How do you feel about expensive foreign school trips?

pavlovs_dog

andygb wrote: »

I guess there were around 400 pupils in my school.

The bit I have highlighted merely confirms that this is an EXCLUSIVE holiday/trip/vacation, and I assure you that the ones who have been fortunate to belong to this SMALL, EXCLUSIVE club will indeed be very loud and proud about their trip.

In my school exclusivity has nothing to do with it. By law we are not allowed to pass the cost of employing cover teachers onto parents. A supply teacher costs £165 per day. You need to cover every member of teaching staff who is absent. Residential trips should operate on a maximum ratio of 1 member of staff to every 10 pupils.

My department runs a four night, five day residential trip for our year 7 pupils. The school will not allow us to take any more than 40 pupils, as the cost of covering the four staff for the five days totals £3300. Many schools are now sending support staff in lieu of teachers to reduce cover costs.


On the insurance front, our school policy for foreign trips is organised at LEA level. We have to charge £1 per head per night abroad for any pupil on a foreign trip.

zagfles

Dunroamin wrote: »

But, as I explained from my own experience, it's not necessarily the most wealthy who'll go on these trips. Perhaps children will boast these days (I'm pretty sure that we didn't) but won't this also be true of privately taken holidays?

Yes, in fact the rich kids probably wouldn't be seen dead associating with plebs on a school trip and having to share rooms with common kids :eek:

peachyprice

valk_scot wrote: »

They'll still get subsidised by District though, and as they'll be a registered charity there are all sorts of perks involved.

Our Brownies do camp in tents btw, there were some strenuous complaints by the girls about not doing this and after several left to go to the local Cubs instead, our group policy changed.

Nope, for the PGL trips they pay the price in the brochure plus the normal goint rate for travel. Not subsidised by the district at all.

Our Brownies are a bit too fond of their creature comforts for camping and our Guides are the ones getting pizza delivered to the campsite instead of cooking

andygb

pavlovs_dog wrote: »

In my school exclusivity has nothing to do with it. By law we are not allowed to pass the cost of employing cover teachers onto parents. A supply teacher costs £165 per day. You need to cover every member of teaching staff who is absent. Residential trips should operate on a maximum ratio of 1 member of staff to every 10 pupils.

My department runs a four night, five day residential trip for our year 7 pupils. The school will not allow us to take any more than 40 pupils, as the cost of covering the four staff for the five days totals £3300. Many schools are now sending support staff in lieu of teachers to reduce cover costs.


On the insurance front, our school policy for foreign trips is organised at LEA level. We have to charge £1 per head per night abroad for any pupil on a foreign trip.

How on earth is that that relevant to anything which I have been talking about - talk about "random".

andygb

zagfles wrote: »

So what? So might the kids with the latest iPhone, the kid who scores a hatrick for the school football team, the kids who gets the best grades in the exams, the kids who have more friends, who are more popular with the opposite sex, etc etc.

When I was in 6th form a kid who'd been to private school up to O-levels joined us - we called him Lord Snooty because of the way he spoke and he was really quite seriously bullied...just because he was posh and went on expensive holidays etc. So it works both ways.

All of those things are determined by quite different outside influences - except the ones which are gained through merit - scoring goals, exam results, more popular with the opposite sex.
However, buying Iphones, going on expensive holidays is down to what the parents can afford, so I honestly do not wish to see schools putting pressure on parents to live beyond their means.

neverdespairgirl

I don't think foreign trips are entirely new - certainly there were lots around when I was at school in the 1980s and 1990s (I'm 35).

My primary school did only one trip which involved overnight stays, in the last year, after entrance exams / 11+. It was in school time in the summer term, and was a week in the Isle of Wight, and I loved it. My sisters later did the same trip. It was for the whole class, in a one-class-per-year school, but wasn't expensive. It was mini-bus and youth hostel, not flying and 5* hotels.

My secondary school did a week-long trip in the summer of the first senior year, for the whole year group, to the Lake District, and was a week of camping, sailing, abseiling, hiking, team-building, that sort of thing. Everyone went, and it was great fun.

There were ski-ing trips every year, in the Easter term half-term, which neither my sisters nor I ever went on, and I don't know how much they cost.

I did one foreign trip when I was in the Lower Fifth (so I was 14) which was a fortnight in Moscow, staying with a Moscovite family, and then hosting the daughter of that family in London for a fortnight later in the year. That was amazing, and I'm very glad indeed that I went.

There were also lots of sports-type holidays the school arranged during school holidays - pony trekking, hiking, camping, water sports, etc. I did 5 week-long sailing holidays in the Isle of Wight (youth hostel-type) and 4 long weekends at the same place. My sisters both did some camping or horsey-type ones.

I also had a compulsary week-long field trip in the Lower Sixth, and two long weekend field trips in the Upper Sixth, all for geography A level. That turned into a sort of family holiday, as my mother was a geography teacher at my school, so she came too.

I don't remember any pressure about the optional or ski-ing trips, or any big deal about who went or who didn't go.

neverdespairgirl

valk_scot wrote: »

They'll still get subsidised by District though, and as they'll be a registered charity there are all sorts of perks involved.

Our Brownies do camp in tents btw, there were some strenuous complaints by the girls about not doing this and after several left to go to the local Cubs instead, our group policy changed.

When I was a Brownie, we weren't allowed to camp in tents, we had to sleep in some sort of hut thing. We were not happy campers (-:

BritAbroad

TBH, £900 for a ski trip to Colorado sounds fairly pricey. I'd be asking for a breakdown of the costs. Where are they going to ski? Ski passes for the bigger ski areas can be expensive - a week in Steamboat or Vail will cost way more than a week skiing in an area like Loveland, and accommodation costs can vary hugely as well.

aliasojo

peachyprice wrote: »

I bet you'd rethink that if you had twins who would cost you £2.4k to send skiing

Ach no, I'd just be sending them up more chimneys to pay for it.

valk_scot

peachyprice wrote: »

Nope, for the PGL trips they pay the price in the brochure plus the normal goint rate for travel. Not subsidised by the district at all.

Our Brownies are a bit too fond of their creature comforts for camping and our Guides are the ones getting pizza delivered to the campsite instead of cooking

They're missing a few tricks then if they're not doing the organisation themselves and borrowing the District minibuses. The more you do yourself, the cheaper the trips get. The cheapest trips are when our Explorer Scouts literally get on their bikes with the tents strapped on their racks and head off to a Scout campsite on their own, with a stop at the supermarket closest to the campsite to buy sausages etc. Costs me £2 a night, plus food. Pizza? What's wrong with garlic damper with cheese and sausage topping?