Nightmare in gap year

Taking a year out before university can be a fantastic experience. But when it goes wrong it is a bitter disappointment. Hilary Wilce on how to get it right

When Sue Williams's 18-year-old twins signed up with two different gap-year organisations, she thought it would be Prue, teaching in distant Thailand, whom she would worry about, rather than Cressida, who had only hopped across the Channel to study at the Sorbonne.

But while Prue's placement with Teaching Projects Abroad went like a dream, Cressida's spiralled down through disillusion and unhappiness, into a complaint lodged against the company in the small-claims court. "This is something Cressy had worked and saved for, but it knocked the stuffing right out of her," says her mother. "Gap-year companies are not a regulated sector. I feel they can get away with an awful lot because no one's looking."

Cressida went to France with Academic Associates International, which has been running placements for students in Europe and America since 1983, although its Sorbonne programme is a recent one. It fixed up her place at the university, and her place with a family. And while, at £4,695 for four months, it seemed expensive, it also seemed worth it for the experience of studying at what they assumed was a costly elite university. Cressida's first disappointment was that her family lived way out past Orly airport, an hour and a half from the university. "Like being in Watford, or Slough" says her mother. Worse, she felt her family was unwelcoming. When she was ill in bed, she was left for 24 hours before being offered a glass of water. She had asked for a house with a piano, but whenever she went in to practise, the children of the household would follow her into the room and turn on the television loudly. Finally, she discovered that the mother, who was a childminder, was using her bed to put children to sleep in during the day.

There was a local liaison person, but Cressida did not want to turn to her because she knew she was a friend of her host family, and had also seen how uncomfortable another student had been made to feel about asking to move from her placement.

"The brochure said we would be in the leafy suburbs because it was safer, but it wasn't a leafy suburb at all," says Cressida. "I really didn't feel safe there. Two people were stabbed at the railway station the last week I was there and they didn't even clean up the blood. The brochure also said I would get to know my family, and they would be interested in me, but they didn't ask me a thing. They didn't even talk to me. I really felt they were just in it for the money. At the dinner table it would be me making conversation, and them saying 'yes' or 'no'. The worst thing was thinking I had to be there for four months."

Instead, she fled home for a weekend. Mrs Williams says she contacted AAI about the problems, but that when Cressida returned to Paris, the organisation failed to get in touch with her to talk it through. At that point, Cressida threw in the towel, left the family and completed her studies from a room in a flat she rented for herself in Paris – although not before the local liaison representative suggested to her that her only problem with the family was that they were Algerian – a deeply offensive remark to a girl brought up in multi-cultural north London. Visits home, and renting a room, brought unforeseen additional costs. Meanwhile, Sue Williams had been told – although she cannot verify it – that fees for four months at the Sorbonne only amounted to about £600.

"After all this we wrote AAI a long, long letter, asking them to respond to the points we had raised. They said they would investigate it, but we heard nothing more." The family has now lodged a legal claim for a refund. In response, AAI says it is reluctant to talk about something that is in lawyers' hands. It made clear to students that they would be living in the suburbs, it says. And it disputes when and how it was told about Cressida's problems. If a situation isn't working, it says, a student will be moved; to do this, though, the company has to know about it and have time to respond. It is also unwilling to give a breakdown of costs of the placement, although it points out that it is a not-for-profit company, whose fees compare well with similar Sorbonne packages.

"We were perhaps slower to respond after the event than we might have been, and if there are lessons to be learnt from this we will learn them," says Beth Legge, the director. However, she points out that the organisation, which places 185 students a year, has a lot of satisfied customers, and that students have been successfully placed with this same Paris family in the past.

Gap years are booming. About 40,000 students take a year off before university, and this is expected to rise to 90,000 within three years. Opting for the structured placements that gap-year organisations offer is a minority choice, but many parents believe that it is the best, and safest, way to do it – as do the 90 per cent of university vice-chancellors who believe a structured year out positively benefits the personal development of undergraduates. But it is a tricky business, and as the market grows, so will the problems. Teenagers have unrealistic notions about what they will experience, while providers have to set up placements in countries where plans can, and do, go awry.

When Mark Calder went to Zambia in 2000 with Gap Activity Projects, one of the longest-standing gap organisations, he was led to expect that he would be doing worthwhile community work. Instead, he found himself working in a luxury, white-owned game lodge where, although he had a nice life "drinking cocktails on the verandah and watching the hippos", he didn't feel it was what he had gone to Africa for. However, his complaints, he says, were translated back to his parents by a Gap representative in the UK as "it being clear I couldn't take Africa". Annoyed and frustrated, he quit his placement, travelled to Lusaka, and found himself another post with an environmental charity. A fellow Gap student in Zambia that year quit his placement at a commercial fish farm for similar reasons.

"These placements were new ones, and we do sometimes have teething problems setting them up," admits Ivan Wise, publicity officer. "People out in these countries don't always understand what young people are looking for when they come out for a gap experience. When these ones didn't work out they were closed down."

The organisation sends out 2,000 people a year, out of which only about 2 per cent of placements are not completed because of "things which are our fault", he points out. In this case, the organisation usually makes a refund, as it did to Calder. And while he cannot explain why the gapper's legitimate complaints were written off as being a failure to adjust, he points out that intense culture shock often makes people want to go running in the first few weeks. "Our advice is usually that they stay put until they get used to it."

Three years ago, to bring in some common standards, leading companies set up the Year Out Group, whose 28 members agree to follow a voluntary code of practice. It offers guidelines for students looking for gap-year placements. "We are sending 18,700 young people out a year but we get very few complaints," says Richard Oliver, the chief executive. "Maybe one a month at most from someone asking how to go about it, and then no one coming back to us again afterwards."

However, none of the 30 to 40 organisations offering gap-year placements are cowboys, according to Tom Griffiths, the founder of the independent yearout.com. Problems are more to do with the nature of the market. "A big one is that companies aren't always good at managing expectations. If you think you're going to be in a mud hut in Malawi doing something amazing, and you end up in a concrete block house, in the rain, in Romania, just helping out, you're likely to be very unhappy, and complain to your parents, who are then likely to complain to the organisation."

Increasingly, too, the Third World is being used as a global finishing school for rich kids bought gap years by their indulgent parents. "So you'll get a guy who's supposed to be doing a teaching placement in China, but all he really wants to do is to go off and play golf with Daddy's ex-pat buddies in Shanghai."

Yet, even though few placements end in disaster, many are beset with niggling problems which leave gappers feeling they got less than they were promised. When David Dickson went, with three others, to teach in a remote villages in Borneo two years ago with Gap Challenge they were only provided with tourist visas "which meant we weren't supposed to be teaching, so whenever anyone official came to the village you had to watch your back. And that made you feel sneaky, somehow, as if you shouldn't be there." Every month the volunteers had to make an arduous eight-hour journey through the jungle to get their visas renewed, and at times the local liaison man had to bribe immigration officers to do so. "What we all wondered was why we couldn't have proper working visas, and if the government was that strict, should we even have been there in the first place? In a way, I suppose we felt Gap Challenge had taken our money, but not entirely kept their side of the bargain."

But Mark Fawcett, the managing director of Gap Challenge, says that the right visa for volunteers often doesn't exist, and that these students were there with the blessing of local education and immigration officials, although maybe more should have been done to make this clear to them. "On the other hand, you are not going off on a holiday trip where everything is going to go completely smoothly, and to some extent it is part of the experience to face up to problems and overcome them."

Yet their first-hand experience is invaluable – as Sue Williams, and Cressida, now know to their cost. "The best way of finding out what a gap project is like is to ask the organisation to put you in touch with a student who has recently completed the same project. If the company refuses then you have to ask yourself why."

education@independent.co.uk