I nonchalanatly divulged my plan on the school run just before the end of term. “Oh, by the way, we’re having a French girl to stay with us this summer.”
My announcement was met with incredulity by our 14-year-old: “Oh my God! That’s so random! Why?”
“It’ll be fun… and interesting. I did loads of exchanges when I was at school. It’ll be fun,” I repeated encouragingly.
“I meant why’s she coming here? French people hate English people.”
Now it was my turn to be horrified. Where on earth had she got that idea?
“The news – because of Brexit.”
If I’d had any hesitation about my decision, this swung it. An urgent rapprochement was needed. An entente cordiale. I rang the local co-ordinator for the scheme and filled in the forms. With our eldest away at university we had a spare bedroom and besides there was a £400 hosting incentive – handy in times of financial stress. This was happening, whatever my family’s misgivings.
Delphine and Céline vs Karen and Mandy
I have long been a staunch Francophile. I read French at university and in my 20s, I lived and worked in France for three years. My first UK job involved syndicating UK newspaper content to French news agencies.
This appreciation of all things Gallic was fuelled in no small part by the school French exchanges in which I participated as a teenager. Growing up in rural Suffolk in the 1980s, opportunities for the expansion of horizons were rare, so the annual French exchange was a massive deal. Our town, Newmarket, was twinned with Maisons-Laffitte, on the outskirts of Paris. Each year, a coach would show up and discharge a posse of impossibly exotic Delphines, Sabines and Célines to stay with our far less glamorous group of Traceys, Karens and Mandys.
We’d then spend a week punting on the River Cam, roller-skating at the rink in Bury St Edmunds or dancing at the local working men’s club to a soundtrack of Duran Duran and Joe le Taxi.
Then – having much the better deal – our group would venture back across the Channel to climb the Eiffel Tower, shop in La Défense and see Versailles.
It was only when describing them to my kids that I realised the extent to which these trips had shaped me and informed many of my subsequent life choices. Of course, there were challenges: aged 12, I was inexplicably paired with a 16-year-old boy called Eloïc, who sported a full beard and refused to leave his room. The year after, I awoke on my first morning to an empty house and a note in French informing me that everyone was busy, but I could meet the parents on their lunch break in the 17th arrondissement, which involved taking a train and navigating the Métro entirely solo.
No longer a rite of passage
Fast forward to 2025, however, and the school exchange trip is no longer the ubiquitous rite of passage it once was. A new report from the Higher Education Policy Institute and sponsored by Duolingo (The Languages Crisis: Arresting Decline by Megan Bowler, HEPI Report 192) shows a devastating decline in formal language learning, with the trend particularly noticeable in French and German.
According to figures from the British Council, since the Brexit vote in 2016, 10,000 fewer pupils in the UK are taking French GCSE and more students now take A-level physical education than French, German and classical languages combined.
Brexit, red tape, increased financial pressures on schools and safeguarding concerns have combined to mean that more than 50 per cent of schools say they have cut exchanges. Those that continue to visit France offer cultural visits to sites rather than homestays.
Dining and Cooking