Trips and Visits

School trips both abroad and also closer to home offer the chance to develop new skills, explore different cultures and create lifelong memories.

The global COVID-19 pandemic meant that we, in common with all schools, had to cancel residential trips both home and abroad and also look carefully at the viability of other trips, both curricular and co-curricular. Now that restrictions are lifted, we have resumef our programme of trips and visits.

Bancroft’s has a flourishing programme of Modern Foreign Language trips. These include a long-established exchange with a school in Germany, when Upper Fourth pupils (year 10) who are studying German have the chance to visit Haßfurt.  We have enjoyed exchange visits to Haßfurt in Bavaria for over forty years, broken only by Covid. Sixth Form French students can take part in a language trip to Nice. There are several regular trips to Spain for those studying Spanish, including a residential trip to Salamanca for our Removes (year 8) and a visit to Spain for A Level students. The emphasis on oral work make these language trips invaluable.

The History department organises an annual Battlefields Tour for GCSE historians. A Level geographers have travelled to Iceland and Ecuador and younger geographers have experienced “The Restless Earth” in Sicily. Classical and cultural tours are always popular, with visits to Italy, Berlin and Prague, the USA, Russia and Greece. Our musicians have travelled to Paris to perform at Disneyland, the Bancroft’s Singers have enjoyed touring in the Italian Lakes and the Bancroft’s Players have become regular performers at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Annual ski trips are arranged for students of different age groups to ski resorts in several European countries. These cater for skiers of all levels.

Volunteering trips are also popular. In recent years, these have included two visits to Costa Rica, during which senior students built a classroom for a village school and a subsequent group worked on other community projects. In summer 2018, three groups of students visited Peru, each spending time constructing new shower and toilet facilities for a rural community.

Regular sports tours also take place. Most recently our rugby squad travelled to Sri Lanka and visited Canada; while the Thirds’ rugby squad get a taste for life on tour with a mini-tour to Wales.  A planned rugby tour to Argentina in Summer 2020 became a victim of the COVID-19 pandemic but has since been rescheduled for 2023. Bancroft’s cricketers have visited South Africa on several occasions, most recently in October 2019 and our younger cricketers travelled to Barbados at Easter 2016. Our boys hockey players visited Singapore and Malaysia.  Senior girls hockey and netball players have toured New Zealand and Australia; South Africa; Singapore and Malaysia; and most recently Barbados (2019). Junior hockey players have also had the chance to travel to France, Spain and the Netherlands for training and tournaments. Such trips give not only a fantastic opportunity to play sport, often at a very high level, but also to experience the culture of other countries.

Bancroft’s is fortunate to be in close proximity to London and many departments organise regular trips to museums, galleries and theatres.