The post A-level gap year was once the preserve of pampered public school kids who lazed around the globe spending mummy and daddy’s money. These days one in 10 students take a year’s break, about 200,000 people, and the definition of the gap year is widening, with cash-strapped students often spending most of it in paid work.

Thomas Birkett, 19, and due to start business studies at Durham University in October, has just had a year off after finishing his A- levels at Tonbridge school, Kent. He spent the first six months pulling pints at his local to raise cash. He then did a three-month, £9,000, ski instructor course in Canada, paid for by his parents. Birkett followed up Canada with two weeks in Fiji and Australia on holiday with friends (funded from his pub earnings) and a month in Honduras building houses for the poor with the gap year charity, i-to-i.

Birkett rejects the recent suggestion from Voluntary Service Overseas that British gappers who jet off overseas to take part in help-the-poor and conservation projects are the world’s “new colonialists”, indulging in a kind of “charity tourism” that may even do more harm than good.

“I had had a great gap year that was mainly about pleasure,” says Birkett. “I felt it was time to give something back. The charity i-to-i has been involved in the project for 10 years and the first houses it built are still standing. Local people seemed to appreciate our help. At the same time I got to see the country and I learnt some Spanish.”

Birkett paid £900 from his pub earnings to take part in the Nicaragua scheme. He says it was an entirely altruistic act and not motivated by a belief that a spot of overseas volunteer work would look good on his CV. “If my gap year had been about career then I would have spent it working in an office,” he says.

But it’s career that Tom Griffiths, founder of www.gapyear.com, sees as the new focus of the ever-evolving gap year. He believes the introduction of £3,000 annual university fees has made the business of the gap year, and what is studied afterwards, much more serious. Fees, he argues, do not sound the death knell for the gap year (although there was a dip in numbers last year), but in fact make it an even more important institution.

“I think the gap year is increasingly becoming a chance to test drive a career,” says Griffiths. “It is coming into its own.

“Many parents have been suspicious until recently,” he says. “They thought their children would be better going straight to university. But now they are having to pay tens of thousands of pounds for university courses, they will be more interested in whether their kids are picking the right degree and career. The gap year is a chance to get the choices right.

“If you want to be a vet you can work as a vet for a year before applying to universities and then work on a wildlife reserve overseas. That sort of experience sets you apart from all the other A-level candidates with straight As.”

Emma Stephenson, 20, from Belfast, chose a working gap year before starting an engineering degree at Glasgow University last year. “My mum is a nurse and my dad is a driver and they have also had my sister to put through university so I couldn’t just go off travelling,” she says. “That’s why I looked for a work placement gap year scheme. The Year in Industry organisation helped me apply to Shell in Aberdeen. I just loved it.”

Emma was paid £15,000 for her year with Shell and she did indeed test drive her future career. “When you are a girl everyone thinks engineering is an odd choice so the Year in Industry scheme helped me be sure . . . One of my projects involved going to Holland to see a new type of rig, another involved going off-shore for a week” says Emma, adding with a giggle, “that was 70 men and me”.

Gap experiences for the taking:

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