To be fed up with the cost of school trips?

[0TiredMumOf4]

Hi all,
Just having a bit of a rant because I feel like I’m being totally swamped by the cost of all these school trips recently. DD1’s school trip to the Science Museum in London is coming up, and it’s a whopping £45. That’s for one trip! And to make matters worse, I’ve already shelled out for DS’s farm trip (another £35), and DD2’s little museum trip just up the road (which, okay, is £15, but still) 🙄.

I get that these trips are important, but seriously? £45 for a museum trip? That’s not even factoring in the cost of packed lunches and the inevitable begging for snacks to take on the coach. And they expect me to fork out this kind of money for all three of them every time there’s a school trip?? 🤦‍♀️

It’s not like I’m made of money, and it feels like they have a trip every other week. Am I being unreasonable to feel totally fed up with how much these things are costing? I don’t mind supporting the kids, but I can’t keep up with this!

Anyone else feel the same, or am I just being a tight arse? 😤

Yes, the teachers do get subsidised places. It still costs them. They're on duty 24/7. I am never doing an overseas trip again. I hardly got any sleep.

I vaguely remember a principal saying a coaching was £1000 for the day (and we arnt in an expensive area)

Re packed lunches, doesn’t the school provide one for the kids on school lunches? Ie you only need to provide one if you usually do.
Or maybe we are lucky with our school.
But yes, I agree, trips are expensive and it is difficult not to send the kids if the whole class is going.

Off topic.. but what’s a weekly chicken shop visit???? Intrigued 😬

Wait until they go to university! These amounts are chicken feed compared to that! I can’t take pleas of poverty seriously from
anyone with 3 plus children you must be seriously wealthy to have that many in the first place.

I wonder how much you’re having to subsidise other pupils as that sounds ridiculously high. I agree teachers should be paid for but if you then factor in (if) other children aren’t paying/paying much less it starts to get to situation where a few are paying for the many.

When trips get that expensive they need to stop them. Perhaps parents just need to start saying ‘no’?

Nonsense. My uni aged son costs me very little

Our school is doing a 2 night away trip for £250 per student. I did the maths and this camping trip will cost £15k (lots of kids going).
That's mental for some coaches, food and some tents in fields!

I don’t live in a very diverse area but I was referring to the stereotype which I demonstrated with the use of “”.

wtf? I’m rich because I have 3 dc? My egg split so baby 2 ended up being baby 2 and 3. I knew 3 would cost a lot hence I planned 2.

DC at a private school and all local trips (we are the edge of London) are included.

However, they announced all local trips would use public transport and there was an outcry from some parents about how unsafe it was and the terrorist threat 🙄yet the thought of a coach crash never enters their minds. FWIW I don’t think the metropolitan line is unsafe with adequate staff supervision.

Honestly, quite an affluent area here and apparently it's very surprising how many parents don't contribute their voluntary donation towards school trips....

Oh, mate!😂

No different to 60 workers getting on. My kid went on the public bus to a park outing. They all have their bus pass with them, with either the montly or 10 ticket card with them. There is no paying cash. About seat belts, there are no seat belts on buses or trains. We all use them to get to school.

It won't be to subsidise other children. The staff will divide the cost by 30 and then if anyone doesn't pay that just comes out of the school budget. Staff and parent helpers are usually free at museums etc so their costs are just the coach.

If parents say no then there won't be trips which other parents will complain about!

We haven’t actually encountered expensive school trips yet, I think we paid £5 for a trip to a science museum, and a recent trip to a forest park with another local school was completely free. They went to a screening of Room on the Broom at Halloween at the civic centre which was £2. We provide packed lunches and the school provides a healthy snack which we pay £28 a term for.

Out primary school has a yellow bus provided by the educational authority though so coach hire doesn’t factor in!

There are lots of costs the school has to factor in; for example, the cost per payment on the financial system they use (our school is charged for every single transaction made by a parent), cover costs for absent staff, the cost to pay someone to make all the bookings / write letters / create & send consent forms / chase inevitable late payments / print paperwork etc etc.

There might be less to do in a primary school setting, but in a secondary school, it’s a huge undertaking.

The staff run the trips because they want the students to have wonderful opportunities that in many instances enhance their understanding of the curriculum.

Quite a few academy trusts near us have done this. I think it’s more likely a few mini buses so easier to get a license.

He goes to the chicken shop after school once a week with his friends! Don't all teenage boys do this?? I am in London where there are more chicken shops than there are Pret or Starbucks.

@roses2 Ah! Sorry- that’s really obvious when I googled it 😂 we live rurally, no chicken shops here… I had images of DS saving up to buy a bantam hen or some chicken feed 😬

As someone who worked in a school for many years, then worked in the museum and heritage education field I can assure you most of that cost will be the transport. Most school trip providers have a school visit rate. Years ago in our LA the max schools could charge parents for normal local school trips was £10 (residential / abroad were different). Therefore most school trip providers charged a school rate between £0 and around £9. I know for a fact the cost of busses has always been an issue for schools. It has always been cheaper to use the LA busses where possible rather than private providers but LA busses are tied to school start and finish times and there are less and less of them about due to cuts. After Covid, the price of busses has gone up and up. I know some of our regular schools who have come to us every year can no longer justify coming purely due to transport costs. One school was paying around £200 for their school trip to us and the bus company quoted them over £1000 just for the bus.

Whilst you are visiting a London museum and tfl travel is free, a decision to use a bus rather than tfl is usually a measured one. It depends entirely on the needs of the class and also class teacher. For example a school I worked at would not allow a supply teacher (even a long term supply) to take students on tfl transport but would a private hire bus. Similarly a class with a lot of SEN or behavioral needs would not be going on tfl transport.

As for getting creative with trips and using free offers. There are getting rarer and rarer in the face of cuts and competition for them is incredibly fierce. They are almost always pilot runs, programs in development, have strict marketing requirements or heavily attached to grant funding. Our museum group used to run them occasionally when we were developing new topics or redesigning a workshop and schools had to apply for them, we never advertised them, just popped them on the museum website. We would get over 200 applications for our pilots within days of them been posted on the website. They required consultations with teachers and students and feedback on elements of the workshop during the school visit. Sometimes it was an hour workshop with 30 minutes of feedback time (often at odd times of the day around other school visits i.e 2-3 or 9.30-10.30 so we were always mindful to select local schools who would be able to walk/ travel cheaply to us and get back to school in time. Other free sessions were for advertising (usually new offers) and required lots of photography and staged photos so it wasn't a proper school trip.

The ones tied to grant funding were usually only for a few weeks and usually on a special topic with visiting exhibition and often didn't link directly to the curriculum (anniversary of RAF/ Victoria crosses/ propaganda in WW2/ specific post modern artists are some of the grant funded trips I have run). Some grant funded trips come with audience stipulations.

Oh please, how common is that?

op you’re complaining about a packed lunch? Shows how far the entitled mentality goes!

I can’t imagine how far away from London you must live if you’re paying £45 per child for a trip to the Science Museum where entry is free. I just organised a trip to Alton Towers which is an hour and 15 mins on the coach one way for a total of £32 per student including entry to the theme park. Either you’re driving from Aberdeen or you’re getting ripped off.

I thnk OP said she was in Yorkshire. I wonder if the increased rate SEN is why public transport can't be used ? Also DC less used to taking the bus or train as both parents drive ?

A lot of people seem to be missing that for many, many schools public transport isn’t an option.
I tried to arrange a lovely study day at a nature reserve local to us. 5 miles. Public transport won’t work as would involve changes with long waits and the timings would mess up the day as so many students would need to be back for contract transport from school.