Why do schools do such expensive trips?

[henry84]

I have 3 dc. This week each received lettaes about visits the school had planned. They cost £19 each.
I now know why parents feel like cash machines.

letters even.

Transport by coach seems to be the main cost of any trips my dc have been on.

Because you have to cover the cost of the place you are going to, the transport to get there and also the cover teaching for the classes the teachers going with the kids will be missing.

£19 does seem a lot, but unfortunately it is transport that is usually the biggest cost - petrol and insurance. If enough parents put their foot down the trips will be cancelled.

and often the school will still be subsidising the real cost it seems transport costs far more than the actual entrance fee.

Coaches in my area cost a minimum of £450 for a day trip-that will hold 50 children so £9 per child. Unfortunately if the class has only 30 children a smaller coach will cost a similar amount, so £15 per child before you start!

As the others have said, the cost of the coach will be horrendous without adding on the actual entry fee etc.

Trips are something the children will look back on rather than a maths lesson etc so its great when they are offered the opportunity.

as well as the coach costs and insurance - days out ARE expensive!

that's why there are always coupons and codes flying about cyberspace for money off.

Rather an odd post. If you're struggling you could ask the school if they have any financial support but surely you can't expect trips to be put on for free??

I thought at a state school, no child was allowed to be excluded from a curriculum trip due to financial difficulties. Skiing in the Alps maybe but things like going to a local theatre to see a production of something they are studying or going to a museum or even the team bonding type things they do at activity centres I think you'll find are funded by the school if you are in dire straights. Its not something they may advertise probably in case they get tons of people taking advantage of it and exaggerating their circumstances. Speak to the school in confidence if you feel it is a genuine hardship and they should help.

If not enough pay they will have to cancel the trip so no one goes.

I'm afraid we have had to do this in the past

I'm a primary teacher who has regularly organised class trips. As some previous posters have already mentioned, it's the transport costs that can bump up the price of the trips quite dramatically. For a recent museum trip, we would have had to charge upwards of £20 had we travelled by coach - we took the decision to go by train instead, and reduced costs to £3 per child. My school has recently taken the decision to travel by public transport wherever possible for precisely this reason (I'm in London, so we're lucky to have that flexibility) but the flip side of this is that many parents have objected to this on health and safety grounds, citing the threat from terrorism etc. Most were reassured when they found out that we had a ratio of one adult for every three children, but a couple have kept their children at home.

As a parent, I don't mind budgeting for a trip or two, but my daughter is in y6 this year and so far (6 weeks into the year) I have paid £80+ for an residential trip, £15 for a trip to the pantomime at Christmas and another £12 for a trip linked to their topic....and she tells me they have been discussing another upcoming trip we have yet to have a letter for linked to their geography work.

We've just had a letter home fora ski trip £1300. I have 3 children there and none of them will be going!!!!

This was why my secondary school decided to buy it's own coaches - I think there were three, certainly two. They also paid for staff to get their PSV license. This meant that nearly every school trip I ever went on was on a bus that was driven by my dad, who was a teacher at the school

Isn't it just part of bringing up children - something you know you will have to pay and so budget for.

Depending on where you live, travel is definitely the biggest cost. I used to teach in London, where the Mousetrap Foundation offered school theatre tickets for £5 per seat, and TfL did school trip travel free. Now I work in Gloucestershire, and took some students out last week - cheapest theatre tickets were £10 per seat and the cheapest way by far of getting them there was on the normal public service bus. Still, it cost £14 per student. We have a fund in school which gives £50 to school trips and I covered any extra from my department budget as I didn't want anyone to miss out if they wanted to go. Last trip I ran was compulsory (fed into one of their BTEC Performing Arts units) so we didn't charge at all - cost was covered by the school.

MigratingCoconuts - I've never had to factor cover costs into a trip. That would be ludicrous.

I think it's a real shame that coach travel is so expensive. I would love to take students to the theatre in London, but the travel costs would be prohibitively expensive.

At my school the PTA's main expenditure (over 80 per cent of funds raised) is funding for school trips (to avoid all the politics of payment). I think it's a great idea as the children directly benefit. What are all your PTAs spending their money on, can they not help support the trips?