Creative Media and Language Camp at St. Bernard, Switzerland

Three courses run side by side - French, German and English. Each is twenty lessons a week, Monday to Friday from 9.00 to 12.30, in groups of an average of six students, and each takes every level from A1 beginner to C2. Small groups are what the school builds the course around: they let the teacher work on one student's weak points at a time, across reading, listening, writing and speaking. The teaching methods are role play, drama, games and audio-visual material rather than desks and textbooks, and the teachers are with the group again in the afternoon and evening.

The price covers twenty weekly lessons in the chosen language, the three Creative Media workshops, three excursions, the evening programme, accommodation in the chalet, full board and the registration fee. Course material, fruit and snacks are included as well. Paid options are listed under Extras: laundry, a special diet, check-in assistance at the airport, accompanied train transfer from Bern or Zurich, the Geneva airport transfer, and the room upgrades - a six-bed or four-bed room in the chalet, a double room with a host family, or a room at the Auberge des Alpes. The school also sells an extra week to participants who decide during the camp to stay longer, but publishes it only as a starting figure, so it is not carried here.

The camp is the school's own chalet Relais de Dranse, a rambling rustic house in Liddes with a large garden and a big common room with a billiard and a ping-pong table. It stands quietly on the Dranse, a headwater of the Rhone, about five minutes below the pass road into the Aosta valley - space to roam, no traffic noise, no through traffic. The standard room is an eight-bed room; six-bed and four-bed rooms in the chalet are paid upgrades, as are a double room with a host family in the village and, in summer, a four-bed or double room with its own bathroom at the Auberge des Alpes, a hotel about ten minutes walk away. All of them are listed under Extras, and lessons, meals and activities happen at the chalet in every case.

Three meals a day, cooked on site by the camp's own kitchen team, plus fruit and snacks. A special diet - gluten-free, lactose-free, vegan, halal and similar - is arranged for a charge listed under Extras.

Three Creative Media workshops fill the afternoons and build on one another: storytelling and idea development, then a shooting day in small teams with the participants' own phones or cameras, then editing, finishing and a premiere in front of the whole camp. They are held in English, and unlike a social-media workshop the brief is open - a short vertical clip or a landscape short film, whichever the team wants. Two half-day excursions and one full day in the Grand St. Bernard region are included. Evenings are rallies, campfires, game nights and karaoke, a different one each night.

WiFi, a large common room with a billiard and a ping-pong table, and a big garden around the chalet. Participants bring their own camera or a phone with a good camera for the workshops; the school asks for this explicitly.

The camp is for thirteen to seventeen year olds who want to make something and come away with it finished - the premiere at the end of the week is the point of the format. Participants come from Switzerland and from abroad. Arrival is on Sunday between about 17.00 and 18.00 at the chalet; departure is on Saturday afternoon at the station of that week's excursion town, or on Sunday for children with a return airport transfer. Parents can also collect a child at the camp itself, on Friday after lessons or on Saturday morning, by telling the camp leadership.