AIBU to not want to pay £5k for a school trip?

[Lincspeeps]

In short, DD's school are running a trip to South Africa in 2021 - safari, time in Madagascar, trekking, social responsibility work etc.

Problem is, its £4.5k plus spends and optional extras - the safari being one. So, with insurance, visas, inoculations etc it'll be five grand and more.

DD's three best friends are all going and we, at a massive stretch, could probably afford it BUT in reading where they stay etc it just seems like such a rip off. I want her to do something exciting but £5k just seems a ridiculous amount.

She's not spoiled and completely understands the value of money but she'll be devastated if she can't go and I'll feel like a demon by preventing her (she's 15 now, will be almost 17 when trip takes place). I just feel that £5k could be spent in a much better way where travel is concerned - I'm sure you can buy a round the world plane tickets for a couple of grand, for example!!

Help...…..

Operation Raleigh the same.
It really doesn’t matter if you’re living in a shed or building schools or what you’re doing.
It’s a big jolly for the privileged few.

Absolutely no way I’d spend that amount of money on a trip for DD. If I was spending that amount in a holiday is wang it to be something we did together. The ‘social responsibility’ aspect is bullshit, if you want to teach kids social responsibility let them volunteer at the local food bank or go litter picking!

@TinklyLittleLaugh
My DD went backpacking with a friend round Italy at 17 for about a tenth of the cost of the OP’s trip. Every bit of it booked and organised and sorted herself. She went to Rome and Pompeii and Sorrento and is now studying Classics abroad. You don’t have to spend silly money to have brilliant, life enhancing travel experiences.

This! ^
There were no such trips offered at my school, but my parents were averagely well off and I reckon if there had been such trips, I’d have been keen to go. Knowing them, they’d have scraped it together. I know I’d be feeling guilty about it now that I realise exactly how much £5k would have meant to them.

However, as it was, I had a full time job from 16, was desperate to travel and so from 17 was organising little jaunts to various hostels with pals in between school and uni holidays. I got a lot of different experiences...some that my parents never need to know or hear about.

This voluntourism seems patronising and ill advised. Doesn’t sit well with me. I got experience in social responsibility doing lengthy periods of voluntary work in old folks homes, youth clubs and children’s hospitals - it’s surely more beneficial to build relationships, responsibilities and experience over time, rather than crashing in to a foreign community you know nothing about for a week, doing building work you have no experience in and then moving on.

*I’d want it to be something we did together.

Have a look at Raleigh international if she wants to do something like this

I'm just imagining the family holiday I would plan with 5k!

” You're not expected to pay. Your child is given two years to fundraise for these trips. They aren't compulsory.”

How is it fundraising? Surely fundraising is something you do for charity? If a friend’s teenager asked me to buy some cakes she’d baked to pay a profit making company to take her on holiday, I’d (nicely) tell her to get on her bike.

If you can afford it then I would let her go. My 12 year old (just started year 8) is off to Japan next week with the school. It has cost us around £4000 in total. More than we can afford really and he is obviously too young to get a job. We paid for it monthly and I did some overtime to help with the cost. I think these sort of experiences are great for them.

Hi OP,
I think the person who said something like "if you gave your daughter 5k in her hand is this really what she wants to spend it on?" could be on to something.

My son (nearly 10) gets his pocket money direct into the bank. It has built up to several hundred pounds.

He is quick to say "I'd like a Nintendo switch/ this iPad app that costs £10 each month etc" when he is asking me to buy them. When I tell him I'm not buying them (he has an x box/ there is a family ipad and i think it is enough) but he could consider using his money, but point out the things that he won't be able to spend his money on if he buys for example a switch, such as a cheap trip abroad when he has enough, he thinks again!

Saving £200 each month over two years would give £4800. Would your daughter be interested if you said how about she passes up on the trip but you save the same money which the trip costs and she is then free to choose to spend on driving lessons/getting on the road, or take extra money to uni or spend a sensible part of it on a holiday with her mates.

At the moment her decision making is trip versus no trip but might be different if it was trip or these other exciting options which offer better value for money. This could work well if there is a sibling gap which allows you to save to do the same offer for other siblings e.g. a savings pot to spend on things that have been negotiated as sensible when they are 17 odd.

Agree with the previous poster mentioning organising trip abroad yourself. My husband took my son to Italy for a few days (son was 8). Flew into Venice for a night or two, train to Rome for a couple of days (day trip to Pompeii), train to Pisa overnight stay, flight home. Their flights were £70 each return. The route was based on where the cheap flights were. The whole trip with flights, trains, accommodation and spends about £500. You could take your daughter and a friend on a trip like this and still be quids in.

You could ask daughters friend's parents if they would fancy a trip where the dad's or mum's (for example) took the kids somewhere cool on lieu of school trip and save at least four grand?

It's obscene. Dd3 has just started secondary school. There is a trip in year 10 to America that is 2k. I have already told her she isn't going. We could afford it but lots of kids can't and I object to it creating even more haves and have nots.

No.

That is all.

I sadly have to agree with Linning. I would not send my child to South Africa for love or money with the current situation that is there at the moment. It is just not safe and surely will not change in the next two years. If anything, it might get worse.

See I think £4000 to send a 13 year old to Japan is an absolute waste of money.

My DS was fortunate to go on a trip to China in Y8 (heavily subsidised by the Mandarin Excellence Program, only cost us about £400). He saw the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace.

He was totally blase about it all, had no concept of his own privilege and was most excited about the fake designer trainers he haggled for in the marketplace. Just too young really.

I would echo the few supporters on here.

DS has recently come back from a similar trip, though with a small local charity rather than a for profit company.

He and a friend have fundraised extensively (at one point the sight of a raffle ticket made my eyelid twitch) and we paid the rest.

He trotted off as a 15yr old teenager and returned changed in almost every way - DH and I have spoken about how it has been the making of him. The changes are small and hard to put into words, but I don't begrudge a penny.

We now have a fundraiser coming up to raise funds for a school they visited which has no books, as the boys were so deeply affected by what they saw.

I would definitely recommend it but would be sceptical of the big voluntourism companies. Smaller local charities seemed so much more personal.

South Africa is only unsafe in particular areas, I doubt the op's daughter's school is organising a trip to any of those. I know plenty of people who have had amazing holidays there.

Operation Raleigh is excellent but those going are usually expected to raise some of the funds themselves. If she is prepared to do that, fine, if not she doesn't go.

By the time she is ready to buy a house, £5k will be a drop in the ocean towards a deposit - it is now!

It's funny how these youngsters are so enthusiastic about these working trips. I'd have hated them! Well each to their own I suppose.

Never in a million years would I spend that much on a school trip. I'd spend it on a family holiday where we could all go but for school? no bloody way. In fact, I think its beyond classist and discriminatory for the school to even be asking this of parents as it is going to be very obvious which kids parents are rich and which kids come from poorer families. What a horribly divisive, elitist move on the part of the school. Urgh. In fact, I'd refuse out of principle TBH.

Is it actually useful 'socially responsible work' or middle-class voyeurism dressed up as volunteering. I think its highly unlikely they are doing useful work and you could all have an ethical holiday for that money if she feels the need to do something useful.

Well one of my dcs did a sports trip to New Zealand and Fiji when he was at school . Cost £3.5k about 10 years ago so probably comparable.

He contributed £1k from savings. He absolutely loved it and still talks about it as the highlight of his time at school. I'm so glad he was able to have that experience.

I have just been hassled by an acquaintance for 2 years to help her son raise cash for a similar trip.

I refused point blank to bank roll his ‘holiday’ with over-priced cakes, car washing and window cleaning.

The teenagers were going to an African country to ‘build a school’. Quite how a bunch of teenagers without any building skills were gong to do this was beyond me.

I personally don’t agree with these type of ‘holidays’ and think they are an insult to the people they say they are helping.

I’d never pay for my child to go on one of these trips anyway, but with a £5k price tag, this is an outrageous amount of money. Just think what you spend it on!

Met too many South Africans who have left due to the horrific violent crime. As a young woman my friend was teaching in Switzerland her work friends were a group of young South African women. They left because a friend of theirs had been raped and murdered walking from her car to her house in a nice area. One cried as they recounted this. Never forgotten it and never want to go there.

@Skinnychip most of these build projects end up being knocked down for exactly that reason. The locals are used to it in fairness - they get a bunch of schmucks coming over emoting at them for a couple of weeks and putting up rickety walls before fucking off back to colony HQ "enriched" and "changed forever", the building gets pushed over, the next lot come along, repeat. There aren't any hard feelings for the most part, just a sense of bemusement. Although personally if I was witnessing such bullshit on a regular basis I would be quite cross that these pampered teens didn't take their £5k and donate it to an organisation giving job opportunities to my friends and family that was properly set up to, for example, "build a school for orphan kiddies". But then I'd remember that it's not actually about me but about Sebastian from chipping Norton finding himself and saving me with his badly built wall.

It sounds like World Challenge.

I echo all of the previous reservations about ecotourism, but I also think that going on a World Challenge trip when I was 16 was quite life changing for me. It cost around £3000 back in thr 90s. I raised about £1000 myself mainly by a weekend job, and my aunt paid the rest. I had quite an unhappy home life with lots of drugs and domestic violence, and it allowed me time away to see what possibilities my life could have that were different to my parents.

But I don't think we would be able to afford a trip like this for my dc.

No.

Social responsibility my arse, as Ricky Tomlinson's character would say.

Social responsibility could be helping out at the local food bank for a couple of hours per week, for example.