expensive school trips - worth it?

[gramercy]

Ds has just bought home a school trip form. It's a history trip and the cost is ... £980 for 5 days!!!!!

On this occasion the answer is no. But some of his friends are going and ds looked a bit crestfallen. (Although it says if you are on a low income you may qualify to go.. grrrrr... but that's another thread.)

Anyway, I have said that if any more expensive (but less expensive than £980!) GCSE trips come up, I will not dismiss them out of hand.

So, what trips have you considered worthwhile and are they that beneficial?

My dcs are years 1 and 3. my dd in year three is off on a mon-weds residential at a pgl place. The cost is £140 they run this trip every year so have 3 more years of it and double cost in another year when they can both go. im dreading year 7 trips.

We let DS go on the ski trip every year (we are poor ski-ers) about £1000, he also does something educational such as: French Exchange, Pompeii, Berlin, etc..

DD does similar.

However, the jaw dropping one in this house was the £3,300 trip to the Galapagos Islands for the Biologists!!

I agree with you Ariel and Shaka. We are lucky that grandparents will help. Apart from that we would be struggling tbh. The whole school trip thing seems to have got out of hand. I never went on a single trip as my Mum was a widow soI am very thrilled that our DDs are getting the things I didn't get iyswim

wow, just have not entered this world, yet. Makes me hopeful that getting DS's passport will be worth the ridiculous effort required, at least.

I think local HS went to Italy recently & I thought that was quite ambitious. When I was a teen we went from California to Washington DC for 3 or 4 nights. That's the only trip I can ever remember out of town in 6 yrs of secondary.

10y DD (y5) is off to France for 4 days on Tuesday. That's cost us about £300 I think. It isn't compulsory as such but every child in y5 and y6 are going (small school). In y3 and 4 DD's residentials (Centre parcs for 4 days) have been about £200.

Secondary is just going to get dearer and dearer I suspect. Good job we only have the one child!!!

We went to Florida with our school - it was about £1k in 2002, it was amazing - we did all the parks and NASA - we didn't learn one dot about anything and it was 10 days out of school (plus 2 at the end for each of us) I honestly don't know how the staff swung that one "well head teacher we had a meeting and instead of aushwitz we thought maybe Florida?" no wonder there was about 5 members of staff and 8 girls ha ha ha