‘£1,200 for a ski trip in year 9’: the quiet rise in school trip costs and the families saying no

The letter arrived in Hannah Pryce’s daughter’s school bag in the third week of term: a five-night ski trip to the French Alps in February, for year 9, at £1,195, deposit of £200 due by the end of October. It was the fourth trip letter since September. The others were a theatre trip to Cardiff (£38), a geography field trip to the Gower (£145) and a three-day residential at an outdoor centre in Pembrokeshire (£290). “I added it up,” said Pryce, 41, a care coordinator in Swansea. “If she did all of it, that is £1,668 before Christmas. She is not doing the skiing.”

Pryce is not alone. A survey of 1,400 parents of secondary pupils carried out last month by a parents’ charity found that the average family had been asked to contribute £412 to school trips in the first half of the autumn term, up from £290 in 2022, and that 44% had declined at least one trip on cost grounds. The most expensive trips, skiing, exchanges and the long-haul “expeditions” to Costa Rica or Borneo that some schools now offer in the sixth form, routinely cost between £1,000 and £4,000.

Schools are not supposed to charge for anything that happens in lesson time, but they can ask for voluntary contributions and can charge for residential trips’ board and lodging and for anything outside school hours, which covers most of the big ones. Heads say the rises reflect their own costs: coach hire has risen by around 40% since 2021, ferry and flight prices have gone up, and the outdoor centres that were once council-run and subsidised are now mostly private.

“We have agonised over this,” said Deborah Lennox, head of a 1,100-pupil comprehensive in Swansea whose school is running the ski trip. “The trip is subsidised for pupil premium students and we have a hardship fund, and 30 of the 48 places are taken. But I know that the 18 we have not filled are not empty because nobody wants to ski. They are empty because £1,200 is a lot of money, and the kids whose parents can pay it are the same kids every time. It creates a two-tier year group and we see it.”

The charity’s survey found the divide is visible to children. Just over half the parents who had declined a trip said their child had been upset or embarrassed, and a quarter said the child had not told friends why they were not going. Lennox’s school has responded by making the most expensive trips a sixth-form rather than a year 9 offer, by capping the number of paid trips any year group is offered to three a year, and by running a free week of activities at the school for anyone who stays behind.

Some schools have gone further. A secondary in Bolton stopped running overseas trips altogether in 2024 and replaced them with a programme of UK residentials capped at £150, funded in part by a parents’ association that raises around £20,000 a year. Its head, Ian Farrow, said the decision had been unpopular with a small number of families and popular with the rest. “We used to take 40 kids to Italy and leave 200 behind,” he said. “Now we take 240 to the Lake District. I know which one is education.”

Pryce’s daughter will do the Gower field trip and the Pembrokeshire residential, and the deposit for the skiing has not been paid. “She was upset for about a day,” Pryce said. “Then her best friend said she wasn’t going either. I think there are more of us than the school realises.”