As a geography teacher, nothing fills my heart with joy like the sight of 30 teenagers clutching clipboards and counting cars or studying a beach profile, clinometer in hand. But this scene is in danger: there is a worrying trend in schools up and down the country to shun local delights and instead set off on expensive and exotic field trips abroad.

Many of these trips - offered in the glossy brochures that fill up my school pigeonhole - cost upwards of £1,000. That’s well outside the budget of many parents.

Who gets to go on these trips? I was talking to two students who had come to our sixth form from another school, one of whom had gone on a school trip to Iceland. It was amazing, he told me, to see the volcanoes, but they were not as impressive as the volcanoes he had seen on his family trips to Italy and Tenerife.

Such conversations confirm my fears that we are organising opportunities for those who already have them. The pupils who most need them are the ones least likely to attend.

Perhaps worse than the financial cost is the opportunity cost for those organising it. A trip abroad can eat up weeks of a teacher’s time. You can always spot the staff member responsible for organising a trip abroad by their harried expression, their habit of stalking the corridors in a bid to track down pupils who still haven’t filled in their health insurance forms and the way they wince when the phone rings. This is time that could be spent planning amazing lessons for all pupils to benefit from, talking to pupils about their work or relaxing with family and friends.

If these trips justified their financial and time burden, I could perhaps forgive them, but my concern is that they tend to offer pupils very little.

I was talking to a teacher at a school that always organises a big trip each year. This time they went to New York.

“What did you do there?” I asked.

“A bit of shopping”, he replied. “Some sight-seeing.”

“No, I mean, what geography did you do?”

“It wasn’t that kind of trip,” he told me. “Not after they have spent so much to go there. But it gets our option numbers up.”

Never been to the seafront

While working at a school on the outskirts of Eastbourne, I was shocked to discover that a few of the children had never been to the seafront, just three miles away. The majority had never been to Beachy Head, even though it towers over the town. They knew little of their wider community, their local geography or their own history.

I have a plea: let’s stop acting as travel agents and planning holidays for a few students in our schools and instead embrace the “staycation”. Let’s get them exploring the local landscape and the history of their own area. Let’s get them out to conduct their science experiments in real-world conditions, but let’s do it in the local park. Let’s save their parents’ money and let them take their own children on holiday. Let’s save ourselves the time and maybe, just maybe, we will have the energy for a holiday ourselves.

Mark Enser is head of geography at Heathfield Community College in East Sussex. He blogs at Teachreal.wordpress.com. Find him on Twitter @EnserMark