Dialogue: Gap year takes stress off teens

Around this time of year, when secondary-school exam results start coming through, it's a good time to kick back and enjoy being older and wiser.

Exams are the thing that makes the supposed best years of your life a downer. Particularly when you suspect much of the information you have swotted up and been judged against will never be called upon in later years.

Once secondary-school exams are passed there is the hope and expectation that more studies will follow.

At present many students will be selecting degree courses or subject options based on nothing much other than a punt or the advice of an adult.

And they will blindly enter institutions to learn a whole lot about an area that they selected to study at age 17, and in so doing set a vocational direction for the next few years. They will also be taking on a student loan that runs into the tens of thousands, having the responsibility of huge debt hanging over them before they have had a chance to really spread their wings.

When people say that all they want is for their kids to be happy what they really mean is happy, employed and earning good money. Thus everyone breathes a sigh of relief when the youngster announces they are going to varsity or a polytechnic. Phew - they have found a direction!

Further education may be a safety net for employability but it certainly isn't an insurance policy for self-fulfilment.

Little do the students know that many of them will abandon their career path later on, when they have the maturity and life experience to isolate what it is they want to do. And it is the studies and the careers chosen as adults that give us the most personal fulfilment.

That's why I am a proponent of mucking around a bit before you settle on tertiary education. Prince William and his fellow royal brat-packers enjoy a gap year between college and university studies. At present he is allegedly roughing it with Patagonian peasants, stopping only for the odd photo call.

My feeling is that the gap should be a little wider than just a year. Not only does this mean that you can be freed of the bind of exams for a while but also it gives young people some space in which they can grow, experience life and think.

How can anyone really make a valid judgement at 17 that accountancy is their calling?

When I was at high school there were two popular occupations for girls to aspire to: teaching or nursing. While they are fine careers - and some pupils found their calling by pursuing them - I am sure many settled for them only because they didn't really know of any other careers.

Weighing heavily on my mind was the dreaded question: "What are you going to do after you leave school?"

Searching for a good answer, I caught a TV documentary about the making of an advertisement in the snow. I thought, "Choice! That looks like much more fun than teaching," and decided on an advertising career - getting people off my back at the same time.

I embarked on studying for this career when I was 18, completely naive about everything including the industry I had chosen to enter. But if I had my time again I would have experimented with life a bit more and only got serious when I was in my mid-20s. Then not only would I have had some life experience to bring to the career but I would have been old enough to at least look as if I knew what I was talking about.

Some time ago we had to take our daughter to Starship. Great hospital, but it's very off-putting for a parent when the doctors look like seventh-formers in mufti. I'm sure they passed their exams but one gets nervous that they have not yet had enough life experience to make sound judgment calls. And what if they got, say, an 80 per cent average in their finals - what about the other 20 per cent they got wrong and haven't yet corrected on the job?

One of the most successful and self-fulfilled people I know has neither secondary nor tertiary qualifications. He probably didn't even receive a school merit award.

His view is simple - people with no qualifications may be disadvantaged in job interviews but in other ways they have tremendous freedom as they can do anything they want.

They are not trapped by a direction they chose at 17.