Yahoo Movies This year it's more important that ever to encourage your children to take a gap year
Daniel Shackleton found studying during the pandemic difficult. “My grades slipped a lot due to the lack of face-to-face contact,” he said. “I also found it much harder to meet people at my new college as we weren’t allowed to sit next to people in class.”
He is just one of thousands of A-Level students getting their results today who were forced to spend a chunk of the first year of their course learning remotely online.
What makes the dread of results day worse this year is the fear among students that the grade boundaries they are working towards are tougher than ever, as well as reports that competition for university places has been extra fierce.
Yet there are reasons to be positive. Amid all the stress and uncertainty, it seems that 2022 might actually be the year that the traditional gap year – that coming-of-age ritual where students get a once-in-a-lifetime chance to explore the world – becomes more than an indulgent jolly and instead something that could help salvage young people’s mental health.
Daniel is among those planning to go away. “After my first year of college I didn’t have the best predicted grades that would allow me to apply to the universities of my choice,” he said. “This reinforced my decision to travel, as I could apply to university once I had my A-Level results instead.”
He was inspired by his parents “raving on” about their gap years. They were teenagers from a different generation, one that was perhaps less worried about getting a job and certainly one that hadn’t been banned from going to parties or even meeting up with friends.
So he is taking the plunge and is excited to be travelling independently to Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and the Cook Islands. He wants to meet new people on his trip and to learn how to scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef. He plans to study for a degree in mechanical engineering afterwards.
The promise of travel has given students who had their studies disrupted and social lives shut down during the pandemic something to look forward to. What’s more, today’s structured gap programmes are designed to help students develop valuable life skills that the pandemic made even harder to acquire at home.
Lucy Lynch from Bunac, experts on working and volunteering abroad, said that gap year travellers gain life skills such as resilience, problem solving and independence. “It’s also a great opportunity for them to build social skills, gain confidence and be pushed out of their comfort zone, all key skills that young people may have missed out on during the last two years,” she added.
“Lots of my school peers didn’t take a gap year because of Covid and they all wished they had,” said would-be gapper Matilda Wade. “I always wanted to take a gap year – but now more so than ever as it will give me time to reapply if I don’t get my grades. We know university places are oversubscribed and we don’t know how we are going to be marked. I’m also very young for my year, so I want to work and travel so I can become more independent and make the most of uni,” she said.
Unlike last year, when restrictions and closed borders made travel impossible at times, the situation in 2022 is more settled. Nevertheless, gappers are visiting fewer places and searching for richer experiences.
“The disruption caused by Covid affected the airlines badly,” said David Stitt. “Along with staffing problems causing the cancellation of flights, the cost of flights has soared. Travellers will need to be prepared to pay more than they might expect. Planning well ahead is important too, as last-minute trips will be very expensive.”
Working in Europe has also become harder to arrange. Milly Whitehead, from gap year company The Leap, warned that it is now more difficult to find a job in a ski resort “as tour operators have to offer the job locally first”.
I-to-i, the Teaching English as a Foreign Language (Tefl) specialist, advises that students now need a work permit to teach English in the EU, even if they are only planning to work for a few weeks in a summer camp. In most cases, students will need a firm job offer in order to apply for one.
Students who are still wary about travelling should remember that the best gap year travel companies offer as much support as they possibly can, before and during a trip. Bunac, for example, organises free virtual jobs fairs in Australia and New Zealand, so that jobs can be pre-arranged for students before they travel, including work on the Great Barrier Reef, in Uluru and in remote lodges.
Despite the higher cost of flights and some extra bumps in the road, the feeling among many students this year is that they deserve – that they need – time out to travel.
“The only impact that no travel for two years has had on British youth is in creating an even more insatiable appetite to get out and experience the world than they had before the pandemic,” said Sam Willan of travel booking company Student Universe.
“There has been huge pent-up demand for travel which is now resulting in a large wave of bookings,” added David Stitt, managing director of Gap 360. “We anticipate bookings for 2022 to be about 7,500 trips, when in 2019 it was 5,500. A great option is to go to Australia on the working holiday scheme for 12 months. Employers are desperate for workers, and wages are excellent – £15 an hour is not unusual.”
Matilda is currently mulling over options for an organised volunteering programme in Africa or south-east Asia with The Leap. “I know that we will have to navigate all the entry requirements [and] I want to start with an organisation behind me so that I hit the ground running, and have back-up while I find my feet.
“We are really lucky to have the world wide open again, so we need to make the most of it. When you can’t have something, you want it even more.”
