Do you think that school travel ads a lot of value to the pupils

I have taken pupils on many ski, sport and watersports trips with Activ4 school tours and I always find that the pupils get so much pleasure and come back with a new enthusiasm for lessons. Just curious as to whether others also use trips in the same way?

 

I think it depends a lot on what the pupils put in. If they are involved in the planning, the fundraising, the preparation in a meaningful way, they get so much more out of it. Some tours are more of the format: "Pay up, turn up and enjoy" in the same way as an all-inclusive package holiday, and I would argue that the benefits there are more limited.
I have been impressed with World Challenge for example; also BSES and Raleigh.

 

We always asked our yr 11 leavers for the 3 highlights of their time at school. Trips of one sort of another, usually residentials, would always take at least one of the three slots.

 

I would say that many students found trips to be among their best experiences. Certainly my daughter enjoyed mfl exchanges which helped inspire her to study German at university.

 

Trips offered by my secondary school’s language department were my first and for many years ONLY experience of life abroad. My parents didn’t have the ability to take me beyond the UK, yet they saved hard and enabled me to make the most of the school’s opportunities, for which I am forever grateful, as it sparked my love of languages and curiosity about the world beyond our shores. It wasn’t skiing or anything remotely luxurious, but I loved it!

 

I think they get a lot out of it. Favourite for one of ours was an exchange to China to stay with a Chinese family for a week. Hosting a Chinese 14 year old a few months later was educational for the whole family.

 

Given that many of the pupils I taught had never been out of the county, didn't know what a motorway was, had never seen a muslim woman etc, YES, it adds enormously. It doesn't need to be sporty or abroad either.

 

Mrs Shedman went on a Mediterranean cruise on the SS Uganda back in the early seventies and over our 30 years of marriage I have been continually regaled with her adventures and every time anything Mediterranean comes up on the telly she pipes up, 'I've been there'.

 

I'm intrigued by the number of people saying that for some students it's a rare opportunity to go abroad. To me it seems to be a very expensive way to go abroad - a local school ran a trip to New York, and not only did it cost as much as it did for us to go as a family, they didn't fit as much in.

 

I don’t doubt that the cost of a full-on school trip to New York could well exceed the cost of a cheap do-it-yourself family holiday there... The price of skiing trips at my school always seemed more money than my parents had in all the world!

However, I was thinking of the £130 for a three-days-in-Normandy-or-Brittany sort of trip, staying in a youth hostel or grim hotel, with entertainment such wandering round the streets of St Malo on a damp day in March, and an eight-hour ferry crossing at night in a storm, and twelve hours on a coach each way on top. Fantastic, and entirely affordable with a couple of months of hard saving. My parents I’m sure wouldn’t have been able to get us all across to France at that price, or even known where to start with booking a ferry.

(Years later, after a few tentative coach holidays abroad sitting behind the coach driver so he could pick up tips for driving abroad, my father took to foreign travel in a big way... he and my mother once went all the way to the Russian border and back by car. But I was grown up and had flown halfway round the world several times by then)