The company will open four new centres in the UK, two in the USA and one in Canada to run during vacation periods. Locations include the prestigious university campuses of Oxford University, Cambridge University, UCLA (Los Angeles), UC Berkeley (San Francisco) and the University of British Columbia (Vancouver).

Sarah Flindall, Ardmore’s chief executive, said: “In these difficult economic times we feel that it is right to be investing more in our programmes and centres, whilst holding our prices wherever we can in order to give agents more opportunities to send students to our centres.”

Ardmore has provided language tuition to juniors for more than 25 years, with programmes combining language with cultural and sports activities. It has had considerable success in recent years, enjoying around 10% growth per annum due to increased marketing, the opening of new centres and a growing demand for juniors courses more generally – particularly in Asia and Latin America.

“We believe that the increase in awareness of the importance of English especially for future job prospects has contributed to this growth,” said Flindall. “Job opportunities have been shrinking with the global crisis and employers are becoming more selective; therefore having English as a second language has become more important.”

Ardmore won the silver award for Best Educational Product at the British Youth Travel Awards last month.