A South Auckland intermediate school has called off its camp this year because most of its families could not find the money to send their children, in a decision the principal describes as devastating for a community already stretched by rising prices.
Papatoetoe Intermediate runs its camp every second year, and it is the one week many of its students spend away from home. This time, only 160 of the school’s 750 students confirmed they could go. With numbers that low the school could not make the trip work, and it was cancelled.
Principal Pauline Cornwell told RNZ the school had tried hard to hold the price down and still could not close the gap. “The fact that we can’t provide the opportunity for our children, just simply can’t afford to bridge the gap, is just devastating,” she said. “For our students, it’s a once in a lifetime experience for many of them.”
Two years ago the camp cost families roughly $240 a child. This year the figure had climbed past $350. Cornwell said almost every line in the budget had moved at once. “Petrol has increased and the price of transporting children to and from camp has increased dramatically,” she said. The camp venue itself was charging more, because its own staffing and running costs had gone up, and the school was paying more to the support staff who go along to look after the students.
Speaking to the New Zealand Herald, Cornwell set out the same problem over a longer run. Measured across five years, the school’s camp charge has gone from around $180 a student to around $360. “Food is more expensive, staffing costs have gone up because camps need properly trained supervisors, petrol costs more, bus transport costs more, and the camps themselves are charging more,” she said.
None of those increases are unique to Papatoetoe. What makes the school unusual is the size of its roll and the profile of the families on it. Many of its students come from lower income households, and many come from families who arrived in New Zealand recently. For those children a week at camp is often the first time they have slept away from home, cooked outdoors, been in a kayak or spent an evening somewhere with no streetlights. It is not an optional extra sitting on top of the school year so much as the part of it that most of them will still remember in twenty years.
Auckland Primary Principals Association president Lucy Naylor said schools across the city are wrestling with the same arithmetic. “It’s definitely widespread, it’s definitely got worse in the last couple of years,” she told RNZ. Some schools have shortened their camps, some have cut the activities that cost the most, and some have quietly stopped running them.
The Herald reported similar pressure elsewhere. Glenbrook School, south of Auckland, has camps costing close to $1,000 a student, and watched the share of children not attending rise from about 5 percent to somewhere between 15 and 20 percent in a year. Principal Lysandra Stewart said the fee is only part of what a family has to find. “It’s not just the cost of camp. It’s the clothing, the equipment list and everything else that goes with it,” she said. Botany Downs Secondary College has trimmed its Year 9 camp from four days and three nights down to three days and two nights.
Behind all of it sits the wider cost picture. Annual inflation reached 4.1 percent in the latest reading, its highest in two years, driven along by fuel, electricity, rates and food. Camps are exposed to nearly all of those at once. A bus to the Coromandel or the Hunua Ranges runs on diesel that has become more expensive. A camp kitchen feeding 200 children three times a day buys the same groceries households are buying. Compliance and safety requirements have also tightened over the past decade, which is good for children but does mean more trained adults on site and a higher nightly rate to pay for them.
Schools have limited room to move. State schools cannot charge compulsory fees for the curriculum, so camps are funded through voluntary payments, fundraising and whatever the school can absorb. Many now run sausage sizzles, mufti days, raffles and sponsorship drives, and keep a small hardship fund for families who ask. That works when a handful of children need help. It does not work when close to 600 out of 750 cannot pay.
There is also a quieter cost in how the cancellation happened. Schools generally ask families to confirm early so they can book. When most of them say no, the school is left with a choice between running a camp for a fifth of the year group, which turns an inclusive trip into a visible sorting of who can afford things and who cannot, or calling the whole thing off. Papatoetoe chose the second option, and the effect is that no child at the school goes this year.
Whether camps survive as a normal part of New Zealand schooling now depends less on schools than on what happens to transport, food and wage costs over the next few years, and on whether anyone decides to help schools with the gap. For the moment the trend is going one way. Camps are getting shorter, dearer and less common, and the children least likely to get the experience anywhere else are the ones missing out first.
Did your school run a camp, and would your family be able to afford one at today’s prices? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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