school trips etc

[tanya77]

Hi all, this is my first post so please bear with me if this doesn't appear in the right place

What's the best way to say to a child that not every school trip is 100% necessary?
The response is sure to be that "everyone else is going!", so is there a tried and tested replt for this?

thank you

gosh this is so hard as a lot depends on your child. I recently had my dd1 come in and say that her secondary school were thinking of organising 2 ski trips one in feb2010 and one at easter. now bearing in mind that we had just the week before told her and her siblings that we were going to florida in aug2010 do you know what she said? 'Its ok mum Ive told the teacher I wont be going because we are going to Florida and it will be too much to expect a skiing holiday as well ' who said the youth of today are selfish and expect everything? I think I would test the water with some of the parents first as it may be that they are not the only one who cannot go

Hi, I'm a teacher (or was until babies) and my advice is to talk to the school. We used to give subsidised places to children whose parents couldn't manage the whole cost, and in several cases I arranged for the whole cost of the trip to be covered by the school. This wasn't for ski trips for eg but it was for day trips and also for up to week long residential trips in the uk.
There is money tucked away in budgets for this sort of thing.
It goes without saying that we never made children aware of who had a subsidised place, or really that there were any, but if a child said they couldn't go for this reason I would always try to contact parents and see if we could help.
Worth a try.

Tanya, are we talking primary or secondary school trips? I am assuming secondary as primary trips tend to be one day and yes, for better or worse, everyone does tend to go. However, at secondary level there seem to be lots of trips for sports/academic/music etc. and I really can't believe that your child will think that everyone is going on every trip. It might be worthwhile finding out from the school the numbers available on a trip (if they don't put it on the information sent to you). DS1's year are going on a trip to France in June but they said in the letter there were only 140 spaces. There are 200 kids in the year so my answer to "everybody is going" in that case would be "59 other people are not!"