The majority of 18-year-old students entering higher education go straight from school to university. For many school leavers, however, there is the irresistible attraction of the ‘gap year’, a time between school and university when they decide to experience something new, different or exciting. Many of these so-called ‘gappers’ go off travelling around the world, often supplementing their limited funds by taking on casual work, while others may do voluntary work in a village in a distant part of the world.For the majority of gappers, the gap year is simply a chance to enjoy life as an independent adult for the fi rst time. Increasingly, however, they are also proving a great way of reinvigorating a lapsed or fl agging interest in education, offering a chance to think about why you should study, or if you need to study at all. A growing number of students, having taken a break after school, are heading back into further and higher education via a roundabout route of working and ‘gapping’. According to the latest data from the British university admissions service, UCAS, 105,000 students aged 19, and 44,400 aged 20, entered higher education last year – fi gures that show a steady annual increase in this age group over the previous three years.19-year-old student Christine Samways is a typical example. She left school at 16 with nine good exam passes at grades A to C, but did not want to continue studying at the time. She was also worried that, despite
having all the attributes of a good student, she would fi nd
the challenges of higher education too great and would
be forced to drop out. Instead, she gained a vocational
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