To ask what the worst school trip was that you ever went on?

[MrsKiplin]

Mine was a trip to Belgium. I had a sickness bug the whole time and missed everything!

Am starting to wonder if we ought to ban school trips! How much trauma they've caused!!!

@SockQueen - If it was a cadet trip for you to do activities, 99% sure that would be St Martin's Plain Army Camp! It's right by Eurostar.

French exchange trip. We had to write letters in advance saying what we liked doing so they could match similar 'types' of people. Being the sociable sort I said I liked parties, so I was put with this utter party animal who dragged me out to clubs in the arse of no where where she proceeded to get pissed as a fart then disappear outside for a shag, leaving me alone getting felt up by French blokes. And she let a total stranger drive us home. And I was sick as a pig on the ferry on the way over. Christ the whole thing was atrocious.

Outward bounds trip to a place in south Wales. It was January with snow on the ground. The staff were verbally abusive, the teachers with us drank a lot and were pretty uninterested in giving any fucks about our welfare. We did a long distance hike with minimal food and a water bottle each which had to last all day, where we lost a teacher and two pupils. We were expected to go waterfalling, and hike back to the centre in wet clothes, and the highlight was one of my friends getting drunk, falling off her bunkbed and somehow ripping her ear off - a caught earring I think.

I work in a school. I'd love to ban trips. Tedious for everyone.

A GCSE geography field trip to Folkestone. It was so wet and windy. I remember trying to change the film in my camera and it being whipped out of my hands. We were meant to be drawing sea defenses but the paper kept getting blown away or sodden. I don't know what they were thinking going ahead with it.

My sister fell off the bottom of an artificial ski slope in Italy and broke her tooth in half. I'll never forget my mum's face when she took the phone call

Trip planning guide according to this thread:

Shit happens, as does vomit- so keep on driving and pick accommodation with 1 loo per 100 children.

If the weather looks grim, it's the perfect day for a geography trip or an outing to the seaside.

The worse the weather or locale gets, the more meaningful the geography data gathered.

Health & Safety and Headcounts are minor concerns- as long as you bring most of them back in one piece. Children are also resilient and do not need things such as spare clothes, warm clothes, waterproofs and weather ready footwear or anything else weather appropriate.

The worse the weather & the facilities, the more character building the trip.

If a child or parent warns you of a medical issue, homesickness or a phobia to watch out for, they're probably lying- ignore them.

The smaller the child, the more important it is to pick a trip that will provide memories to last a life time- deeply scarring ones. The darker the destination the better.

The dump, the local sewage works and the local supermarket are excellent trip locations and kids should be grateful to visit. Ditto power stations if you're REALLY lucky.

If it is an exchange trip, always match pupils with a wildly inappropriate, weird family who serve no edible food and have nothing in common with their guest.

Wine will blot out all the horror on residential. For staff and teenagers.

My brother went to France on the ferry. He was 15/16. Some kids started on him and his friends, they didn’t think much of it because they were about 11/12 but soon realised they had apparently been ‘raised by the streets and wanted to fight’ My brother had to get the teacher to help when they dangled his mate off the side of the ferry by his ankle. The teacher finished his wine and chips before heading over to help. .

My brother did tell me that the trip greatly improved when they got there as underage drinking was positively encouraged by everyone. That is until the last night when someone drank so much they barfed in a pillowcase and then got hungry right after and tried to eatone of the actual miniature bottles of spirits they got from a local supermarche.

I took a group of students to the SS Great Britain. Brunel was the iconic designer/engineer on the specification that year. We went by train so they could experience the 'Box tunnel' and arrive at Temple Meads for a short walk to the ship. The best bit of the trip for the students was walking through the underpass where 'Skins' was filmed.

Bosworth Battlefield for Year 8 history.

It was a field. With this dull tour guide droning on and on. There was a visitor centre and I bet that these days it's all interactive and snazzy but 20 years ago it was snoresville. The one redeeming feature of the whole thing was that I got to sit next to the boy I fancied on the coach journey home

Year 11. A trip to the lake district in accommodation that the council lends out to the schools in the area. After dinner we all gathered in one of the bedrooms to drink vodka someone had snuck in.

One girl had a seizure in the room while someone was curling my hair, the girl curling my hair dropped the curler and burned my back, someone tried to catch it and burned their hand, someone else tripped over running to get the teachers and broke their nose. And then we all got a bollocking for drinking even though the bottle was still shut because the girl had a seizure before we cracked it open!

A few nights later a load of people got food poisoning so they all got sequestered in one room so we couldn't go out and do anything. A few nights later the temperature dropped to below 0 and the place had shit heating, I remember shivering my arse off all night.

Nearly cried with happiness when I got back home, my mum got told how great she was which was a shocker from 15 year old me!

I do remember wetsuits being pricy but they arw kind of essential for water sports in the UK.
I am old and have done a sailing course and canoeing as a kid, and taken lots of kids canoeing when I was young. Not once did any kids or instructors have wetsuits. I had only ever seen people wear wetsuits abroad, never in Britain. So it was standard.

I also went on a week long health and safety course where the instructor kept going on about how from next year everyone would have to do a risk assessment before they did an activity. This was a totally new idea to most of the adults on the course. Before then I remember having checklists of things to remember e.g. headcounts,, but no risk assessments at all.

Things have changed enormously.

Had a week in France too, year nine.

Teachers were pissed before they even got on the bus. 24 hour coach trip or something ridiculous, loads of snogging /fumbling/ fingering going on in the coach corridor. Grim.

Girl I was supposed to share a tent with deserted me and slept with the cool kids instead. I made friends with two Year 8 saddos instead who were fun.

I told the camp monitor that all I wanted to do was sunbathe and she couldn't believe it. Tried windsurfing, hated it. Food was awful, it was literally baguettes, lettuce and coleslaw for lunch and dinner, can't remember about breakfast.

The teachers were pissed all the time. Made the coach stop to fill up on cheap cheese and you guessed it, booze. Feckin feckless bastards.

Went bowling one night, it was like something out of deliverance. Was glad to get home tbh

Trip to Germany.. on the way home 15 out of 25 kids got chicken pox. I'm not even exaggerating you could see the spot coming out.. the weirdest bit was that this was secondary school. Year 9 if I remember rightly. The whole trip was quarantined at home and the dr confirmed chicken pox for the second time :/

At my primary school for 1 morning in Autumn term there would be a whole school trip to the nearby waste ground and
everyone would pick elderberries for the Headteacher who made elderberry wine. Saying it now I wonder if I imagined it as it sounds so odd but I am sure it happened. This is 35 years ago and we did do some bizarre stuff at my little cofe primary.

Also- year 7 group team building away from home- compulsory trip. I was 11

My dad was really unwell (cancer) and when I rang on the first night I asked how he was and my mum was so evasive I just knew. Rest of the trip was shit as I wanted to go home.

When I got home I was told it was terminal, he died a couple of months later. It was awful and I didn't tell anyone what I thought so had a bit of a meltdown at the top of the high ropes course

French exchange trip with a racist host family who made random comments out of the blue over breakfast about not liking Algerians. My classmate, who was also staying with them, was British Asian and they wouldn't let the topic of her race alone, but they seemed to have a genuine belief that she was an "Indian" like in a John Wayne film (they even kept pointing to pictures and comparing them to her, FFS).

Also, I was too terrified of them to say more than a couple of words on the first night, so they decided that I was stupid and kept talking in front of me about the fact that I supposedly didn't understand a word of French.

New Yoiker - I'm so sorry

At secondary school the language department organised a day trip to Calais. We were due to depart from our school in Norfolk in two coaches at about 6 am to catch a hovercraft crossing at about the 10 am.

Firstly, one coach broke down on the way to the school and it took about an hour for another to be arranged. The second coach then got a burst tire somewhere on the M20 and it took nearly a hour for that to be changed.

We had obviously missed our scheduled crossing but we arrived in Calais at about 2pm and were told that we had about an hour to spend there before we had to return home. The poor teachers abandoned any of the planned tasks and just headed to the nearest winery to drink away the stress.

On the way home we were lucky to catch the last hovercraft ferry before the services were suspended due to a storm making the crossing too rough for the hovercraft. Half the pupils and staff got horrendous sea sickness as the ferry was pitching so much.

On the way home the other coach got a puncture. Someone (moi, peut-être ) had bought some particularly pungent french cheese as a present for her parents, which in the warm coach began to stink the place out. We arrived back at the school several hours later than scheduled, which in the days before mobile phones and emails etc was to a host of worried parents who had not been kept informed of the delays.

I remember one Geography field trip where the teachers hated each other and rowed in front of us. Basically, she thought he was 'common'.

Otherwise, it was normal for the staff in the 70s to get drunk on every trip, and try to cop off with each other. They legged it into pubs, leaving us fifty kids with the coach driver, or alone, and once managed to leave one 13 year old girl behind in central London.Though even they hushed that up.

In middle school we went to look round a synagogue only for it to be closed when we got there. So all had to head back to school to talk about them instead.

A really bad wax works in great yarmouth. The people looked so bad it was almost funny.

Horrible "outdoor team skills day" at uni. I hated my classmates (improved after the first year!) and it was wet, miserable and cold. My feet got soaked in the first five minutes and that was it for the rest of the day. It was awful. If you didn't go on the trip you had to write a 2000 word essay instead. Why didn't I do that instead!?

And I don't remember it, but early on in primary school we went to see Santa in the shopping centre. DM volunteered to help. She said one child started screaming in terror as soon as they saw him, and that started everyone else off. 60 kids sobbing and screeching for an hour straight. (The kid in question was me )

@DSHathawayGivesMeFannyGallops It may well have been, I can't remember the name!

Another highlight of that trip was the fire alarm going off while my friends and I were in the shower. We'd had it drilled into us early in the week that if we heard the alarm we had to run straight to the parade ground, no matter what we were doing/wearing. So we obediently trotted over there in towels and flip flops, only to get bawled at and told to come back decent.

Ooh another one but it was 6th form not school as such .. new york.. sounds great.

• 44 of us in a grotty hostel with 2 male and 2 female showers and toilets.
• in the bloody ghetto - werent allowed out the hostel for 5hours cause i guy was shot on the street.
• we all got sunburn on day 2 and chest infections on day 4 cause the weather was so erratic.
• 4 of us has to stay at a hotel near jfk another night with an teacher because we werent medically fit to fly with ear infections - our parents were billed for the hotel.