It was almost certainly my own school French exchange to Évreux, in northern France, in 1983 that made me want to study languages at university, become a teacher of them, and go on to run exchanges for my own pupils to Russia, France, Germany and Spain for the past 25 years, as well as facilitating each of my three children to do at least one during their time at senior school.

There is, quite simply, no better linguistic, educational and cultural experience for pupils than living with a family, conversing with them daily, and sampling first-hand the culinary and cultural delicacies of that particular country.

So I was devastated when it became clear that our school, like many others, could not continue to do exchange trips.

The challenges have been growing year on year and, in 2017, the final hurdle has proved too much. Changes in regulatory guidance from the Department of Education, which came into effect last September, require all schools to further strengthen the processes and procedures concerning the checks to be carried out on host families to ensure that they are suitable to care for any children to whom they are not related.

This essentially means that anyone over 18 in a host family would need to undergo full police checks (a costly and time-consuming process) because hosting any foreign student under 18 (unless a private arrangement) is considered temporary fostering.

Even before the new rules came into effect, it has been a struggle to keep exchanges going over the past few years. Fewer teenagers seem willing to leave the security of the nest and live with another family for nine days.

The pairing process has become time-consuming and complicated, as more and more parents have (albeit understandably in some cases) insisted on their children being in non-smoking, allergy-free, vegetarian, gluten-free or animal-free households. While any hotel-based trips fill up quickly, it is a struggle to fill exchanges.

And it isn’t just language exchanges that are affected by society’s kid-gloves approach to safeguarding. Sports tours, where participants were to be billeted in families as a way of making the trips more affordable, will now have to ensure that all accommodation is non-family based.

While I fully understand that our children need to be as safe on school trips as is realistically possible, isn’t life full of all sorts of risks? Don’t the benefits of language exchanges outweigh these?

‘Society’s gone mad’

Things are already a lot safer than they used to be: all pupils now have mobile phones and instant contact with me while in the host country. Everyone I have spoken to about this situation, including pupils, fellow teachers, friends and family, has the same reaction to the fact that exchanges cannot take place any more - they, almost verbatim, say “That’s ridiculous”, “Society’s gone mad” and “I don’t believe it”.

I would implore those making the decisions to see sense - otherwise, how long will it be before parents have to insist on full CRB checks on every member of a family to whom they send their child for a sleepover? Other European countries find these measures almost laughable - why can we not have faith in our fellow human beings?

Simon Ravenhall is head of modern foreign languages at Yarm School, North Yorkshire