Kids excluded from free trip

Yes this happened at my kids' school as well. I posted it earlier 😬 myself and other parents for fuming as well but were basically told its tough tits 😡

Instead what we should do is explain to the bullies why it’s unacceptable to bully children for circumstances entirely beyond their control.

Ah yes of course. That will do it. The sure-fire way to stop bullying dead in its tracks is to explain to the bullies why it's a bad thing to do. Amazing nobody's thought of that before.

Back in reality, the school has to deal with the world as it is as opposed to how it would like it to be. The 'stupid school' will know exactly what the upshot of highlighting that the 'poor kids' have been on an outing would be, and that no amount of well-intended 'explaining' would change that.

Can't be arsed to work at school and you get a free trip to Alton Towers - preparing for a kids perfectly for the world where if you can be arsed to work you get benefits steeped upon you (including free trips for your kids to adventure centres it would seem).

Ex teacher

there’s a lot of external funding now which is linked to pupil premium.

also, pp is ever 6 which means that the pupil premium status persists for six years after the trigger event/fsm claim etc. this can mean that some kids who are pp are now in better financial circumstances - we used to run additional maths support groups for pp kids and I particularly remember one kid who’d been on fsm some time ago saying he was going to Florida to Disneyworld.

we Also at our school applied for and got funding to run maths circles for gifted and talented maths students BUT half of each group had to be pp. it was actually quite hard to balance that one as the further you get through secondary the more the pp kids tend to be concentrated in the lower groups.
these circles were quite frequently mentioned in our newsletter etc but not the fact that half of the attendees had to be pp.

I nearly spat out my brew reading this!

I would ask. When my dc were in secondary school I saw a coach full of children getting off a coach at the end of the school day. I asked my DS where they had been and he said it was a reward trip for the kids who are usually naughty for being good. They had been to Alton Towers.
Believe you me schools aren’t always fair in their selection processes !

I can guarantee that the pupils who were selected were vulnerable or disadvantaged pupils who have never gone further than their own town.

If you could afford to donate £50 to the school, I am sure that your children have had plenty of life experiences that these children have never had.

People will be less likely to tell the school if they are eligible if they know it’ll be plastered all over the next school newsletter.

The criteria wasn’t kept secret though, the OP just feels it was too outing to share.

I’m just guessing, and hear me out here, that they didn’t share pupil’s personal information because it’s got absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. I’m also guessing that they might have assumed that as adults the parents of other students were going to be capable of celebrating the experience of some pupils without making it about themselves.

Children in receipt of Pupil Premium are not 'unmentionable' in the sense you're talking about, ie, shame. It's 'unmentionable' because it's private, personal data about children and their families that the school should not be disclosing to everyone else. Think data breach. And a family's income has to be shockingly low to be in receipt of it initially.

was this using Pupil Premium funding perhaps?

I don’t see it as shameful but as a poor kid I appreciate them keeping it quiet: there are a hundred ways to get outed as the poor kid and they don’t need another one. Kids are cruel. There’s stigma attached to it rightly or wrongly. I’m personally glad they got this trip. Their families never would have been able to afford it and hopefully it gave them something to look forward to in a life where treats, trips and holidays can be next to none existent

My kids school does this. Sometimes it does come from PP. But then sometimes it is cheaper local stuff and they still only pick a small group.

I don't begrudge the kids that are going and I don't doubt that this is a ring fenced budget that is separate from the classroom supply budgets.

The issue I always have with it is that there is rarely an invite where you can pay and they rarely do any trips more generally as it is stating equity reasoning, so no whole class trips in July or no regular museum visits to tie in with themes etc. So loads of kids won't go anywhere at all for sometimes a full school year. The suggestion that other kids will be able to have those experiences with their families is a) not necessarily true these days with lots of people on stretched budgets and b ) not the same as having out of school experiences with friends which is valuable for all kids. I do find that scouts full this gap to some extent.

Well I think that’s plain wrong. By telling children to hide their poverty, we make it harder to talk about poverty in our culture. We add to the shame

They're not telling the children to hide their poverty. It's not the school's place to make the decision for the children to talk about their poverty. The school should not be effectively saying 'these children are in poverty'. Any more than they should be saying 'these are the children from very wealthy families'. It's not their place to divulge the financial status of the children, and more than that, it's none of your fucking business!

If you’re not being given any more information, then it’s almost certainly none of your business…but I suspect you have reason to be grateful that your kids didn’t meet the criteria for the trip. This is one of those examples of equality and equity being very different things.

Presumably the school was only allowed to take so many children and they may well have been picked out of a hat, randomly. Your child may be picked next time, that's just how it goes.

The referral can be made by GP/school/social services/adoption services...some areas you can self refer i believe. For us its a section of the local council - so my child was assessed and is officially a young carer.
They go to the local authority youth club, can access cooking lessons, fun trips, have ID to collect medication etc, and school are informed. There is an annual carer festival.in Southampton with our local authority pay for all the young carers to attend.
School can register them.as young carers just by self registration or via the local authority.
Our school give young carers extra pastoral time, support with homework, emotional support if needed (ie if the cared for was in hospital or end of life etc) and practical support - eg we dont attend parents evenings but have 1:1 face to face to give us that report, if child is sick an allocated support staff can drive them home rather than sit waiting to be collected by a neighbour or friend.

The support has far exceeded the expectations, and was worth the half hour conversation with social services ☺️.
Dm if I can help.

Bloody hell - you want school children to be the vanguard in breaking the taboo of discussing money and dispelling shame over poverty? That's a bit of a burden, don't you think?

Look at the proliferation of benefits bashing threads, and the judgey comments people make about spending choices of those in poverty - "big TVs and money for beer" etc. As soon as people know who is living in poverty and receiving state support, they get all judgemental over how those people spend their money.

It is wrong.

You are very naive to think anything is going to change it.

I wish it would. But it won't.

My family was very poor growing up. My grandma always used to say its one thing to be poor, it's another to be seen to be poor.
We were entitled to fsm, out of mum's pride pride we never had them because the fsm kids got a big bright token every day to exchange for their lunch and it was so humiliating that mum gave us 50p and most days I went without lunch so I could save it up and give it back to her.

In those days nobody noticed or cared if you went into the dinner hall.

You have NO information

I’ve just been asked to pick 10 SEN kids for a trip - do you wish your kid was non verbal ?

sometimes it’s kids who are in care or in poverty , sometimes you are offered stuff for just a small group

I raise money all the time and it goes to the nursery or year 6 not my kid still give and raise money

why don’t you offer to organise and run a trip for everyone?

I think you’ll have a difficult time if you don’t quickly accept your child won’t always be included. Just wait until the birthday invites go out 🙈😂😂

Sadly it doesn’t work like that

Ask for copy of the budget... and ask if the school bursar has time to go through it with you. You might find that quite an eye opener when you see what comes in and what has to go out, whilst retaining monies for emergencies, that is one of the more fun parts of being a governor.