The ever-increasing cost of school trips to places such as Osborne House and Carisbrooke Castle is becoming a serious threat to their future, English Heritage has warned.
As the UK’s largest provider of free school trips, the charity has seen the cost per head for educational visits rise from £2.25 to £3.66 over the past 3 years, and it is projected to hit £3.89 in 2023/2024. In a bid to bridge this divide, English Heritage is launching a year-long fundraising appeal to ensure the work it does for schools and education groups can continue at the same rate.
The charity has also revealed regional differences in how many school trips are taken, with historic sites in the affluent South East receiving considerably more school visits than those in other areas of the country, despite other regions containing more historic sites.
In the South East, which includes the Isle of Wight, a total of 13 education sites are open to schools with 57,968 visits in 2022/23, an average of 4,459 per site. This means that, on average, a historic site in the South East welcomed almost 8x the number of schoolchildren in 2022/23 as 1 in the North West.
83% of all school visits to English Heritage sites are free visits, with the remaining 17% consisting of immersive, expert-led Discovery Visit workshops. Overall, school trips remain 28% down since COVID, which English Heritage attributes predominantly to the cost of living crisis rather than the enduring effects of the pandemic.
With schools increasingly unable to afford school trips, the charity believes it is more important than ever to keep offering educational trips free-of-charge.
Dr Dominique Bouchard, Head of Learning and Interpretation at English Heritage, has said:
“For many children, a school outing is the only chance they get to discover the very places where history was made. Visiting these places, touching the same stones, seeing the same sights and listening to the same sounds as those who made history is the best way to bring the subject to life. Learning about the Battle of Hastings in a classroom can never offer the same depth of understanding as visiting the actual battlefield, seeing the landscape and even recreating the fight.
“And the benefits extend far beyond the topic being studied. A school trip to one of our sites can have a lifelong impact on children – it can broaden their horizons, develop their sense of self-worth, enable them to strengthen their relationships with teachers and peers, and so much more.
“As a charity, one of our main purposes is to provide everyone with memorable learning experiences. Our educational visits are a vital part of this. We are one of the only paid-entry providers in the UK to offer free school trips and we do this because we want to instil a lifelong love of learning in every single child. However, over the course of the past three years, the cost of providing school trips for free has increased by 63% and it is becoming increasingly difficult for the charity to absorb these costs. Under no circumstances do we want to stop offering free school trips and it is for this reason that we are launching a public appeal to raise much-needed funds.”
For more information on the charity’s programme of school trips, to download teaching resources or to book, visit www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/school-visits.
But if they don’t cut these visits how can the Tories promise more tax cuts. Always the Tories saying the kids are not educated but then call for tax cuts at the cost of education. Well done.
Try and keep on topic. This is about English Heritage offering free school trips. It’s nothing to do with tax cuts.
Don’t know why schools can’t take kids on walking trips from school to see local history and architecture. There’s plenty of it and it doesn’t have to be a big organised costly trip.
Don’t think my daughter went anywhere at all in 5 years at secondary school.
All part of the not travelling due to the climate hoax.
Yet Jeremy Hunt flew to Manchester for the Tory Party conference
Lol
and of course that english heritage has been infected with the woke virus, where they are constantly trying to change the historical narrative to fit the current day ideology.
Am I missing something here?
I stopped being able to afford English Heritage admission prices years ago..
Maybe simply cut the admission costs overall…
How do English Heritage arrive at £3.66 per head for educational visits? A breakdown of this figure would be very helpful in understanding the problem for the organisation
In most cases they walk through the door of a ruins and someone points at a wall and says “thats where” whatever happened, the cafe is priced like a motorway service station, most of the people are volunteers who know little about the history but can point you in the direction of a toilet, and the gift shops make an airport shop look like poundland. There are free and unmanned heritage places all over europe in better condition, EH need to up their game and make these places better or loose the admission prices altogether.