SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 18 Oct. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Cabildo de Tenerife, through the Education area, has restructured the language immersion scholarships to offer long-term stays for the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 academic years.
In this way, the Impulsa modality that contemplated online studies in English or French and a one-month stay in Ireland, Canada or France, depending on the language chosen, will be replaced by the new scholarship that provides for studying a full course in Ireland. This will lead to the investment of the Island Corporation going from 3.3 million euros this year to more than 3.7 million.
The Minister of Education, Concepción Rivero, explained that this long-term scholarship has 35 places. The students with the best academic record will be able to decide if they want to make use of it or, on the contrary, participate in the traditional three-month out.
“This is a unique opportunity to delve into the knowledge of a language and almost dominate it like a native person,” said the counselor, who added that “those who choose this method of spending a full course abroad will have a one-way ticket included and back to come to Tenerife for Christmas”.
“We have decided to eliminate the online course modality and a month’s stay abroad due to how the market has become oversaturated. Host countries prioritize longer stays, making it difficult to find places and host homes, making it almost impossible for just there would be a scholarship per family”, indicated the person in charge of Education and Youth. “We prefer to invest more and ensure the quality and excellence of the scholarships, the young people of Tenerife deserve no less,” she added.
Until now, the Cabildo offered four types of language immersion: BIL scholarships with three-month stays, Cambridge, Dual and Impulsa. Of these, only the last one will be modified. In this new edition, the Impulsa scholarships that allowed 170 students to carry out online studies in English or French and enjoy a one-month stay in Ireland, Canada or France, will disappear and will be replaced by full course scholarships in Ireland.
This new modality will offer 35 third-year ESO students the opportunity to study in Ireland for the fourth year of ESO, a course prior to high school and whose grades do not affect the average grade for the EBAU. In addition, the opportunity includes a round trip at Christmas so that the participants can enjoy this festivity in Tenerife with their families.
The island’s Director of Education, Isabel Bello, assured that “this new formula requires the greatest investment that has been made in terms of linguistic immersion scholarships, but it is a historic qualitative leap.” In addition, she stated that “from the Education area, we seek to reward the best records and ensure that a stay for a full course will give them the opportunity to return being practically bilingual.”
Isabel Bello explained that “this new format will come into force in the 2023-2024 academic year, so a new period of ten days will be opened only for the application of this full-year scholarship. However, it must be specified that the people who have already applied for the linguistic immersion scholarship they do not have to do anything, they do not have to request this new modality, since it is already understood that they have also applied for it, and those who have already applied for a linguistic immersion scholarship opt jointly for all the modalities and vacancies for annual, quarterly, Dual Baccalaureate or Cambridge BIL scholarships”
The order of choice of modality will depend on the best academic record and, in case of a tie, the lowest family income per person will be valued.
As for the other types of scholarships, they will not be changed. On the one hand, the BIL scholarships continue to offer 200 students a three-month stay in Ireland, Canada or France, staying with a native family and attending an educational center.
The Cambridge scholarship, introduced as a novelty this year, has a total of 20 places that allows participants to develop an online course during the first year of Baccalaureate to finish the course with a three-week stay in the United Kingdom, staying in the residence of Cambridge University itself.
The Dual scholarship is aimed at obtaining a Baccalaureate degree in the United States or Canada in parallel to Spanish and includes a one-month stay in the corresponding country for a total of 100 students during the summer between first and second year of high school.
