The school trip now seems rather quaint. When you can see the whole world on Google Maps, what’s the point of traipsing to the seaside to see longshore drift in action? In an age of austerity, moreover, the school trip might seem an unaffordable indulgence.
Yet parents seem to think otherwise: according to a recent Family Finances Report, 69 per cent of parents are willing to pay for school field trips in Britain. Experiencing the real world — rather than merely reading or writing about it, or staring at it through a computer — should be an essential part of education.
The government agrees. Last October, Michael Gove unveiled a £5 million scheme designed to fund trips to the first world war battlefields for thousands of pupils in England. The aim, Gove said, was for children to learn about the sacrifices made ‘to secure our nation’.
Gove has attacked the bureaucratic educational culture which led to schools not organising trips for fear of contravening rules they did not even understand. Thanks to his ‘bonfire of the regulations’, 150 pages of official guidelines on school trips have been cut to eight. The Health and Safety Executive has further issued a report entitled ‘Tackling the health and safety myths’.
No one disputes that sensible regulations are needed to keep children safe, nor the stress involved for teachers looking after exuberant teenagers on a day out of the school bubble. But when it’s considered too risky to take children out of the confines of the classroom then something is not quite right.
What Gove would have made of the actions of Bromet Primary School this July has never been made clear —but we can hazard a pretty accurate guess. An 11-year-old pupil was banned and her mother forced to undertake a 160-mile round trip through the night to collect her. The girl’s offence? She ate chocolate in defiance of a ‘charter’ which parents and pupils had signed before the trip. The school only found out about the crime by reading one of the girl’s letters home.
But such a depressingly closed-minded attitude towards school trips is the exception rather than the rule. Take the Duke of Edinburgh Award. It was established 57 years ago with a simple aim: to give children the active, outside and real-world experiences they would otherwise be denied.
As the world around it has changed, the D of E Award has not only endured but expanded: it now has 275,000 participants a year. Part of the requirement to obtain an award is to do community work: it’s the ‘Big Society’ in action. But the fun lies in expeditions — ranging from a weekend away in the case of the Bronze Award, to a whole week in the case of the Gold Award. This involves lots of hiking, lots of getting lost and plenty of self-reliance: when traipsing across the moors, I can tell you from experience, there is no substitute for old-fashioned map-reading skills.
For all of the D of E’s worth, some schools take an even more ambitious approach to school trips. Cardiff Sixth Form College is one example. It is involved in the gloriously named International Space Settlement Design Competition. In both 2011 and 2012, Cardiff won the competition, which is held at the NASA headquarters in Houston, Texas, and requires participating students to come up with proposals for developments in space. Very different in tone but equally stimulating is the school’s Goodwill Ambassador Programme, which it runs with Malaysia and Bahrain: this varied scheme gives students the chance to go to schools and universities in between immersing themselves in local life and visiting the sights.
It’s a very 21st-century approach to the school trip: more ‘global race’ than Famous Five. It provides students with an experience far removed from their normal existences, with the potential to shape their future lives.
As laudable as such schemes are, less glamorous school trips need a helping hand too. National Heritage figures show a 28 per cent drop in visits to its sites from school children from 2002-03 to 2012-13. For schools with ever-tighter budgets and ever-greater pressure to climb the league tables, school trips can seem a waste of time and money.
But reports of the demise of the school trip may have been exaggerated. Measures exist to make trips open to all students, regardless of their parents’ income: wherever possible, contributions for school trips are voluntary.
The government is eager to ensure school trips remain an integral part of state education. Independent schools should take advantage. This year, English Heritage has announced that £120,000 a year will be used to offer free bus journeys — prohibitive transport costs often put schools off organising trips — to sites including Hadrian’s Wall and Stonehenge. Schools already benefit from free admission to more than 400 National Heritage sites in the UK.
Far from being obsolete, schools trips are needed more than ever for a generation too often glued to screens. For all the benefits of interactive learning, it is no substitute for going somewhere. The school trip is about education for life, not just education for exams.
From the Spectator's Independent Schools supplement September 2013