Another rant about mad modern life and extra educational costs.

Further to my rant about gifts for teachers yesterday, here is something about school trips.

When I was a pupil at Southport High School for Girls, then the girls’ grammar school, now a girls-only comprehensive, every year we would receive information about a school trip to France. Every year I took the information home and every year it was beyond the reach of our family budget. Eventually, when I was in the sixth form and it was clear that I was headed for a university course in Modern Foreign Languages, my parents got together with the mother of a friend and classmate and cobbled together a way for the two of us to go the France. My friend’s older brother was married to a Frenchwoman and so we were able to stay with members of her family. The only cost was travel and spending money.

Independent travel at seventeen. It was probably much more beneficial than the school’s organised trip to France.

As a teacher of French and Spanish, I was encouraged to go along on and indeed to be the organiser of trips abroad: visits to places of cultural interest, camping holidays, conferences on Europe, exchange holidays with pupils staying in each other’s houses. Indeed, when I worked in sixth form colleges it was pretty well imperative to organise something so that it could go into the college’s prospectus and marketing material. Educational visits were a good selling point for the college.

However, one of our, or at any rate MY, major concerns was always to keep the costs as low as possible. Conscious of the fact that our college was in a largely working class area and that many of my students would have to meet the cost themselves from money earned in part-time jobs, it made sense. So I would work away at finding cheap flights or bus travel to destinations which could accommodate my students and give them a chance to practise their language skills. And I would have to justify it educationally to the senior management team if I wanted any kind of subsidy. And then I would discover that the Humanities Department were organising a considerably more expensive trip to New York, with precious little direct relevance to the subject areas concerned but looking much more glamourous in the college prospectus!

And that trend to organise prestigious-sounding trips to ever more exotic places is clearly continuing, to judge by this article from the Guardian.

School trips can cost £3000!

“Expensive school trips to far-flung corners of the globe are fast becoming the norm, not just in elite, private schools, but in ordinary state secondary schools up and down the country. Other contributors to the Twitter conversation told of trips to Japan, Madagascar and Cambodia, all costing in the region of £3,000. There was a netball trip to Sri Lanka, and an opportunity for some lucky children to travel to Uganda to see gorillas and help build a school, for a minimum price tag of £2,800. Other school destinations now include New Zealand, China and the Caribbean; there are trips to the Galápagos, the Arctic and Namibia. Really, it seems there is nowhere on the planet that is out of the question.”

Most schools these days organise skiing trips. In fact this has long been the case but surely these can be within Europe (one school I worked at took pupils to the Mont d’Or in France) not New England. The competition to provide the most exotic school trip seems to be getting out of hand. The insurance costs alone must be quite phenomenal.

And then there are the health and safety checks. When I was organising visits to France and Spain I had to fill in copious amounts of paperwork regarding what the accommodation would be, what sort of activities we would get up to, and guaranteeing that we would not be doing anything life-threatening. The accommodation question had the health and safety officer at one college suggesting we should go out and vet the homes where my students would be hosted!! You can imagine how that went down!

As regards the “no life-threatening activities” assurance, I was able to provide this as an excuse for a student of mine who was looking for a way to refuse to jump over bonfires at the feast of St John in northern Spain! He did not want to appear to be a wimp but neither did he want to risk setting his trousers alight!

But who are the parents who are coughing up these huge sums of money for school trips? Do they organise similarly exciting family holidays or do they just accept that their own holidays must seem a little tame in comparison? Are they not not setting up unrealistic expectations for their youngsters? And what about those who have mo chance of taking part?

The questions go on and on!