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I went on 3 week courses/trips to Germany when I was that age, we would go to class during the weekdays from 9-3ish. People from all over the world that didn´t know each other would attend. Since I hadn´t travelled internationally until then it was a great life experience. A fraction of it was funded by me spending the rest of the summer(summer holidays in spain are long) working full time in a hotel.
Also, the price seems right.
I would boycott it and start a group protesting against it.
in a few years she will be able to go back-packing without a chaperone and 4 grand would last you for 4 months or longer.
I wish you could tell my daughter that! We're on about £7.5k all in for 10 weeks 🙁
That said it is getting her to Thailand and Australia in a mostly guided group - so more expensive than it could have been but I'm a believer in 'safety in numbers'!
I’m happy for my kids to go on as many school trips as they can.
I’ve done in about two grand this year to send one to Paris for a week and one to Sorrento for a week.
I was always the povvy kid at school that never had the opportunity to go anywhere. I was an adult before I ever left the UK and I want my kids to experience much more of the world than I was able to.
I’d much rather spend a grand on a trip for them than on something for myself.
I've been involved with a couple of similar school trips and have grave reservations about the ethics of them from the standpoint of both communities here and communities in the countries visited.
It is very divisive within the school community. Wealthy parents will just pay for it but pupils from less wealthy families are told that they can fund raise for it. This is problematic for a few reasons. Firstly, I think it's wrong go around asking for donations for what amounts to a fancy holiday so we asked pupils to make sure they were providing a product or service. This can be really hard work, have quite small returns and become a bone of contention within the community. Secondly that money has to be floating around in the local community / friend / family network in the first place. If it isn't no amount of fundraising is going to work.
The impact on the communities abroad is also pretty variable. We went with a charity who work primarily in Peru and Tanzania. They had pretty robust programs and strong ethical standards but it was clear after going on the second trip (Tanzania) that the impact there was massively greater and the projects much more meaningful than those in Peru.
Also worrying is that up to a couple of years ago at least some of these trips counted towards university entrance points so wealthier parents could basically buy a greater likelihood of entry through these trips.
Don't get me wrong, both the trips I went on had lots of positive impacts but there were negative ones too and I'm left with doubts about how lasting some of the positive ones will be.
I got a scholarship to a well respected independant school but as we were a very blue collar family i could never go on any trips with school. It just wasnt possible and i respected my parents enough not to ask. I did however hate being excluded in a school of super wealthy kids. In the 6th form, i had a sat and holiday job and paid for my mountaineering trips that way.
Fast forward many years and my twims are at state school and there is a school trip to Uganda. The cost was £4k each and at the meeting, some slick salesman couldnt tell me who was going to keep my children safe, when a folklaw remedy for AIDS in Africa is the rape of a white woman.
The children decided they didnt want to go before i said they werent going. The trip went ahead and was cut short by 2 days due to machete based violence in the next village. They even had an armed guard (whose commitment to protect my children over himself i was uneasy with).
Short answer, are you happy to abdicate all resposibility for your kids to a geography teacher?
I also think the trips are devisive and exist for the teachers. There is a clique of 'going' vs the kids who arent and cant attend. I realise the world isnt a socialist paradise but its nasty and elitist when some parents can afford and others cant. There is only so much school fundraising can do.
Beener
£4k is a whole heap of money but if she really wants it, you can afford it, the safety aspect checks out and she is willing to earn money to pay for say half of it then have the discussion about the ethics of it all. If you can't afford it or don't agree with it then tell her & tell her why.
As a kid I never went on any of the away trips & wouldn't even bother giving my parents the details of them, but there is no way i begrudge the other kids that went away skiing etc
Nothing really to add here but we have a 14 year old son and his school trips are now all over as his exams kick in. I think we got away lightly by the looks of it: trips to London to see lion king and Harry potter world, Paris eurodisney (palace of Versailles was really boring) and last year went to Berlin, Krakow, auschwitz. All state school
All I did at high school was an outward bound trip in Shropshire
Short answer, are you happy to abdicate all resposibility for your kids to a geography teacher?
and exist for the teachers.
Much of your post was very sensible but this bit was utter bollox. Flip you first comment around - why would a geography teacher want responsibility for your child in a far flung place? Scrap that, why would that Geography teacher want responsibility for 20 kids in a far flung place? Do you ever find you own child tedious? I bet you do - and they are your own flesh and blood. Kids spend much of their time being immature arses - its what they are for. Can you imagine how tedious a travelling companion 20 of the little ****ers can be? Trust me, a group of someone else's kids can ruin the most awesome experiences. And that's before you are on evening duty and entertainment - doling out medication, dealing with parents, trips to hospitals. And that's ignoring spending weeks before generating reams of risk assessment paperwork. It's a properly shit job. And the best bit is you are doing it at a time when you could otherwise be kicking back with a cold beer (you can't drink as adult in charge of trip) with your own family, out mountain biking, or binge watching Netflix in nothing but your boy boy pants. The only crumbs of pleasure you get from running a trip is because you think (maybe misguidedly) that it is important that opportunities are made available and watching the kids have fun is a reward in itself for the sort of people who usually become teachers. I'll make this very clear - It is not a free holiday. Some of the hardest weeks of my career have been running trips.
A few points:
Don’t get me wrong, both the trips I went on had lots of positive impacts but there were negative ones too and I’m left with doubts about how lasting some of the positive ones will be.
I agree. At a blunt level, a profit making company is all about profit, the 'good cause' is a tool to sell more. A third sector organisation is much more likely to be focussed on the good cause. Hence my suggestion about looking at other providers.
As a parent you and your child are interested in the personal development - living away from home, hard work, self organisation, challenge, working with others, character development etc. This is why you go on such trips - the good cause is a vehicle to that. But you can have that same self development experience in the UK...
The cost of these trips is down to how far and how remote you travel. You could have a similar challenging personal development experience in the UK, and there are opportunities to support more needy in UK and EU. So why then go so far? Two reasons - firstly a brochure that offers Ecuador sounds and looks more glamorous than one that offers Romania. Secondly it is even more radically different culture and environment - but they you question how much culture is experienced when living in a group of your friends, sheltered and secure from harm...
A truly sustainable learning experience would have been co-designed with the pupils - they would have come up with a good cause, they would fund-raise for all to attend (not the few), they would develop the programme. I wonder, did a headteacher phone the company selling these trips and say 'i have a set of pupils who want to....' or has the trip come about through the company phoning the school to sell this?
I have a career in outdoor education. This last week I have delivered two twilight sessions in schools on designing residential and day trips - and who can help provide them. I am a huge fan.
But I have big issues about these big ticket trips - especially when a commercial company is involved, and it is not co-designed.
I would also like to say that the vast majority of school trips are chuffing hard work before, during and after for school staff. They carry huge responsibility, working all hours, with children who lets face it are rather unpredictable. Please don't suggest it is a jolly. That said, my own sons' school who chose a French trip that was 2 days in Quebec and 3 days shopping in New York were likely not motivated by inclusion....
More reading
https://learningaway.org.uk
Interesting article here https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/nov/14/orphans-cambodia-aids-holidays-madonna
Something similar was offered to our lass this year. 3K for the chance to take part in a volunteer project in India for a couple of weeks and do a bit of sightseeing in Mumbai.
Given that paying for it would have meant her having no life while she fundraises non-stop for the next year, then us stepping in to pay the balance when she couldn't raise enough, we told her that for a fraction of that, we could pay for her to have a trip somewhere in Europe when she's 18.
Unimpressed by the scale and cost of school trips in general. Last year the children who couldn't afford even the cheapest activities got the opportunity to stay and paint the school during enrichment week...
I liked Ecuador, it's quite a cool place in a sort of microcosm of South America in one compact country way - you get big snowy volcanos, some jungle, a bit of coastline and the Galapagos in a relatively small geographical area.
Coincidentally, I was there in my mid-30s as part of a year-long climbing, trekking travelling gig around - mostly - the Andes. I did't do the whole gap year thing when I was younger and I kind of made up for it later.
One of the over-riding impressions I got from the trip generally was that travel is sometimes wasted on the young. It sometimes felt like student-age travel kids were so caught up in each other, getting stoned, laid, drunk and repeat, that they often forgot to look at what was around them. I know that's a gross generalisation, but I think it was the case for a lot of younger travellers.
I wonder if you can come up with an alternative, less expensive way of her having a travel-type experience without going the whole £4K hog. Of course, if that's easily affordable, then what the heck, but it seems like an awful lot, even taking long haul air fares into account.
I've been invited a few times recently to contribute to these types of trips through "fundraising events". My middle class, state school attending friend's kids off to have a "lifetime" experience. I politely refused. My priorities for spending go my family then real charitable causes, well before funding little jonny's trip.
As has been said before these are commercial companies using the twin sales and marketing-gold-assets of "ethical/charitable" descriptions and teenager peer-pressure. I think state schools should have a cap on their trips as it's pretty divisive to promote events that 80% plus maybe of kids/families could never participate in.
15/16 yr olds have an awful lot of life left to have experiences of a lifetime. A significant amount of the great experiences is in the planning, arranging and resultant jeopardy of finding out if it will all come together. Do that as a say 21 year old and you experience a hell of a lot more for less cash than a chaperoned 3rd world-lite trip.
The trips we went on were massively over subscribed so for the second one we made the first part of the selection process doing some voluntary work for a local charity. The pupils selected then continued to do local voluntary work, partly for group bonding but also in acknowledgement that they were fundraising from the community. That sorted out the ones who thought it would just be a holiday.
Oh and to the person upthread suggesting these trips are a bit of a jolly for the teachers: I could quite happily have gone without the 25 minute minibus journey on dirt road holding an unconscious pupils head to maintain their airway followed by the hour of dealing with petty African hospital bureaucracy. I really enjoyed both my trips but looking after other peoples children, especially in a developing world country most certainly is not a jolly!
My dad did a few World challenge expeditions with his school but I think they came to an end because they realised the voluntary work aspect was a waste of resources and was not actually helping the folk it was supposed to. They could see evidence of previous work that had never been used and felt they were doing stuff for the sake of it. Designed to make people feel good.
Shocking!
I have a mate in Central America, he is really well off and very generous, if you agree to bring back some suitcases of "confectionary" for him I'm sure he will cover the cost of the trip, for sure..