The first day of a course, in order

The first day is the one students worry about and the one nobody describes to them. So here it is, in order, from the aeroplane to the first evening meal.

At the airport

A member of our staff is waiting past customs with a Roseworth sign. Not at the gate — you cannot get to a gate — but in the arrivals hall, which is the first place you can be met. They have your photograph and your flight number.

If your flight is delayed, they wait. If it is diverted, they follow it. This is the part parents ask about most and it is the part that is most thoroughly arranged: somebody is tracking the flight, not standing hopefully at a barrier.

What you do: come through, look for the sign, say your name. If you cannot see anybody, do not leave the arrivals hall — call the number on your arrival sheet, which is the same number your parents have.

Then you wait. Usually for other students on later flights, sometimes for an hour or more. This is the dullest part of the whole fortnight and it is where the group starts, because six teenagers with nothing to do and no shared language except English will talk to each other. Every group leader will tell you the same thing: the airport wait is where friendships get made.

Getting to the city

By coach or train, with the group, accompanied. Depending on the destination this is twenty minutes or two hours. Sleep if you need to — most students do.

Meeting the host family

Families collect their students from an agreed point, usually a school or a station, in the late afternoon. You will be introduced by name, and the group leader will not leave until every student has gone with the right family.

The first hour is awkward. That is normal and it is not a sign of anything. You will be shown your room, the bathroom, where the towels are, what time meals happen and how the front door key works. You will be asked whether you are hungry, and the honest answer is usually yes.

Three pieces of advice from students who have done it:

• Say your name slowly and then say it again. Everybody mishears a name the first time, in every language, and a family who has your name right on day one is a family you are comfortable with by day three.
• Ask where things are rather than working it out. Asking is normal. Wandering the house at midnight looking for a glass is what feels awkward.
• Bring something small from home. Not obligatory and not expensive — a food, a photograph, something from your city. It gives everybody something to talk about at the first meal, and the first meal is the hardest one.

What a host family is actually like, and how they are chosen and checked, is in host family or student residence. On the New York and Toronto courses accommodation differs — New York is a university residence — and the first evening is a group meal instead.

The first evening

Dinner with the family, at whatever time that household eats, which in Britain is often earlier than students expect — six or half past six is common. Then usually not much: unpacking, messaging home, sleep.

Do message home. Agree the time before you leave, and then keep to it — how do I know my child is safe explains why a fixed time works better than an open one, for you as much as for your parents.

The second morning: the placement test

This is the part students dread and it is genuinely nothing.

Every student sits a short written test and has a two-minute conversation with a teacher. It is not an examination, there is no pass mark, and nobody sees your result except the staff placing you. Its only purpose is to put you in a class where the level is right — too high and you learn nothing because you are lost, too low and you learn nothing because you are bored.

Two things students do that make it worse, so do neither: revising for it, and trying to look better than you are. A student who performs above their level spends a fortnight struggling. Answer at your natural level and the fortnight works.

How much English does my child need covers this in more detail, including what happens if you are a near-beginner.

By late morning you are in a class. By the afternoon you are somewhere in the city with the group. The course has started.

What the first week actually feels like

Honestly: days one to three are tiring in a way students do not anticipate. Not the walking — the listening. Concentrating on a second language for fourteen hours a day is genuinely hard work, and most students are asleep by nine on the first two nights.

Homesickness, if it comes, comes on day two or three, almost never on day one, and it almost always passes. Every group leader has seen it a hundred times. Tell them; that is what they are there for.

Then somewhere around day four something changes, and every student describes it the same way: they stop translating. A question gets answered before it has been converted. That is the moment the fortnight was bought for, and it arrives on its own.

The one thing to do before you travel

Read your arrival sheet, and put the emergency number in your phone under a name you will recognise at two in the morning. Not in a folder — in your phone.

Everything else is in what to pack for two weeks in England, and if you have not chosen weeks yet, which weeks and how early to book matters more than most families expect.