Taking a Gap Year

I am writing this article, not so much with my AYME Education Advisor’s hat on but more with my ‘ mother of two recovered ME sufferers’ hat instead.

I write here particularly about my daughter, Beth who started with symptoms of ME at the age of seven, received home tuition through the rest of her primary and secondary schooling, took three GCSEs at home when she was sixteen and felt she could not cope with any more formal tuition as the build-up to the exam period had caused her condition to deteriorate. By this stage, she was fluctuating somewhere between 50% and 70% on the AYME ability scale.

Before the end of year eleven, education for young people is compulsory. There is a legal duty for Local Education Authorities (LEAs) to provide some form of education provision and, similarly, there is a legal duty for parents to see their children receive an education under the Education Act 1996. Once students have reached the end of year eleven, this is no longer the case. Some students choose to take up a place in the sixth form, some may choose to look for work.

For a young person diagnosed with ME and their family, the years of compulsory schooling may have been difficult. Professionals do not always understand the varying symptoms of ME and families can sometimes face unreasonable or challenging behaviour and attitudes from LEA officials and teachers.

We, as a family, had experienced every bit of that challenging behaviour and realised we could look forward to the end of year eleven when we would be free to make our own decisions about the way Beth progressed in the future. The ‘gap year’ idea came from Beth herself who told us, one day, that she couldn’t deal with studying for exams for a while and needed a break to do something else.

We embraced this sense of freedom by giving control to Beth. We let her decide what she wanted to do with her time, what sort of things she was interested in achieving, what were her parameters. Anything with an exam was definitely out of the question! And we helped her by doing the legwork to investigate local possibilities.

By this stage, Beth knew she wanted to move into Art and Design. We have a very good college in the town and many other classes running from businesses and private concerns. There are also many societies and voluntary groups. The outcome of this was a wonderful, relaxed year attending a sculpture and drawing class, a short computer course in Photoshop, voluntary work with a youth group and, most successful of all, she joined a silver jewellery workshop which, for a while, was considered as her future career. The advantage of all this was that there was no difficulty if Beth was unable to attend one week. We were able to finance the courses by Beth claiming what is now known as ‘Incapacity Benefit For Young People’.

During this year, Beth developed new skills, many of which have proved extremely useful. She was able to relax and feel in control of her own progression and she made some wonderful friends who have stayed with her. I am not going to claim this is a cure because that would be wrong but I know that, in Beth’s case, we saw an improvement in her condition, so much so that she was able to start at our local college the following September to take two more GCSE courses and hasn’t looked back since. Now at the age of twenty four, she has graduated from University and is commuting to London to work for a retail design company.

You can tell from this article, I am a big fan of the ‘gap year’ idea. Many of our members do not follow the same pathway as their classmates and trying to maintain the accepted pattern of exam progression through to A Levels and beyond may not be possible or advisable for the time being. The freedom to choose their own pathway, to investigate other possiblities can lead to new experiences, new confidence and new friends. College or job seeking can start at a later date when a young person’s condition allows and their ‘gap year’ experiences may usefully appear on their CV for some years to come.

And as a final thought, AYME is always happy to hear from young people wishing to volunteer for jobs which they can carry out from home.

Hilary Tandy – Education Advisor

Article last edited on Wednesday 29th July 2009                          Printable Version