School trips and unavailable teachers, more than 4 out of 10 students will stay at home

Unavailable professors, excessively high costs, student indiscipline and even the personal choice to avoid forced cohabitation: these are the main reasons why almost half of the students (44%) from middle and high schools give up the traditional educational trip, the one with an overnight stay away from home.

This has been revealed by the annual School Trip Observatory of the specialised portal Skuola.net, carried out by polling a sample of 1,500 secondary school pupils on the threshold of the migratory season par excellence, not only for birds: of those who are leaving - 66% - about a third (34%) will do so from now until the end of the year, while 22% have already given in the past months.
But there could be more leavers. Because, to those who will almost certainly - barring last-minute second thoughts - have to give up the trip against their will (38%), we must add a resounding 6% who decided to abstain and bid farewell to their departing classmates. Among the latter, moreover, only 36% were forced not to leave by choice (economic or educational) of the family, while as many as 52% backed out spontaneously, in order not to be with their classmates.

The decision to avoid this experience, which in the past was considered indispensable, is therefore also influenced, at least in part, by the spectre of the now well-known and widespread social anxiety, which seems to affect the new generations of teenagers more than the previous ones.
For the rest, however, the Skuola.net Observatory notes numbers of non-departors (with relative reasons) that are absolutely in line with those measured in 2019. This is a sign that the side effects of the social isolation experienced in the post-pandemic period are slowly fading away.
Sign that this teaching practice, after the forced stop in 2020-2021, is back to business as usual. Moreover, in spite of the (possible) bureaucratic complication dictated by the fact that spending commitments for amounts over EUR 140,000 now have to be made through certified platforms or tools made available by central purchasing bodies, in line with the recent update of the Contracts Code.
Not surprisingly, according to 14% of students to whom the school did not propose an educational trip, this was one of the reasons for the 'niet'. Although MIM has initiated and concluded tenders that have allowed the identification of qualified suppliers from which to acquire turnkey services, without having to launch independent tenders.

But the reasons holding back multi-day educational trips are above all others. The main obstacle to student mobility is still linked to disciplinary reasons, which indirectly discourage teachers from making themselves available (at the root of the cancellation of the trip in 34% of cases) or represent the official reason for the refusal (12%).
At the same time, the weight of the aforementioned bureaucratic complexities and economic difficulties is also growing: 29% of the students who will not be going report that the school was unable to organise an educational trip due to the high costs or because an adequate number of participants was not reached. International wars and tensions, on the other hand, weigh only a modest 2% in the list of culprits.

Among those who are leaving, however, a clear trend can be seen: trips are becoming slightly more demanding, both in terms of duration and, predictably, expenditure. The average cost of the trip is around €440, up from the €424 recorded in 2025: a growth more or less in line with inflation but clearly noticeable on the final bill.
Almost half of the students (49%) are in a spending range of between 200 and 600 euros, a sign of a certain variability but also of a general increase in budgets.
But this, as mentioned, could be the result of a tendency to lengthen the duration of trips: in one year, the average goes from 3.94 to 4.06 days. This is the result of a two percentage point increase - from 36% to 38% - of students spending at least five days away from home. A signal indicating a willingness on the part of schools to make the experience more complete and structured.