An education union leader has criticised a key stage 2 Sats maths question that asked pupils about the cost of school trips.

The wisdom of including the question was queried, given that funding pressures have forced widespread cuts to activities such as school trips.

Released to the public last Friday, the question in the 2025 maths reasoning paper asked pupils to make a calculation involving the travel, food and hotel costs of a school trip.

Cuts to school trips

Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that “it is ironic that a question in a test paper asks pupils about the cost of school trips at exactly the time that many schools are having to cut back on these activities because of the pressure on funding”.

He added: “Perhaps ministers should sit this Sats paper, too.”

The KS2 maths question stated that the total cost of a school trip for 12 pupils was £780, including travel (at £27 per pupil), food (£16 per pupil) and hotel. Pupils had to calculate the hotel cost per child.

The question was worth a maximum of two marks for a correct answer (in this case, £22). An incorrect answer with evidence of an appropriate method was worth one mark, according to the marking scheme.

Since 2022, the number of senior leaders at state-funded schools reporting that their school is cutting back on school trips and outings has more than doubled, according to the Sutton Trust’s annual School Funding and Pupil Premium reports.

In 2022, some 21 per cent said their school had been forced to cut back on trips due to “financial reasons”, with that number rising to 50 per cent in 2023 and 2024, before hitting 53 per cent this year.

This year’s criticism is the latest in a long line of complaints, with the 2024 Sats maths paper branded “deliberately tricky” by primary leaders and experts.

‘Questions that seek to confuse’

Mark McCourt, a leading figure in maths education who was recently appointed as CEO of the Academy Transformation Trust, described last year’s reasoning paper as “a failure at a national level” in a social media post.

He said: “Mathematicians love the challenge of overcoming difficult problems. But that’s not the same thing at all as questions that seek to confuse, mislead or hide meaning in meaningless, tiresome contexts.

“Show a real mathematician a problem written by someone who is deliberately communicating badly or poking fun by being disingenuous and that mathematician will tell you to bugger off.”

Toby Hancock, a Year 6 teacher in an inner-city school predominantly teaching pupils with English as an additional language, told Tes in 2024 that paper 2 (reasoning) was “difficult and worded awkwardly”.

The Department for Education has been contacted for comment.

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