Do we need a visa for a short English course in the UK?

This is the question that most often decides whether a family books at all, and it is the one where wrong information is most expensive. So two things before anything else.

First: immigration rules change, and they change without much notice. Everything below is how the routes work as we write this, and the authoritative source is always GOV.UK. Second: we are a school, not an immigration adviser. We can tell you what we issue, what our other families have done, and what has gone wrong before. We cannot tell you that a particular visa will be granted, and any school that does is telling you something it does not know.

The short answer

For a short English course, most students come to the UK as a visitor. A visitor may study for up to six months at an accredited institution, which covers a one-, two-, three- or four-week study holiday comfortably. There is no separate student visa required for a fortnight of English lessons, and the older "short-term study" visa is not the route for a course of this length.

What that means in practice depends entirely on your nationality:

• If your country is visa-national — India, Nigeria, Turkey, Egypt, China and many others — you apply for a Standard Visitor visa before travelling. This is an online application, a fee, biometrics at a visa application centre, and a decision that typically takes around three weeks but can take considerably longer in a busy season.
• If your country is non-visa-national — the EU and EEA, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico and others — you do not apply in advance. You will, however, need an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) before you travel. It is an online form, a small fee, and usually granted within a few days. It is not a visa and it is not optional.

Either way, the student needs a passport valid for the whole trip, and — for a minor travelling without a parent — consent documentation. More on that below, because it is the part families most often get wrong.

What we provide

Once a place is confirmed and the deposit is paid, we issue a letter of invitation on school letterhead. It states who the student is, which course they are enrolled on, the exact dates, where they will be staying, what has been paid for, and who is responsible for them while they are in the UK. It is signed and it carries our accreditation details.

That letter is the document a visa application or a border officer wants to see, and it is the reason the order of events matters: book first, then apply. We cannot write a letter about a place that does not exist, and an application submitted without one is weaker for no reason.

If your visa application needs anything further — confirmation of accommodation, a statement about supervision arrangements, a specific wording your visa centre has asked for — ask us. We would rather write a second letter than have an application refused over a missing sentence.

A student under eighteen travelling alone

This is where the real complications live, and they are rarely about the visa itself.

A minor travelling without a parent should carry a letter of parental consent, naming the accompanying adult or the receiving school, with the parents' contact details and signatures. Some airlines require their own unaccompanied-minor paperwork and charge for the service; that is a matter between you and the airline, and it needs arranging when you book the flight rather than at the airport. Where a student is travelling with one parent only, or where the parents' surnames differ from the child's, carry a birth certificate.

Border officers ask children questions. That is normal and it is not an accusation. A student who can say the name of their school, where they are staying and how long for will have an easy time of it. It is worth ten minutes of rehearsal before the flight.

How early to start

Earlier than feels necessary. Our recommendation:

• Visa-national, needing a Standard Visitor visa: at least eight weeks before the course starts. In practice this means enquiring about ten weeks out, because the booking and the deposit come first.
• ETA only: at least three weeks. The ETA is usually quick, but "usually" is not a plan, and the school still needs time to place the student with a household.

Those figures are not a courtesy. If a visa is likely to be needed, our own booking engine applies an eight-week horizon before a date stops being joinable — because a place held for a student who cannot get a visa in time helps nobody, least of all the student.

The mistake that costs families their place

It is not a refusal. It is applying too late and then asking us to hold a place while the application sits in a queue. By that point the accommodation has been allocated, the excursion numbers are with the suppliers, and the date may be full. We will always try, and sometimes we can move a student to a later date, but the honest answer is that eight weeks of notice makes this a non-problem and three weeks makes it a gamble.

The second most common is a passport that expires during or shortly after the trip. Check it now rather than in July.

If an application is refused

Tell us immediately. Our refund and transfer terms are on the terms page, and a documented visa refusal is treated differently from a change of mind — but the position depends on how close to the start date it happens, so speed genuinely matters. We would far rather move a student to a date they can reach than argue about a deposit.

Where to go next

Read the dates on the course you are considering and work backwards: eight weeks if you need a visa, three if you need an ETA. Then send us the student's nationality and the dates you are looking at through the contact page, and we will tell you what you will need and when the letter can be issued.

If you are still deciding on the shape of the trip, what is a study holiday covers what a fortnight involves, and how supervised is a study holiday answers the question a border officer is also, in effect, asking: who is responsible for this child?