LINES Summer School at Stowe, Buckinghamshire

Teaching is organised around four age-based programmes. Little Explorers, for the youngest children, runs twenty-four lessons a week combining English classes with Hands On sessions. New Adventurers, Rising Learners and Future Leaders each run thirty-two lessons a week, pairing English lessons with Skills Workshops, Challenges or Masterclasses depending on the age group. Skills Workshops cover areas such as robotics, coding, drama and filmmaking. Classes are formed by age and by level, with an average of seven students and a maximum of ten, and the two senior programmes are aimed at students working at intermediate level and above.

The published weekly price covers the tuition programme, full board, accommodation on campus, two full-day excursions a week and the associated entrance fees, internet access and weekly laundry. Optional extras are charged separately: professional tennis or horse riding coaching three times a week, a Saturday evening musical in London’s West End, a theme-park or studio-tour outing, airport transfers and an unaccompanied minor service. The camp is sold in whole weeks, with several arrival dates across the summer season.

Students live in boarding houses on the Stowe School campus and are accommodated by age group in different houses, each supervised by house parents. The youngest programme uses double, triple or quad rooms with a shared bathroom; the pre-teen programme uses single, double or triple rooms with a shared bathroom; and the two senior programmes are housed in en-suite single or double rooms. The provider states that student accommodation is always supervised and that the staff-to-student ratio across the camp is one to four.

Full board is included. Three freshly prepared meals a day are served in the school dining hall and supervised by camp staff. Dietary and medical requirements can be catered for when the camp is told about them in advance. Meals on full-day excursions and on optional outings are arranged by the camp; the musical evening and the theme-park outings include a meal in the published extra price.

Afternoons and evenings are given to a structured activity programme that varies by age group, from supervised in-house evening activities for the youngest children to later evening activities, a disco and a Wednesday shopping outing for the senior groups. Two full-day excursions run every week: one academic day out linked to the theme of the week, and one Saturday trip to London taking in landmarks such as Buckingham Palace and the London Eye. Academic excursions have included Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Warwick Castle, the Tower of London, Wembley Stadium and London Zoo. Professional tennis and horse riding coaching is available as a paid option three times a week.

The camp uses the campus of Stowe School, set in seven hundred and fifty acres of parkland in Buckinghamshire. Sports facilities include an indoor twenty-five metre swimming pool, football and baseball pitches, an athletics track, tennis courts and a gym. Teaching takes place in the school classrooms, meals are served in the dining hall, and students have free wifi, a weekly laundry service, a medical room and qualified first aid support on site.

The camp brings together an international group of students — the provider reports around twenty-five nationalities — in a full immersion English programme on a historic English boarding school campus. Buckingham is about four miles away, Oxford twenty-five miles and London sixty miles, which shapes an excursion programme built around both. Welfare is handled by a Welfare Manager, house parents and police-checked staff, and students are grouped by age both in class and in their accommodation, so younger children keep a close-knit community of their own.