Staincliffe CE Junior School

Trips and Visitors

We aim to schedule all of our trips and visitors for your child’s year group at the beginning of each academic year, to enable us to plan and communicate to parents/carers the anticipated costs for running these curriculum enhancements. Hopefully this will mean that parents/carers can budget for the whole year without any unknown costs arising a few weeks before a trip or visitor into school has been booked.

We fully appreciate the financial climate and cost of living crisis that faces so many people currently, so everything that we plan will take account of this situation. We thought now would be a good time to remind parents and carers about the expectations when it comes to paying for trips and visitors, and what the ‘law’ is: Sections 449-462 of the Education Act 1996 govern the law on “charging for school activities”. This applies to all maintained schools, academies and Local Authorities. The General Rule is schools cannot charge for education provided during school hours, therefore trips and visitors into school that take place during normal school time (which most are) cannot be charged for. This means that when a trip/visitor is organised, schools ask for a ‘Voluntary Contribution’.

Voluntary Contributions: Schools can ask for voluntary contributions for the benefit of the school or any school activities. It is made clear to parents that the contributions are voluntary and parents/carers are not made to feel pressurised into paying. What school does communicate is that if not enough voluntary contributions are made, the trip/visitor into school could be cancelled. The school budget is not large enough to pay for trips for all pupils.

School will set a minimum budget for voluntary contributions that are needed for a trip to go ahead - each trip budget will be different depending on the type of trip it is, for example, how far to travel; number of staff needed; length of trip etc. School will do all it can to assist with payments - discounts for families who receive Pupil Premium and installment plans for costly trips such as the Year 6 residential.

At all times, school will continue to communicate the current situation regarding contributions so that parents/carers are fully aware should a trip or visitor be cancelled due to lack of funds or pupil participation numbers.

We strongly encourage all of our children to get involved in as many extra curricular activities as possible, as it broadens their experiences, builds confidence and self esteem, widens social circles and adds to cultural capital. All of our trips are planned with these in mind so that all of our children gain from the experience and become even more prepared for the next stage of their education.