Le Rosey My Family: a first camp away from home, ages 8–13

The camp is built around a choice made at enrolment: English or French. Lessons run each weekday morning in two periods of seventy-five minutes, with a placement test on arrival deciding the group, and the school says the academies are not suitable for native speakers of the language chosen. Afternoons move to sport and creative activities, and no two weeks are the same. A three-week stay ends with the Ultimate Adventure Week, when lessons stop and the group — no more than thirty children — spends the whole week on an adventure programme.

Stays are two or three weeks and begin on a Sunday. The price covers the stay as the school sells it and includes a deposit that is not refundable; the school does not publish a breakdown of what else the fee covers, so nothing further is claimed here. Children who choose three weeks get the adventure week as the final one.

Children live at Le Rosey's Gstaad Mountain Campus, high in the Bernese Oberland, in shared rooms on campus. The school is direct about what this camp is: a first stay away from home, which it describes as more like one big sleepover with new friends. Parents who travel to Gstaad for a weekend may take their child off campus after Saturday morning lessons and bring them back before Sunday dinner, but the camp itself is residential and children stay with their group.

Meals are taken on campus with the group; Sunday begins with a brunch before the day's excursion. The school does not publish a separate meal plan for this camp.

Afternoons draw on a broad list that changes week to week — basketball, climbing, cooking, creative arts, football, golf practice, mountain trekking, swimming, tennis and via ferrata among them. Evenings bring inter-team competitions, discos, film nights, arts and crafts, board games, sports matches, barbecues and, on occasion, a night in a mountain hut. Saturday afternoons are an excursion such as canoeing, laser games or a bridge swing; Sundays are a full-day trip, for instance to Aquaparc or Glacier 3000.

The camp uses Le Rosey's own Gstaad Mountain Campus, the school's winter campus in the Alps, with its accommodation, teaching rooms and sports facilities on one site and the mountains around it used as the rest of the programme.

This is a camp for a child's first stretch away from home, and the school designs it that way: a group of children of the same age, a routine of lessons in the morning and sport in the afternoon, and an evening programme that keeps everyone together. Children meet others from around the world, pick up a language in the country where it is spoken, and — on a longer stay — finish with a week in the mountains that has no classroom in it at all. The name My Family refers to the group the child joins, not to a holiday with parents.