what school trips should schools be going on in your opinion ?

[OneRealFinch]

can be anything you want

Art galleries

Theatre

Back to basics scout type camping, orienteering with a compass not phones, teach them they are more important and enough without tech.

What I would really like to see -is one afternoon a week (or even just each month) set apart for non-classroom based activities.
So the ones who enjoy sport - great, they get a chance to try different activities that they can't / don't teach in school eg swimming, yoga, keep fit, martial arts or just a long country walk in the locality etc.
The ones who don't like sport could maybe go to a gallery, museum or other place of interest in the area, or do art or craft or cooking, but just for fun.
Some other kids could maybe opt to do voluntary work or work experience.
I know it would be too much paperwork and red tape for schools but it would be so enhancing for both pupils and teachers to be able to share planning and doing interesting and nice things together, away from the National Curriculum.

Depends on their age. We went to a WWT reserve yesterday, there were a couple of primary age groups who looked like they were having a good time ... I'd guess they weren't all from families who'd be able to take them to such places and teach them about wildlife.

@VillageGreenPS These swimming, yoga, keep fit, martial arts are all taught at our local schools as part of PE

I'm not even really bothered where - I'd just like it if we could afford them full stop. A couple of trips a year used to be the norm. Now we do a couple of educational trips in the whole of primary because coach costs are so high. Children love a trip related to their topic and learn so much. Just learning how to behave in places like museums is an important lesson in itself.

Surely there is scouts for that?

Places of historical interest (e.g. castles, cathedrals, etc)
Places of nature interest (e.g. national parks, forests)
Places of cultural interest (e.g. theatre, art)
Places to learn life skills (e.g. mechanics, electricians, cooks, tailors)
Places to have fun (e.g. theme park, sports games)
Places connected to subjects beings studied.

Trips I don't think schools should be going on - the ridiculously overpriced "voluntourism" holidays, where you have to pay a fortune to go an build a hut that local people would otherwise have been paid to build, where the "help" isn't really needed but the money is.

Surely there is scouts for that?

Not all kids who'd benefit from such activities get to do them out of school.

Secondary age - geography field trips of one form or another.

Depends on the age of the dc, but also depends hugely on the demograph of the school population.

Trips out, and educational visits add so much to the children's learning, but the cost of transport now is so high so many schools just can't afford to run them. Of course, there is a strong correlations between the children at schools where the parents aren't able to provide the money for the coach, and the children in families that aren't able to take their dc to castles, theatres, museums, zoos, farms, etc, in the holidays.

Nearly all my secondary school trips involved staying in UK youth hostels or field centres and looking at U shaped valleys and chucking oranges in rivers to measure flow rates. We’d have the odd afternoon trip to visit a local castle or cathedral for a bit of culture.

Now they seem to be trips to Iceland or Italy to look at volcanoes or canoeing down the Ardeche.

Camping in the school grounds.
day trip to the seaside
theatre
art gallery

Haven't been, but heard the Bank of England is a good one to learn about money.

My DD hasn't had much in the way of trips out throughout her school career so her dad and I take her places instead.

Our primary school went to

An 18th century silk mill, working windmill, local civil war castle ruins
Stonehenge, Avebury, Windsor Castle
London museums, theatres,
Watercress farm, steam railway
Xmas panto, PGL
Winchester Science Park

Senior school has been:

GCSE science & geography field trips. MFL language exchanges
Skiing
RSC Stratford
Bletchley Park
Sports & chess fixtures against other schools

The Duke of Edinburgh scheme does that. DS is doing it through school at the moment, year 10.

DS's school used to run a gcse history trip to Berlin, but have stopped now due to cost. He'd have loved to go on that.

Outdoor education especially residentials.

There's a wealth of evidence that these are immensely beneficial to children and young people.

DS is a primary school teacher in London and the parents can’t afford the cost of a coach so outings are very limited as it’s a long walk to the bus stop which takes them to the tube station. They still do a school journey but also offer camping in the school grounds for those who can’t afford it.

Theatre to see a play, theatre to see an orchestra, art gallery, a castle, a beach, a farm, the thames barrier or a windfarm or some other major engineering works like this.

Slight adjustments on locality no point taking a load of farmers to a farm..

The school trips I remember (I was at school in the 70s and 80s) were the ones where it was a case of doing practical things rather than just looking at things.
I remember going on a school camp and measuring gradients of slopes and calculating the height of trees using practical maths.

Galleries, museums, theatre, classical music - the things some parents don't take their kids to unfortunately. My dc got plenty of opportunities from us but it was sad hearing when I was a helper on trips that the other children had never seen an orchestra, been to a proper play or heard of famous artists, i remember dd telling other children about visiting Giverny to to Monet's house and they hadn't heard of Monet though loved the paintings in the exhibition school visited, blew them away

We have pretty much stopped all trips now-there is very little we can to on foot or get public transport to. So few parents paid for the last trip involving a coach (which cost a fortune) that the trip wasn’t viable and was
cancelled.

We even struggled to get enough parent helpers for a walk around the local area recently and hardly have any TA staff to make up the Safety adult/child ratio needed.

I can see school trips fading away completely unless something massively changes with government funding. If people want their children to go camping, they can take them camping or send them to scouts-I don’t think staff have the resources or staffing to facilitate this (outside of DofE at secondary).

That's what most private schools do. As an example: lessons finish every day at 4pm then there is 1 hour of various clubs/sports/activities/games/puzzles/chess/baking/gardening/debating/singing etc. Split into different categories ie physical, mental and spiritual and the kids have to do minimum 1 from each category each week.