A quality follow-up

Quality follow-up

The En Famille International team monitors the progress of every exchange throughout the year. All families benefit from having a local representative who shares their first language and also has first-hand experience of an EFI exchange from a parent’s perspective. This understanding and knowledge is essential in the months when we are setting up the exchange and becomes a lifeline for your child when they are establishing themselves in the home of their foreign exchange.

We are on hand to manage difficulties, articulate concerns and avoid communication problems. Families in the process of an exchange know that they can reach us at any time and are given all our contact details from the outset. Our experience shows us that an exchange is not always a "long, quiet river". However, we do our best to help children adapt to their new way of life and fully support them. We make sure to have a close working relationship with the parents in every exchange, encourage them to ask questions and provide advice drawn from our own experience. The children in an exchange also know that they can reach us very easily. After seven weeks, we conduct a human and linguistic check (VHL) to assess the child's language level and share the report with the family. We also carry out a new assessment about 3 weeks before the child leaves which is also shared with the family and really shows how far they have progressed over the course of the exchange.

The key to the success of an exchange is establishing and maintaining trust between us and our parents. We do our very best to set up quality exchanges. We take care to select families and children who we think will be well matched and put all our energy into qualitative monitoring. Our aim is to find a foreign family that fits and create a lasting bond between their child and yours. A relationship between two families which continues long after the end of the initial exchange.