What is a study holiday?

A study holiday is a fortnight — sometimes one week, sometimes four — in which a student has English lessons in the morning and does something in a real place in the afternoon, with a school responsible for them at every hour in between. That is the whole idea. Everything else is detail, and the detail is what this guide is for.

The phrase is used loosely by everyone who sells one, so it is worth saying what it is not. It is not a summer camp with a language class bolted on, and it is not a language course with a coach trip at the weekend. The lessons and the city are supposed to be the same experience: a student learns the word for something in the morning and then has to use it at four o'clock, to a stranger, in a shop. That is the mechanism, and it is why a fortnight abroad moves a teenager's spoken English further than a term of lessons at home.

A day, in outline

Mornings are lessons — typically four hours with a break, Monday to Friday, taught by our own teachers in a group that matches the student's level rather than their age. Afternoons are the city: a guided walk, a museum, a castle, a beach, a football session, depending on the course. Evenings are with a host family or in a residence, and at least one day a week is a full-day excursion somewhere further afield.

The course pages each carry the actual day-by-day itinerary rather than a description of one, so you can read what a Tuesday looks like before you decide. We would rather you did that than take the word "excursions" on trust.

Who it suits

Most of our students are between eleven and seventeen. They arrive alone, in twos, or as a school group of thirty with two of their own teachers. Ages are grouped, and the age range each course actually accepts is on its own page — not a range we would like to advertise, but the one the office will enforce when you book.

It suits a student who is somewhere in the middle of their English and has stopped improving. It suits one who is shy, more than parents expect: a host family's dinner table is a gentler place to speak a foreign language than a classroom of thirty. It suits a student who wants to see a country rather than a campus.

It suits less well a student who needs an examination result by a fixed date. If the goal is IELTS or a school entrance test, a general English course over a longer period is the better instrument, and our general English course exists for that.

What "supervised" means

This is the question we are asked most, and the one where a brochure sentence is least useful. On our courses there is a named member of staff with each group, a twenty-four-hour telephone number that is answered by a person, and a register taken at points through the day. Host families are visited and checked before a student is ever placed with them; residences have their own staff on site overnight.

We have written that out properly, hour by hour, in how supervised is a study holiday, because "fully supervised at all times" is a phrase that means nothing until somebody tells you who is standing where at ten o'clock at night.

Host family or residence

Both are real options on most of our courses and they produce quite different fortnights. A host family means dinner with a British family, a bedroom in a house, and conversation you cannot avoid. A residence means a campus, other students from a dozen countries, and more independence. Neither is better; they suit different children, and we have set out how to tell which is which in host family or student residence.

Where

We run courses in Newcastle upon Tyne, London, Peterborough, Cardiff, Dublin, Dubai, New York, Toronto, Brisbane and Cape Town. Newcastle is the largest and the one we know best — our main office is there — and it has an unusual advantage for a first trip abroad: it is a real city, with a university, a football club and a coastline, and it is small enough to walk across. A fourteen-year-old finds their feet in it in about three days.

The destinations pages describe each one, and the Newcastle guide follows a single week through it from Monday to Sunday.

What is included, and what is not

Every course page lists both, explicitly, because "all-inclusive" is another phrase that does more work than it should. Broadly: tuition, accommodation, meals as stated, the excursions named in the itinerary, and airport transfers on the arrival and departure days are part of the course. Flights are not. Travel insurance is optional and worth having. Optional extras — a theatre ticket, extra one-to-one tuition, a match ticket — are listed on the page and confirmed with your quote.

We do not publish costs on this website. There is a reason: what a fortnight costs depends on the date, the accommodation, the group size and where a student is flying from, and a single figure on a web page is either wrong for most families or so hedged as to be useless. Ask us and you will get a real number for your own dates, usually the same working day.

Is it worth it?

The honest answer is that it depends on what you are measuring. If the measure is a grade, a fortnight is a small intervention. If the measure is whether a fifteen-year-old will speak English to a stranger without rehearsing the sentence first, a fortnight is often the thing that does it — and that is a change parents describe as permanent.

What we can say from twenty years of running them is that the students who get the most out of a study holiday are the ones who arrive expecting to be uncomfortable for two days. It passes on the third.

If you are weighing it up, tell us your child's age and the weeks you have free on the contact page, and we will tell you which of the ten destinations fits — and which do not.