Taking your students on a study tour abroad: Getting the details right
The Bulletin (Issue 52)
This is the third and final part in the series on how to take your students on a study tour abroad. The first was 1. Why you might want to take your students on a study tour of a foreign, English-speaking country, part two was the broad brushstrokes of 2. How to do a tour and this final part, are the miscellaneous details that I’ve figured out by trial and error specifically from a week-long trip to London and Cambridge over the end of March and beginning of April, and I’ve included a few lessons learned more for my future benefit, but from these you can see the kind of specifics you might need to figure out for a trip to wherever you fancy taking your students.
Get everyone to pack one carry-on bag each only. This may sound extreme, but trust me: you don’t want to have to chase missing checked-in suitcases at the airport and you don’t want to battle your way up and down London Underground steps with suitcases. You can carry on a backpack — more easily stowable than those boxy, inflexible carry-on suitcases — (up to 7kg, 50cm x35cm x25cm dimensions for Qatar Air) and that means you can zip through Heathrow customs and baggage reclaim and scale the Piccadilly Line stairways like mountain goats. You can always wash your clothes at the Airbnb or, like me, just pack clean but worn out underwear and T-shirts, throw them out when they get dirty and buy cheap replacements from Sainsbury’s. By all means, check-in your bag on the way back to Japan if you or your students have bought loads of souvenirs (or a stack of secondhand books, ahem), if any bag gets lost on the way back it won’t derail the trip.
You don’t need a visa for a study tour of Britain, but it’s a good idea to have a consent form signed by parents. You can word this yourself, just have something official sounding in English signed by a parent with their contact details that the minor is in your care and the parent consents to this. It’s probably not legally binding, but it goes some way to keeping officials happy. At Heathrow immigration no humans checked our kids’ passports, but on the way back to Japan a jobsworth airline ground staffer was getting very sniffy about so many kids who were not our own, until we were able to produce the consent forms.
Double-decker buses are cheaper and more fun than the Tube or trains. Use Oyster cards for all public transport in London (like Suica in Tokyo). They automatically charge you the cheapest available fare, which saves you inordinate time and effort trying to work out the Byzantine fee system for transport in the UK. You can pre-order them from London Transport while in Japan and they will send them to you and you can pre-load them with a £50 credit. If you are travelling with under 16s, when you arrive in the UK, go to the travel office in Heathrow Terminal 3 to have them electronically modified to junior cards, which will mean 50 percent off all travel. Get a spare Oyster card or two if possible. In a party of 15 we managed to lose two over one week!
Plan your days so that you can travel after 9:30am in London, otherwise you pay a premium for travelling during peak times, with or without an Oyster card.
The danger of street pickpockets is real. Everyone should keep their money in small amounts in separate places on their person. Leave passports and extra money at your accommodation, it may not be perfectly safe there, but it’s safer than on your daily travels. See the note on Oyster cards above. Have photos on your email of everyone’s passport numbers just in case. The Japan Embassy is a quick walk from Green Park tube station.
Get parents to pay the travel insurance policy of their kid before you head off. Basic coverage is fine. You are mitigating against extreme medical emergencies or severe flight problems ruining your trip. Insist on travel insurance for you and your students’ parents’ peace of mind. Costs were well under ¥10,000 per person. Have the relevant paperwork (or photos of the forms) when you are abroad in case you need to make a claim. Don’t forget to insure yourself.
Count people on and off everything. If there are two supervisors, have one at the front of the group and one at the rear of the group. Put the slowest walkers at the front of a group to prevent people getting spread out thinly in crowds. Work out a protocol for what happens if you get split up. Everyone gets off at the next Tube stop, or everyone meets at a pre-arranged location, or meets at the last known public spot.
Everyone should have an emergency contact number and know the address of where they are staying. At the time of writing, mobile SIM cards for smartphones are more trouble than they are worth. Just set your phones to airplane mode and use free wifi available in most chain shops and at your Airbnb. In an emergency, just turn off airplane mode, turn on data roaming and make the emergency call, or send the emergency email. So it will cost a bit more for that day, it’s a lot easier than messing with SIM cards.
To get kids using English and out of their Japanese bubble, think of missions for everyone to do. Get kids to find unknown shopping items (tell them to buy “a packet of Hobnobs” and they will have to ask someone for help); give out prizes or points for successfully finding and photographing 10 people the same age from 10 different counties at The Tower of London, say; find and picture the oldest thing in the British Museum; find and picture the most expensive item in Harrods; give prizes for successfully negotiating a price at Covent Garden market. Get kids to do these missions in pairs (for safety) and randomly alternate the pairs to encourage weaker, shyer kids.
I’ve yet to stay in a British Airbnb that had enough hot water or wifi to cope with more than a few people at a time. Consider rationing showers and baths or splitting the group into morning and evening shifts. Keep kids’ smartphones and their rechargers in the kitchen next to the wifi router if you have to police internet usage.
Changing money. You don’t get good rates at supermarkets etc, so it probably makes sense to just use your credit card to get money out of cash points when you need cash, but it is a learning experience for kids to change money themselves at a bureau de change which they can then use to buy stuff, even though the UK is fast going cashless.
There are no doubt more details, but the point is, that’s all they are, details. You can figure them out through trial and error (and reading friendly bloggers, ahem). So what’s stopping you from leading your own tour, becoming the pre-eminent language school in your ‘hood and having a damn good time doing it?
See you on Friday for the video-podcast.
Patrick