Child visitor visa - conflicting advice - please help!

Hi
I hope someone out there can give me the correct information as have spoken to the UK embassy in Aust. but have been given completely different advice from what I have found on the UK visa website.

I am working in the UK at the moment & my 15 year old daughter (Australian citizen) is planning to come & visit me for just under 6months.

From what I can see on the UK visa website (set out in a flow chart), in Sept. 2007 a new short term entry clearance (visa) category of student visitor was introduced for students wanting to come to the United Kingdom to study on courses of six-month duration or less. If you are a non-visa national under 18years of age (i.e. my daughter) it says that you have 3 options - 2 involve getting a student visa before arrival but the third is to get a child visitor visa "at port of entry" which means you can't work & must leave after 6months but you can study as long as its at a school that's registered & non-maintained (non govt. funded I assume). My daughter is coming mainly to visit me but we are looking in to her spending a term at most at a fee paying, private school.

However, everytime I have called the UK embassy in Australia to check on this new visa category & what documents my daughter will need to have with her on arrival (she's coming in unaccompanied) I'm either told that they're not sure or "no" she cannot come in on a visitor visa & study AT ALL.

Please help if you can - I'm running out of time...& patience!!!

Dont worry my brazilian girlfriend's 15 year old daughter who is also a non visa national travelled unaccompanied to the uk for a couple of months recently and it was possible for her to attend an English college for a couple of weeks.

The new student visa rules are a bit awkward to understand and the new BIA website is just awful to understand anything.

Under 18's seem to be exempt from the new student rules. They can come in as a "child visitor" which is simply the standard visitor category for under 18's. And they can study for up to the length of the visit visa but remember the 6 month visitor visa may change to 3 months sometime soon.

I dont think it matters if she has already been accepted on a course or not.

As a non visa national she does not require any pre-entry clearance. But she will need to fulfil the immigration rules. She will need a return ticket, and a sponsorship letter detailing who is looking after her in the UK and who the guardian is in Austrailia with contact details. The sponsor needs to pick her up at the airport and bring evidence of bank statements, payslips, also the accomodation details.

In our case the IO just read our sponsorship letter she was carrying and let her through. If she is flying with BA I recomend paying for the child solo service. It costs only about £50 extra and she will be escorted all the way and does not even need to que when arrving at Heathrow.