"The kids shouldn't go without"

This is the belief that overrides all the others, because it's about the children and it feels like care. The ski trip, the party at the venue, the brand of trainers, the phone at eleven. The other children have them. Yours shouldn't be the ones without.

I'd separate what children need from what the table has. Children need to be included, to be safe, to have what their friends have often enough not to feel like outsiders, and to be loved. Some of the keeping up serves the third of those and it's worth doing. A child whose every possession is visibly cheaper than every classmate's has a harder school life, and I wouldn't pretend otherwise.

But the ski trip isn't that. The ski trip is a thousand pounds for a week, and the child who doesn't go spends the week at school with the other children who didn't go, of whom there are always several, and comes to no harm. The party at the venue is three hundred pounds for two hours, and the party at home is a hundred pounds for four, and the children at the party at home are, by every account I've heard, having a better time. The trainers at a hundred and forty pounds are worn for six months and outgrown. In each case the keeping up is for the parents, at the school gate, and the child is the reason given.

What children learn from the school-gate pace is the pace. A child who watches a parent match every trip and every brand learns that this is what adults do, and takes it to their own gate in thirty years. A child who watches a parent say "we're not doing the ski trip this year, but we're doing the cottage at Easter" learns that a family chooses. That's a more useful thing to have learned than how to ski.

I'd keep one rule for the children. Nothing that would leave them alone. If every child in the class is going and yours would be the only one at school, that's different, and the price might be worth paying for that week. But that's rare, and the ski trip letter makes it sound like every time.