Newcastle for a fourteen-year-old: a week, hour by hour

Newcastle upon Tyne has an advantage for a first trip abroad that larger cities do not, and it is not the one the tourist board leads with. It is small enough to walk across and big enough to be a real city — a university, a football club with a cathedral's worth of devotion attached, seven bridges over one river, and a beach twenty minutes away on the Metro. A fourteen-year-old finds their feet in it in about three days. In London that takes a fortnight.

Our main office is here and it is the largest set of courses we run. Here is what a week actually looks like, Monday to Sunday, on the Newcastle study holiday.

Monday: the placement test

The first morning is not a lesson. Every student sits a short written and spoken placement test, and by about eleven o'clock they are in a class with people at their own level rather than their own age. That matters more at fourteen than at any other age, because nobody wants to be the one who cannot follow — and nobody wants to be the one waiting.

The afternoon is a walk. Not a tour with a flag: a walk from the centre down the Grey Street curve — which people who care about such things call the finest street in England, and they may be right — to the Quayside, under the bridges, and back up. It exists to do one thing, which is to make the city navigable by the end of day one. Students who can find their way back to the Monument are students who relax.

The evening is the first one with the host family, and it is the hardest hour of the fortnight. It passes.

Tuesday to Friday: the rhythm

Mornings settle into four hours of lessons with a break, Monday to Friday. Teachers are ours, they hold current DBS certificates, and groups are small enough that a student who has gone quiet gets noticed.

Afternoons rotate, and this is where Newcastle earns its place:

• The Baltic and the Sage. A former flour mill that is now a contemporary art gallery, and a concert hall that looks like a glass caterpillar, facing each other across the river in Gateshead. The Baltic's top floor has the best free view in the city, and admission costs nothing.
• The Great North Museum. A full-size Hadrian's Wall model, a Roman gallery and a mummy, on the university campus. It is where the Roman history stops being a school subject.
• St James' Park. The stadium tour, which for a certain kind of fourteen-year-old is the entire reason they agreed to come. It sits in the middle of the city rather than on a ring road, which tells you something about the place.
• Tynemouth. Twenty-five minutes on the Metro to a priory on a headland, a long sandy beach and a fish-and-chip shop with a queue that is part of the experience. Bring a jumper; the North Sea is not the Mediterranean and it will make that clear.

Evenings are with the household — dinner, conversation, and about an hour a day of English that no classroom can manufacture. Students who arrive nervous about speaking almost always improve fastest here rather than in the lessons. We have set out how families are chosen and checked in host family or student residence.

Saturday: the full day out

One full day each week goes further afield, and which one depends on the date. The usual candidates:

Durham — twenty minutes by train, a Norman cathedral on a bend in a river, and a city small enough to see properly in a day. Of everything on the list this is the one students mention months later.

Hadrian's Wall — the Roman frontier across the neck of England. Standing on it in the wind explains the Roman empire better than any lesson does.

Alnwick Castle — where the flying lessons in the first Harry Potter film were shot, which is a fact no fourteen-year-old needs to be told twice, and a genuine medieval fortress underneath the association.

Edinburgh or York on the longer courses — both reachable by train, both worth the whole day.

Sunday: the day nothing is planned

Deliberately. A fortnight of scheduled afternoons is exhausting for a fourteen-year-old, and a Sunday with the host family — a walk, a supermarket, a film, a roast dinner — is where a student stops being a visitor.

Parents sometimes ask why we do not fill it. This is why: the students who get the most out of a study holiday are the ones who have had a boring Sunday afternoon in somebody's living room and talked their way through it.

What Newcastle is like, honestly

The accent is real and it is strong, and students find it hard for two days. Then they find it charming, and a fortnight later they are saying "howay" to each other at the airport. It is a genuinely good thing for a learner: an accent that has to be worked at builds a better ear than an accent that does not.

People talk to strangers here, which visitors from larger cities find disconcerting for about a day. A bus driver will ask a fifteen-year-old where they are from. This is the single most useful feature of the city for someone learning English and it cannot be timetabled.

It rains. Not heavily — finely, persistently and sideways. See what to pack for two weeks in England, where the short version is: layers and a waterproof, not one thick coat.

Which Newcastle course

Three shapes, and the difference is what the afternoons do:

• The study holiday — lessons plus the city, one full-day excursion a week. The standard, and the one most students take.
• The Gold course — the same mornings with a fuller excursion course, including days beyond the North East.
• The football academy — lessons in the morning, coached sessions in the afternoon. For a student who plays, this is the version that gets them speaking, because a pitch is a place where you have to.

All three are on the Newcastle destination page with their dates, and each course page carries its real day-by-day itinerary rather than a description of one.

Is it right for your child?

Newcastle suits a first trip: walkable, friendly, and small enough that being lost is a ten-minute problem rather than an hour's. It suits a student who wants a real place rather than a campus. It suits a football supporter almost embarrassingly well.

It suits less well a family who want the sights of London — for which the London cultural trip exists and is a different, shorter, denser thing.

Tell us your child's age and the weeks you have free on the contact page, and we will tell you which of the Newcastle dates has room and which one we would put them on.