Post-Brexit immigration rules lead to collapse in EU school trips to UK
Pupils can no longer use group passports, increasing the cost and paperwork involved in travelling
yesterday
Isabelle Regiani displays details of a school trip to the UK from France in 2018. ‘My students are so disappointed; going to England was so exotic for them’ © Régis Suhner/FT
Isabelle Regiani has led class trips to the UK from her school in eastern France throughout her 22-year career as an English teacher, but she will not be bringing her students back any time soon.
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Brexit changes to UK immigration rules mean EU schoolchildren can no longer travel on group passports and non-EU students require expensive individual visas, putting a trip to England financially out of reach for some of Regiani’s pupils and thousands of others in mainland Europe.
Regiani’s students at Jean Jaurès middle school in Sarreguemines will instead have to settle for Calais. “It’s disappointing,” she said. “We’ll visit places in touch with English culture and we’ll have a walk on the beach in Calais and we’ll see the cliffs, and I’ll say ‘see there’s the white cliffs of Dover’.”
Large tour companies across the continent have reported a collapse in school bookings to Britain in 2022. Despite the pandemic, relative to the UK inquiries are increasing for other destinations where English is widely spoken in the EU, such as Ireland, Nordic countries and the Netherlands.
The trends bear out warnings to Boris Johnson by French and German school exchange companies last spring that the new immigration rules would erode school cultural exchanges between the EU and UK, with negative consequences for cultural exchanges that were “crucial for the future of our societies”.
Travel industry estimates suggest French and German schools alone send at least 17,000 trips to the UK each year, with French school groups’ direct input into the UK valued at £100m. The British Educational Travel Association, BETA, estimates the total value of the industry, including language schools, at £1.5bn a year.
French school teacher Isabelle Regiani with her class last week © Régis Suhner/FT
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survey last month of French schools by Unosel, the international association for language and homestays, suggested the number of planned trips to the UK had fallen by almost two-thirds. Eurovoyages, a French company that sent 11,000 students to the UK in 2019, said less than 100 students would travel to Britain this year, with clients instead switching to Ireland, Spain and the Netherlands.
Marie Bayol from Verdie Open Class, another French operator, said it had organised more than 800 school groups in 2019 for 36,000 students, but had just 34 groups scheduled for 2022, none of which had confirmed.
The sadness I feel from a personal and business point of view is nothing compared to the level of sadness I feel for the loss of opportunity for cultural exchange for the UK’s youth and the consequent ramifications
Susan Jones, head of UK homestay accommodation provider Linguastay
Leading trip providers in Belgium and Germany have also reported a sharp decline. Christoph Knobloch, head of CTS Reisen, an operator in Lemgo, Germany, usually runs 1,600 school trips annually to the UK. He said demand this year had collapsed, and instead there had been a jump in bookings to Copenhagen and Amsterdam.
He blamed the new UK rules for non EU citizens, which have hit the many Turkish, Russian and refugee children in German schools who used to be able to travel on the EU “list of travellers” scheme, which the UK left as a result of Brexit. “If you need to pay for a passport or a visa on top of the costs of the trip, and the teacher has to organise everything, it is a lot of supervision,” he said.
The scale of the drop-off has dismayed teachers, travel companies and British host families, who say they receive social and financial benefits from providing homestays to visiting EU children.
“The sadness I feel from a personal and business point of view is nothing compared to the level of sadness I feel for the loss of opportunity for cultural exchange for the UK’s youth and the consequent ramifications,” said Susan Jones, the head of Linguastay, a UK homestay accommodation provider.
She said multiple attempts to lobby the government to introduce an exception for school groups had failed. “I can’t help expressing disappointment in our government who are willing to let this happen.”
Jenny Collings, a host in Chester with two grown-up daughters studying modern languages, said exchanges were a welcome source of income but also expanded the horizons of her 12-year-old son, who studies French and German.
Jenny Collings, back left, with her family and two German students, believes hosting EU students has expanded the horizons of her 12-year-old son, who studies French and German
“It’s exciting, it makes the world feel a bit bigger,” she said. “It’s given my son a real head start. He can often help with a word if a visitor is struggling. He’s confident because of it and is used to mixing with the children.”
Carl Kilvington, who runs Nottingham Host Families, which places students locally, said he had received only three provisional bookings for groups for the coming months, compared with pre-pandemic levels of more than 20 a year.
“Because of the passport and visa issues, with the cost and the faff of having to go to Paris for documents, it’s a real stinger,” he said. “Tour operators are saying if half of their classes have non-EU students, they won’t travel here at all.”
The Home Office said the government recognises the importance of cultural and educational exchanges between the UK and other nations, but ascribed the downturn to the pandemic.
“It is no surprise that in the middle of a global pandemic, which significantly restricted global travel and where public health is paramount, fewer schools are travelling abroad on school trips,” it said.
For Regiani, who has children in her class from mixed socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, the new rules mean she now has little prospect of taking a group to Britain.
“It’s so sad. We’ve visited Devon and Cornwall, Oxford and Cambridge, Stratford, of course, but it is the host families more than museums and castles that put children in touch with English culture. My students are so disappointed; going to England was so exotic for them.”
