Thousands of pupils have headed off on school trips, spending their Easter holidays in some far-flung location. But is there any educational bang for their parents' bucks?

DOES A VISIT to the Liverpool Football Club Museum count as an educational experience? It does if you're trying to justify a school tour to the Department of Education. The Irish school tours market is getting very sophisticated as tour operators wise up to the niceties of school/state relations.

If you want to travel to Anfield off-peak, a museum tour is the rider that the inspectorate will seek. Once your tour has ticked the "educational" box, it's off to the Caribbean Waterpark in Alton Towers or to Cheshire Oaks for a spot of shopping - de rigueur for groups of both sexes nowadays, according to Dave Buckley of Celtic Horizon Tours.

"Schools are getting into football trips to the UK in big way, because they are cheaper than going further overseas. We've had almost as much interest from girls' schools as boys' this year. That's a big change. Another change is the shape of the boys' tour. If you included a day's shopping on boys' tour a few years ago, they'd look at you like you had two heads. Now they insist on it."

The school tours market has experienced a growth from 10 per cent in 2006 to 15 per cent last year. Don't expect it to slow down anytime soon either: the Transition Year tour market is relatively untapped, and doesn't attract the ire of the inspectorate. Transition Year groups can travel off-peak, so tour operators are now targeting these groups to fill the travel time between school holidays.

The school tour product is diversifying as a result, and the trends are being shaped by a number of issues for schools.

"Schools are watching costs more closely now," says Paul Hackett of school group tour operator NST. "Teachers are clued in to the price points that parents can meet and are focused on making trips as affordable as possible." There is pressure on parents - the family budgeting support agency MABS has been prompted to caution families not to borrow for school tours that they cannot afford. However, schools are getting more organised - booking trips 18 months in advance and then setting up savings schemes for parents, backed up by fundraising and bag-packing. For many families, it's a lot cheaper to send their kids abroad with the school than it would be to go as a family.

Clever planning is the secret to keeping costs down, says Hackett, who explains how canny principals are booking trips that fall a day or two into the school term and scheduling curriculum-linked events for those days to keep the Department at bay. "If schools want to save money, they have to look off-peak. There could be €250-per-head difference in the price."

Budget consciousness is actually fuelling long-haul school trips. Once the flight is paid for, a holiday in Beijing or New York can be better value than trips closer to home. Students get to experience top-quality hotels and resorts that they couldn't get near in Europe. Even the snowballing school ski market has gone transatlantic, with a huge increase in trips to New Hampshire in the US this year.

"It's a long time since skiing has been elitist," says Aileen Eglington of Topflight, which accounts for 85 per cent of the school ski market. Schools from all over the country go now and it's a brilliant experience for them. When you think about it, many of these kids have never seen snow. That's an education in itself."

NST is growing its ski tour product because, despite economic forecasts, the market is continuing to grow. "We thought that the ski tour market would shrink as schools came under pressure from the Department of Education to take more educational tours, but that hasn't happened," says Hackett. "Educational tours have certainly grown, but ski trips have not been affected. What we're hearing from teachers is that a ski trip is a great way to deal positively with behavioural issues, by encouraging students to work together in a healthy outdoor environment. With no access to TV, Playstations and other sedentary activities, they actually start to communicate again. That's what teachers are looking for."

It's all uphill for the ski tour market - Topflight's 2009 school ski packages are completely sold out already.

It's easy to look askance at school ski tours and to question their curricular value, but schools rarely take ski trips in term time. Off-peak tours are more likely to have defined curricular links, as Derek Keogh of Group Travel International explains.

"We are seeing rising demand for trips that take in the battlefields of Northern France or the Concentration Camps in Poland. Krakow was one of our biggest destinations for schools last year. All the syllabi are being modernised and there's a new emphasis on taking learning out of the classroom."

According to Keogh, radical developments in the UK school tour market are starting to impact here. "We sat at a board meeting of the UK office where our operators there were planning tours around school subjects. This is moving right up the agenda in the UK. Teachers want to get kids excited about what they are learning and will look for angles that shine a light on classwork."

Group Travel International took almost 50 Irish school groups to Auchwitz and Berkenow last year. "It's a tough visit, and not for young teenagers, but the older ones were really struck by the experience. Nothing brings the second World War more vividly to life than to see at first-hand the gas chambers and the belongings of Nazi death-camp victims. It suddenly dawns on them that this really happened, and it wasn't that long ago."

There's also a big push on Beijing at the moment, with quality hotel and tour packages proving more cost-effective than Europe for many schools.

For an even more recent jolt of history, many schools are taking students to New York, where a trip to Ground Zero punctuates the shopping and musicals.

The move to school tours in the US is a symptom of international currency fluctuations, but there's another appealing aspect to the New York or New Hampshire tour - teenagers can't get their hands on alcohol. One teacher who travels regularly with teens put it succinctly. "It's very difficult to stop Irish teenagers from drinking in Ireland. In the US, you can let the bars do it for you."