IT’S crunch time for a lot youngsters who have got their A-level results and are planning for the future.

With the price hikes in university fees due to start next year and unemployment on the rise, the world can seem a little daunting.

This is one reason taking a productive gap year has become so popular among teenagers, as a way of giving them a perspective on their lives and gaining valuable skills.

However, thousands of teenagers are scrapping plans to travel in favour of going straight to university.

They will be the last to secure a degree costing £3,290 a year before fees are increased, and in some cases tripled, next year.

As a result, only 6,000 18-year-olds have deferred a firm offer of a place on a university course for this year, according to admissions service Ucas. Last year 20,000 did.

So why is a gap year worth considering? Emma Sorrell, 20, from Colchester, decided to volunteer in an orphanage and schools in Ecuador when she was 18.

She had just completed her A-levels at Colchester Sixth Form College and wanted to do something completely different. She said: “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do in the future, so I decided I wanted to go and do something different.

“I hadn’t been away from home for more than a week before, so going on a gap year was a real adventure for me.”

She decided the city of Cuenca, in the highlands of Ecuador, was the perfect place to gain life experience and improve her Spanish.

Emma arranged her trip through Lattitude Global Volunteering, which specialises in volunteering projects.

She said: “I stayed with a family whose daughter was on the same project as me in the UK.

“It meant I got to hang out with their other daughter on the weekends and have dinner with the family in the week.”

Emma found working in the orphanage was an incredible experience, which pushed her to learn new skills.

She said: “It was a bit of a culture shock for me to be helping look after children in the orphanage, because I had never done anything like it before. There was a baby unit there and a unit for toddlers.

“Some of the babies were premature and so tiny it was unbelievable, and I was shown how to feed and look after them.

“There were these sad cases where babies had been abandoned – one had been left in a park. There were some happy endings, though. A lot of the children were eventually adopted.”

Emma found her feet and began to enjoy her new life.

She said: “My confidence grew as my Spanish improved. By the end, I had bonded with a lot of the people. It helped give me a completely new perspective on life. Being on the other side of the world alone, and then coping with that, made me feel I could achieve anything.

“When I got back, I knew a bit more what I wanted to do for my future. I am now studying English literature at Exeter University. I would like to work in the media or for a charity when I leave university.”

Emma recommended volunteering to anyone at a crossroads in their life.

She said: “When you finish college, you can feel like you don’t know what you want to do. Volunteering helped me find out more about myself and what I was capable of.”

For more information, go to www.lattitude.org.uk