School trips go global

To an older generation a school trip was something to be endured as much as enjoyed. It meant an expedition to peer at frogspawn in Epping Forest or, for the recklessly profligate, maybe a coach to Skegness. Over recent decades, however, as top schools have raised their fees in line with the international oligarchy’s ability to pay them, school trips have come to resemble the work of chichi travel agents. Designed to build character, they now build air miles.

The trend was already well under way when I was at school in the austere early noughties. Twice a year we went on ‘expeditions’. Some were to the traditional sodden youth hostels in Wales, but there were also such tests of young manhood as ‘swimming in the south of France’ and ‘culture break in Marrakech’. Good preparations for life, if the life you have in mind is that of an ageing gay aristocrat from an Alan Hollinghurst novel. There was one trip to Skegness, but it was to play golf rather than the bracing seaside trials of yore.

At any rate, the real preoccupations on these missions were smoking, drinking and chasing girls. By the time we hit sixth form and went to Florence and Paris for history of art (there’s no art in London, seemingly) we were to be ‘treated like adults’. This meant that the preoccupations were still smoking, drinking and chasing girls, but the teachers no longer had to pretend to care. Bliss for all concerned.

I have since come to realise that compared to what some other schools got up to, these outings were a model of parsimony and restraint. A girl I know went on a three-week creative writing trip to South Africa in her final year of school.