Unrealistic school trips part 2. The meeting…

3895 quids!!!!! The good news is you can pay by installments. Wtf!
And as expected dearest daughter went off to bed teary eyed last night which I **** hate and breaks me a bit as a dad! ****!

£3895!!!
oof. right in the slats.
No more pudding for you for a while.

Nothing for you to feel bad about.
That’s f###ing ridiculous!

Where’s Part 1 ?

Where will your daughter not be going ?

That is an insane amount of money.

In a few years I’ll be telling my kids that they can’t go on the trip too.

Mine won’t be going either. That’s a **** rediculous price for a school trip.

I went to copt oak youth hostel in Leicestershire and had to walk there!!

WTF? I would love to know how many kids will be going.
I paid £90 for an overnighter at one of those PGL centres for my lad and I thought that was a jip off. Apparently not many kids went which shocked me, as the school is in quite an affluent area.
I totally get school trips and do think they are a good idea, but I think the schools are going a little bit too bat shit crazy with their ideas.

I hope your daughter realises the reality of your decision soon as it must be bloody awful (let’s be hones kids just see us as the bad guys at times). I’m dreading when mine come home asking for such things 😆

We’ve already explained to our daughter that trips like that are the equivilent of a really good holiday for the whole family and we can’t afford both. Im not sure how good these trips are, last year there was a 3 day trip to France costing hundreds comprising a day in Paris and a day at Euro Disney. Most of the trip involved sleeping on the coach so the kids were trashed before they even got there. It just made no sense and still wasn’t cheap.

Most kids I know who’ve gone on these type of trips raised a substantial portion themselves.

last year there was a 3 day trip to France costing hundreds comprising a day in Paris and a day at Euro Disney.

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear our kids go to the same school; my lad had the sme trip.

He was knackered but loved it. Cost £400-ish.

There’s no trip this year which he’s a bit miffed about. Next year they are going to Bayeaux to look at an old carpet.

At wifey’s school, they are going to San Francisco, about £3k. That includes the cost of paying for the teachers to go, too, don’t forget.

That includes the cost of paying for the teachers to go, too, don’t forget.

If the staff don’t go, the kids don’t go and whilst taking kids abroad can be fun and rewarding it most certainly isn’t a holiday.

On the original thread I thought your ‘3/4 grand’ meant £750 and I was gobsmacked… not 3 to 4 grand! That’s insane!

As said, don’t feel guilty about it – the school should have felt guilty in asking.

This is an excellent opportunity to teach your daughter about hard work and money.

If she really *needs* to go on this trip, ask her how she will pay her half.

Is she ready to get a part time job, work each week, forego going out/makeup/spending on whatever for a year, work through her holidays ? Is she willing to stay at home when the rest of the family goes away next summer in order to get a bit of extra cash for this trip that she really, really wants to go on ?

Ask her to draw up a plan for getting work and a plan for saving up in order to pay her share.

it – the school should have felt guilty in asking.

I didn’t read the last thread but this kind of thing isn’t normally just the school, it’s usually a business like World Challenge or a charity.

I don’t understand why anyone should feel guilty here, we all make choices based on prices and what we can afford every day and as Bertrand Russell said, being without some of the things we want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Where on earth is the trip to? That’s an outrageous amount of money to think suitable for parents to stump up for a trip.

I’d be saying no as well. Don’t feel guilty

It’s a trip to the moon!

If the staff don’t go, the kids don’t go and whilst taking kids abroad can be fun and rewarding it most certainly isn’t a holiday.

So the fact that the teachers want to see San Fran had nothing at all to do with the selection of destination?

And the further fact that (due to teacher drunkenness) a memo went around saying that there could be no drinking on any trip all the staff volunteers withdrew immediately?

Not a holiday? Maybe not in your eyes.

Ask her to draw up a plan for getting work and a plan for saving up in order to pay her share.

tell her to prepare a ppt presentation for the family, milestones are important here it shows commitment.

Not a holiday? Maybe not in your eyes.

I can only comment on the ones I’ve seen and been on. There are muppets and chancers in all walks of life but please don’t assume all trips and teachers are like that.

tell her to prepare a ppt presentation for the family, milestones are important here it shows commitment.

Quite.
And if she comes up short on the ‘funding’ – perhaps a shade under the agreed 2k, terminate the project as breach of contract. Tell her it was purely a ‘business decision’ and that she can ‘learn from these things’.

Valuable.

It’s a trip to Malawi. The company organising are these guys.
wallet bleeders[/url]
It’s all very slick, great presentation and you could see the kids being sucked in. Several parents walked mid presentation. It got to the end and the guy asked for any questions. All I wanted to know was how many went last year and how much they raised? After one question everyone got up and left so I never got my answer..

At wifey’s school, they are going to San Francisco, about £3k. That includes the cost of paying for the teachers to go, too, don’t forget

I would have love to have been at the staff meeting planning that one; ‘you mean the parents pay for us to go…..screw YHA we are going YMCA!! woop woop!!!’

I can only comment on the ones I’ve seen and been on.

Me too.

The supervision dliemma was solved by the agreement that ‘some’ of the teachers would be sober at all times. What a sacrifice!

Crazy amount of money and now as a parent I wonder how my Mum and Dad afforded to pay for me to go to Florida on a school trip 😯

Miami Beach
Disney
Epcot
Bush Gardens
Universal
etc etc

But the best one for a group of teenage lads … Wet and Wild … Got some teaching there from Mandy from Louisiana…. And I bought my first Hendrix tape… so did get some education from the trip.

Dont know how it came about or what the point of it was … they didn’t do it again …. but in all honestly it was an amazing trip and memories I’ll never forget.

Lucky lad.

Our local school does these sort of high end trips too – my kids have never visibly taken much notice. We do send them to France etc for £400 but not skiing in Colorado for £4000. As mentioned above good for kids to learn value of money.

It is cheaper for the School to plan and book everything themselves, but then they take the risk, rather than the company, and not all Schools are keen on this. I’ve been on a lot of School trips to a lot of wonderful places, but a holiday it is not!

As Spin mentioned, all the kids I know who have gone on trips like this have raised most of the money themselves through car boot sales, car washing etc. Usually there is an 18 month period to do this. Their trips were a similar price and the trips to E Africa and Borneo were really excellent.
My daughter did a Biology expedition to Dominica which was much less (2K), but raised most of the money through baby sitting and selling raffle tickets.

My daughter did go on an expensive trip to Namibia which she was in the 6th form.

The school made them raise the money over the course of a year. I guess as parents we still ‘paid’ for most of it by going to casino nights, fashion shows etc etc but they had to ‘work’ for the money.

The trip was excellent and they spent most of the time there at a school helping repaint and repair it. I think it was very valuable for her and perhaps opened her eyes to the world in a way the news reports/TV does not.

I’m not saying it’s not a silly amount of money but my daughter went on to choose a caring career where she will never be rich. Slightly ironically maybe the expensive trip made her realise there are more important things than money.

£4k!!1!1!111 😯

Makes a family Center Parcs holiday in peak season look a bargain. 😆

Just explain that sort of money would buy daddy an ENVE wheelset, she’ll understand.

In all seriousness, that is ridiculous. From what i hazily remember of school trips, its the social interaction that kids focus on and I doubt that differs whether you are in Malawi or Machynlleth.

£4k per child?! That is pretty insane. How long is that for?

We splashed out on our honeymoon & had a week in Sri Lanka on an organised tour followed by a week in the Maldives all inclusive – that ‘only’ cost around £4.5k for the pair of us…..

they spent most of the time there at a school helping repaint and repair it

If they’d spent the time teaching the locals how to paint and repair I’d approve. Do gooders going in does no good at all unless the capital is invested in the people. A school doesn’t need paint it needs teachers.

Jesus Christ, talk about first World bull carp.

Why do these kids have to go off to the other side of the World?

We used to do the PGL trips to Wales. Bit of rock climbing, hiking in the pi$$ing rain, canoeing in water so cold that if you were unfortunate enough to go in the drink you were rushed back and thrown in the shower before hypothermia set in. Bit or Archery and orienteering. Bloody great trips they were. Great fun, brilliant character building and teaching you how to function with others and didn’t cost more than I pay for a family of 5 to go skiing in Europe.

4K….I’m doing okay for myself, but even I think that’s a lot of money for a school trip. Do they stay in 5 star hotels and fine dine every night?

It’s a shame that people put such ideas into young kids and make them feel bad if they don’t go….

How long is that for?

20 years ago I went on a Raleigh International expedition to Namibia. Not a school trip. £3000 – which I paid myself – got you 10 weeks of living in a tent, eating porridge and mealies, being accompanied when going for a poo by a ranger with a gun so a lion didn’t eat you, and directing your diarrhoea down a long drop toilet you had dug yourself. The mixture of privileged (in the grand scheme of things) youths, underprivileged youths (including scrotes) and people from Namibia made for some interesting tims and it was quite an eye opener in terms of developing people skills – which I think was largely the point of it.

But without knowing what your school one involves it’s hard to judge. Is it a three week jolly with school friends? My kids wouldn’t be going at those prices, simply unaffordable.

My wife spent summer in Rwanda teaching teachers how to teach.

What edukator says is true.

Boxes and boxes of UNICEF sent resources toys puzzles teaching aids all still wrapped up in a back room as no one knew how to teach with them.

Anyhow she did it as a personal thing out with the school with a local business funding half and self funding the rest.

She wouldn’t dream of trying to take a school trip out there.

Can I just check?
1) Is it a fee paying private school fees in excess of 20k a year?
and/or
2) Does your catchment area include mostly million plus houses?

I had a newly qualified teacher as a lodger once. as the new girl she volunteered for the school trip, via cross channel ferry to Paris. Apparently she spent most of the trip at the local police station trying to get several of the kids released after they went on a shoplifting spree, and then had to negotiate with the ferry company to let the kids return on the ferry after the chaos they caused on the way over.

She didn’t volunteer the next year.

I have a decent wage, and my friends are generally middle class type families with kids. We often talk about money and stuff so I have a good idea that not one of them could justify £4K on a school trip for one person.

My wife and I went to California for 2.5 weeks, stayed in a nice central SF hotel for 5 days and hired a fancy car to tour round Cali in for the rest of the trip, all in including flights and food and entry to stuff cost £3700 for both of us! Are these kids staying at 5* places or something?

And you’ll have to cough up spending money too….

Can I just check?
1) Is it a fee paying private school fees in excess of 20k a year?
and/or
2) Does your catchment area include mostly million plus houses?

^ Ha! Ha! 😀

Nope – normal state high school, in a normal town. My daughter goes to the same school as wrightyson’s. Looks like we should start saving now!

My school (90s) organised language exchange trips to France and Germany (which my parents let me go on), skiing trips (which were understood to be outside the budget) and an exchange with the USA (the very idea of my going on this was hilarious).

I think I just understood that while my parents were by no means poor, there was a reason why our holidays typically involved train travel and camping, and there were limits on what trips I could aspire to.

🙂