Over the course of many years, many have learned foreign languages through foreign exchange programs where language learners spent a week or more in host families’ homes in other countries to learn languages and in return welcomed exchange counterparts into their own homes. Foreign exchange or swaps are considered to be among the best ways to learn languages and culture since the participants will be fully immersed in the natural environment where the languages being learned are spoken.

In the United Kingdom, foreign exchange programs are under threat from the new regulations of child protection. Exchanges are collapsing in the UK because many parents do not want to undergo strict criminal record checks which the British government is imposing for anyone who looks after a stranger’s child overnight.

Claudia Freeman, the head of languages at the Perse School in Cambridge, is one of the many language educators that think that foreign exchange is one of the most effective ways of learning foreign languages. Freeman stated that it is “absolute madness” to enforce the strict regulations and is worried about having to cancer trips abroad because of the child-protection legislation introduced after the murder of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

Freeman cites a letter from the Department for Children, Schools, and Families advising her that “host families in England involved in providing accommodation for foreign students on school exchange visits are strongly advised to undergo enhanced CRB checks … which become mandatory next year. This is in line with guidance to schools on volunteers involved in activities requiring an overnight stay”.

All over the UK, schools that conduct foreign exchange are faced with the same issues. Freeman is having a hard time finding accommodation for teenagers from European countries who will be learning languages in the UK. Freeman said that the government seems to want to do away with school exchanges completely and schools are being pushed to study trips in youth hostels where there have been attacks and murders such as the case of 13-year-old Caroline Dickinson who was a Cornish teenager raped and murdered in a youth hostel in Brittany in 1996.

Sam Cunning from the Hall prep school in London is among the many teenagers who would want to learn and improve their foreign language skills. Sam and his class were supposed to stay with families in Lille in the next spring in order to learn French language and culture and in return will accommodate their hosts for an exchange visit. However, the said trip is cancelled said the school’s French language teacher Rob Clarke. Clarke said that about seventy parents need to be CRB checked which is just not practical. He also disagrees that new checks on host parents are necessary since in the past fifteen years of exchanges there have never been reports of any impropriety.

Foreign exchange programs have brought many changes in its participants and have made them learn more than just their target languages. Duncan Byrne, a language teacher at the Aske’s Boys School said that the most important thing about the foreign exchange trips is that the participating youngsters can make friends for life.

The new regulations might totally put an end to exchanges with host families and pave way to hostel programs which may no be totally safe. If and when the regulations will be implemented, there is little chance for the youth to be exposed to other languages and cultures without having to go through a lot of scrutiny.

What can you say about the new child protection regulations and their possible effects on foreign exchange programs? Share your views with us.

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