Is The Gap Year Dead?

There was a time when our society believed that we all had at least one novel – and one gap year – inside us. In Belgium, they have written this notion into law – their Time Credit system means every citizen is entitled to a total of one year’s paid leave across their lifetime.

The times have however changed! In the UK, it seems the tide has begun to turn against the sort of cliched multicultural chunder-fest skewered mercilessly by Matt Lacey’s YouTube smash Gap Yah skit and Jack Whitehall’s Fresh Meat character, JP.

The stereotyping is entrenched by real-life toe-curlers such as Jordan Jacobs. In December, the 21-year-old managed to spark an international manhunt after implying to his family that he had been kidnapped on the Thai island of Ko Phi Phi Don, before emerging, five days later, with the sheepish admission he had simply been “having a bit too much fun”.

As student debts have mounted, the percentage of Ucas applicants deferring by a year slipped from 7.9% in 2002 to 5.4% in 2015. Across the class spectrum, the gap year is no longer regarded as a universal good. Boris Johnson’s daughter, Lara Johnson-Wheeler, even wrote a piece in the Spectator explaining why she wouldn’t be taking a year out, before trooping diligently off to St Andrew’s.

Now, Sir Martin Sorrell, boss of WPP, the world’s most successful marketing firm, has added his voice to those heaping scorn on the idea that spending several thousand pounds to send a kid from Surrey to build a mud hut in Malawi is a good investment.

Sorrell told the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai that he didn’t believe a travelling gap year was a plus for anyone’s career prospects. “Gap years tend to be ill-organised and ill-directed and more a serendipity,” he warned. “Companies don’t find them enough time [to do something useful].”

He’s not the only one. In June last year, leading City lawyer Sandie Okoro made the news when she told an audience at the Girls’ Day School Trust conference that graduate recruiters were tired of the same narrow band of foreign aid and travel experiences, and advised school-leavers to get a job at JD Sports instead.

Yet Sorrell – who suggested young people instead learn “computer code and Mandarin” – had to admit that his gap year, mainly spent working at a TV shop in Harlesden, must have been some help on his rise to the top of a company with 190,000 employees. So, is the way forward for this endangered pastime simply a rethink?

Perhaps, far from the dreaded tales of Ko Phi Phi Don, Kings Road will, in years to come, be thick with moneyed vowels discussing the transcendent authenticity of a rainy season spent trying to communicate with the natives while working at a car mechanic’s in Newport!