100 years of bespoke guardianship

Gabbitas explain how their guardianship service works in more detail

Keri Beckingham

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.

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. We interview prospective guardians and send families their full profile.

We carefully select our guardians using our contacts with former parents and staff at the top UK boarding schools

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.

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 halfway 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.

E: info@gabbitas.com
T: 02077 340 161
W: www.gabbitas.com