Admissions tutors' advice needed re early gap year please!

[PeterTavy]

My DD would like to take an early gap year and miss Year 11. She is a bright, Summer born girl and a year ahead so will have completed 11 GCSEs by the end of Year 10.

She would plan to return to a Sixth form college for Year 12 and take A levels as normal.
She ideally wants to learn a particular language- she has already started teaching herself this and would like to do an exchange visit to the country if possible. She will be 15 throughout Year 11, so this might curtail what is possible for her as I have looked at various courses (non-academic as well as academic) but all are for over 16 year olds. She already knows that she ultimately wants to study a specific Arts course at a competitive Uni.

Are there any admissions tutors out there (or anyone with any experience of unusual education paths) who can help with my questions :

1. Will this be a problem?
2. Will she need to do qualifications in her gap year?
3. Does anyone have any ideas what a 15 year old can do who is not in school?!
4. Do you come across students like this from time to time?

We need to decide in the next couple of months really and have been fobbing her off so far!

I have posted about this before.Not wanting to be too specific but a young relative of mine did something similar and it went very wrong.Do not underestimate how vulnerable a minor is in an alien culture without easy physical confidential access to a trusted adult.my family did not know what was going on because phone and online communications home were monitored and controlled (this was a European country)

Brioche I have also heard horror stories. To me, when people talk about exchange programmes, I always assume parent/s will accompany the DC, even though the clue is perhaps in the word 'exchange' but my mind just refuses to register it.

If Sweden why not:

1. Phone the Embasy. They will have an education/culture person. (Inter alia the Stockholm School of Economics is one of Europe's leading international business schools.) I assume one option might be a boarding school for kids living in rural areas. I assume that, like Scotland, these exist and would provide something more predictable than a family stay.

1. Write to the Swedish School in Barnes, London and see if they have a newly arrived family interested in a short language exchange. This might provide a stepping stone to some other ideas

1. Look at residential camps, or approach sports/theatre/whatever groups. We were lucky in that we met a French girl on holiday who did the same sport as DD, so they did an exchange with something in common and this led to DD being invited back several times by the Club, and indeed staying with a family we never met, organised by the coach. Great immersion as it was with a group that she had a lot in common with, she gained an authentic accent, and loved the food. When she then did an exchange in her second MFL she was able to train with a club there. It is quite usual to see European kids, often with virtually no English, at sports camps in the UK. Had she then wanted to spend more time in France, she had her "alternative family" who could have found her something suitable, or could have gone to a specialist sports school.

Good luck. If you can pull it off, it sounds fab. Certainly DD really enjoyed the time she spent in France, and as well as a language gained a useful understanding of a different culture.

The OP hasn't come back so I don't know if it's any use posting to this thread.

Just wanted to say language skills, especially minority language skills, are an undervalued but important asset. People say well what's the point, the whole world speaks English anyway, but it's not quite true that everybody in the world speaks English.

Not long a go, I was at uni in the capital city of an important EU country doing a science/tech degree. Life was dull until I registered with two translator/interpreter type agencies in the city and was immediately inundated with work. This new opportunity, using a skill I previously thought totally worthless transformed by life economically and socially in a major way.

The amount I was getting paid was so ridiculous that I could afford to work 4 hours a day for a couple of days in the week and focus on my studies the rest of the week. And the thing is, I am really terrible at learning languages. I wish I could say I speak English better than I write it but it wouldn't be true.

my life, not by life.

London too is full of such translation agencies.

Sorry to have not come back sooner, Christmas preparations have been getting in the way.
Thank you all for your ideas, I'll investigate them further over the holidays. The language/ country that DD is fascinated with is Iceland. She loves the country, history, sagas etc. but is obviously very much a minority language. In fact there are fewer worldwide speakers than the population of our nearest medium city! It definitely wouldn't be a for a career move (a bit niche for that) but to follow her interests and broaden her mind.
Part of me does think I should steer her to develop a skill or more mainstream language that would be useful in the future. She is quite quirky and knows her own mind though.

She should look at reading Old English & Norse at Cambridge - a variation on an English degree.

Why now rather than after A levels OP? She will have more opportunities when she is a bit older and be more resilient too. I think if she does it now she may struggle to find anything really worthwhile, and you may pay throguh the nose for it too.

I live in Canada and international exchanges at school are relatively common here. We looked at sending our dd to Japan for a semester (also in year 11, but she seems to have changed her mind so we'll see, plus it was very expensive) and you can also do it for a year. I know children (and adults) who went to all sorts of countries and seem to have really enjoyed it. All in year 11/12, so mostly 16 or 17. Much easier here though as all of our courses are semester based so you can take a semester out without causing a big disruption to your education.

It definitely wouldn't be a for a career move (a bit niche for that) but to follow her interests and broaden her mind.

I think this is key.

To me, a language is something you learn before going to university, then you go to uni to learn a skill (for a career?).

DH took a year out of school at 17 to learn French in France. He worked in a restaurant in a small town the whole year. Your DD being much younger obviously can't be expected to travel by herself but if there's somebody in the family that can travel with her or you can make other satisfactory arrangements then it's a marvellous opportunity to explore the culture and language of Iceland.

The minority languages I speak are not EU/EEA languages. They are not even minority languages in origin countries and I only studied them in school and on holidays.

I work in the UK now but it's thanks only to my technical skills, nothing to do with language.

It's great that you're doing what you can to support your DS' creative planning. Although grades aren't everything, will she plan to rest any exams? A student that can pull off 11 GCSEs in Y10 would presumably have been looking at A*s if completing them at the end of Y11. It would be a shame to see her disadvantaged academically because she was so far ahead...

If Iceland is her passion then I wouldn't encourage her to do something more "useful". If she does something she is passionate about, she will be more successful and will come to other languages later if they are right for her.

I would have thought that admissions tutors at Cambridge would be biting her hand off (assuming strong grades) to join their in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic or Modern and Medieval Languages degrees...

It might not have an obvious "purpose" now or this could spiral into a PhD and a successful academic career exploring a subject she enjoys. At the very least, it will be a fascinating quirk of her background that will pay dividends (in unforeseen ways) later on.

Firstly the obvious question- why would she do a gap year now instead of at the normal times?
Her gap year, can't really be a 'gap' year because she has to be in education. If she is studying abroad then she is still studying academic subjects and the only problem I could see is that it might look as though she has given herself 3 years to prepare for A level instead of 2.

The main reason we are looking at a break from formal education now is to avoid DD taking her A levels when still 16. I feel that she would miss out on the Sixth form experience and DD is keen to follow her specific interest, which doesn't exist at A level. Even if she waited to do a gap year until after A levels she would not be 18 until the very end of it so that in itself would cause some issues.
The changes in GCSE and A levels going through at the moment compound the situation. I'm not too worried about the requirements for her to attend school as I will just say she is home-schooled, particularly as she will (hopefully) already have GCSEs under her belt.