When a child from overseas under the age of 18 comes to study in the UK, schools require them to have a guardian that can provide support in lieu of their parents, and to have a safe and welcome home for them at exeat weekends, half terms and in an emergency.
Carefully selected school guardians
At Gabbitas, we’ve been providing a guardianship service for over 100 years and our service has become fine-tuned to the needs of our clients. We carefully select our guardians, using our contacts with former parents and staff at the top UK boarding schools. We recruit from community groups and our networks in specific geographic areas. All guardian families and any dependents over the age of 16 are DBS checked. Each home is visited by a member of the Gabbitas team to ensure that the standards are high and that it is a caring and supportive environment.
Life with our guardianship families
This article appeared in the July/August 2019 edition of Independent Education Today
We interview prospective guardians and send families their full profile. We do our best to match each child with the right family, taking their tastes, interests and even sense of humour into account. Of course, a host family will never replace their own, but children have a break from their school’s boarding house and get to stay in a home, eat home-cooked food and, if they enjoy it, help with cooking or baking.Their host family takes them to the cinema, excursions or a picnic in the country. They go back to school having had a different experience, having learnt about the culture of families living in the UK.
Guardians to safeguard your children 24/7
At Gabbitas, we do everything we can to make their experience as vivid and enjoyable as possible, by choosing the right family and providing a range of other services. Whether a student missed their flight, forgot their passport at school and remembered half-way to the airport, had flu with fever and had to be taken out of school – our guardians are there to help 24/7. We have so much experience, we’ve seen it all, we are there to support.
Learn more about our guardianship services
For a discussion about the reassurance, support and home-from home experience we can provide your children while they are studying in the UK, please contact us at any of our offices.
