council opened a private inquiry on 4 September 1985. It ran for six days. The 64-page report, published on 11 November, reached harder conclusions than the inquest had: Askew's planning and preparation had been 'inadequate and, in a number of ways, seriously unsatisfactory'; he had 'failed to organise sufficient supervision and failed to act when he saw the children in danger.' Harrington resigned in light of the findings. The report made 22 specific proposals for the future organisation of school trips, recommendations that fed directly into the Department of Education and Science's new national guidance, Safety in Outdoor Education, and into the policies of the National Association of Head Teachers. During 1985, six warning noticeboards were installed at Land's End itself. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution accepted a £100,000 contribution from the four families and the people of Stoke Poges towards a new Mersey-class lifeboat for Sennen Cove station, just north of the disaster site. They named her The Four Boys, and on 22 April 1992 Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, dedicated her in memory of James, Ricky, Robert and Nicholas.