Don’t deny teenagers the great gift of a foreign exchange

I’ll never forget the moment when, aged 14, our bus stopped in front of our “sister” coeducational school near Fontainebleau. Zut alors! Boys called Yannick and Christophe and Clement with shoulder-length brown hair in pony tails, sporting luxuriant curtains (this was the Nineties) and starter ‘taches, spilled out of the building to greet us, transfixing us with their sexy hirsuteness.

We didn’t get much schoolwork done over the next few weeks, admittedly – but our French, our taste for tarte au citron, and our ability to chain smoke cigarillos improved markedly. Our host families ranged from the bonkers to the lovely, but we wouldn’t have changed a thing. The result was that the number of us who opted to take French the following year was high, with some going on to do French at university and then to have glamorous careers in diplomacy, development, fashion and – dare I say it – the EU, too.

So it was with a sinking heart, and yet another stab of gratitude that I’m not a school pupil today, that I learnt school foreign exchange trips are under threat, with a concomitant drop off in the numbers taking language subjects. Quel dommage!

The reasons for the stifling of foreign exchange trips are ghastly on all fronts. Terrorism is one factor putting parents off packing their kids off to Europe – understandable, if not quite rational.

But then there’s the red tape: a perfect storm of everything both excessively precious, and bureaucratically thick-headed about contemporary life. Never mind health and safety gone mad, this is child protection gone mad. Rather than necessarily being protected from dubious Frenchmen, children are instead being prevented from a unique learning experience and an enthusiasm for European languages. To arrange an exchange, schools must now request “disclosure and barring service” (DBS) checks from host families, which sounds dreadful, while a range of other inscrutable requirements are also demanded of schools, all of which is making it difficult or impossible for schools to make the trips happen.

Finally, there’s the unfortunate paranoia of today’s parents, who, according to the report, don’t want their sprogs staying in strangers’ houses, or have strange ones sleeping in theirs. How odd, when I reflect on my own parents’ enthusiasm for hosting students – and their continued delight in having a range of visitors pass through their home. Many was the time when I’d come downstairs to find Syrille or Ute or Sven or Louis sitting chatting away to my mum or dad while pancakes were loaded up before them.

Taking careful measures to keep children safe is clearly right. But go too far and you end up keeping young people from some of the richest experiences school days have to offer – cigarillos included.