A Personal Message from Peter Etherton, 09 June 2020
Dear Friends and Partners,
I begin this message with an old photo from 2001. Here I am talking to a fine young man, one of my students at Wellington School. I believe his name was Carson, and I’m sure he’s done well since those days.
My experience of working with great students like Carson helped me to design our academic summer courses, which provided a caring introduction to UK boarding school life for international students.
Our first courses started in 2002, and since then we have taught several thousand students, and we have continued successfully despite many challenges.
Cancellation of 2020 Summer Courses in the UK
This year, however, we have, very sadly, decided that we will have to cancel all of our 2020 summer courses because of COVID-19. Until today, we tried hard to see if we could find a way to run these courses, but there are now too many obstacles in our way.
Thus we are cancelling our 2020 courses at Wellington School, Lord Wandsworth College, Badminton School and Dean Close School, and we are very grateful to our host schools for their kind understanding and cooperation.
I know that this cancellation will cause inconvenience for the students who are still enrolled with us, and their families, and I apologise for this. I hope that by taking the decision to cancel now, you will have sufficient time to reschedule any arrangements you have made.
New Etherton Online Courses for August 2020
It is still very important to us to help international students, and so we are now proud to announce that in August 2020 we will offer two-week and four-week online courses to help students prepare for starting GCSEs or A-Levels.
These will be academic courses which will help the students prepare for studying in English. They will feature lessons in English language and in the main subjects, and will focus on the technical language and study skills students will need to master.
They will also include lessons on:
- How to be happy and successful in your boarding school
- British culture and etiquette
- Virtual visits to places of interest
- Talks from staff at our partner schools
These will not be dry, boring self-study courses. They will include many live lessons with our kind, patient teachers and exciting social sessions with our friendly British student hosts. Our online courses will continue the great spirit of the past 18 years of summer courses!
Alan Etherton is now leading our team in preparing these courses, and we will send out a brochure with further information soon.
Again, we can only offer our sincerest apologies that we are not able to run our normal summer courses this year. We very much hope to be able to welcome your student to an Etherton Education course in the future – whether that is a residential course or an online course.
Kind regards
Peter Etherton
Peter Etherton, Director
Etherton Education
09 June 2020
