Meet our overseas language & activity instructors
We have a highly trained team of overseas staff who are responsible for your school groups. By training and managing the teams ourselves, we can maintain consistently high levels of instruction, safety and quality standards.
French-native animateurs trained at our centre of excellence
Our method of teaching French is through language immersion, where learners only hear and speak French throughout their stay.
What makes our language immersion programmes different from the traditional school trip is that they are run by our own animateurs, a hand-picked team of French-native activity leaders who have undertaken training at our flagship French language centre, Château de la Baudonnière.
It’s the animateur’s job to spend time with your students, build their confidence and encourage them to speak French at every opportunity, coaxing even the most reticent French learners to take part. They make experiences memorable and fun and as a result, fears of making mistakes are reduced and confidence increased.
Time and time again teachers say that their animateur is like ‘having another teacher on the trip’. They run the whole programme for you so you can relax and enjoy seeing your students learn in an 'outside the classroom' environment
We have been running French immersion programmes at the Château for over 20 years which means we have unrivalled experience recruiting, training and developing our animateurs to ensure they deliver the best learning to your students. What’s more, our animateur training course has been co-designed by a former Headteacher and Head of MFL to ensure that all our activities support current language pedagogy and curriculum.
Read a teacher's first-hand account of taking a school group on a French language immersion trip on the TES website.
Spanish Monitores and German Betreuers will get your pupils talking
Using our considerable experience offering French language immersion programmes for schools, we have developed Spanish and German language programmes which use native-speaking group leaders to provide an authentic and immersive language experience for your learners.
As with our French immersion programmes, your school group will have a specially trained activity leader who will deliver all on-site activities, mealtimes and evening games in the target language to create a truly authentic and immersive environment.
To ensure that we offer a high-quality immersive language immersion across all our programmes, the senior Spanish monitores and German Bertreuers have been trained by our French Château team.
Designed to give your students plenty of opportunities to use the language they are studying, our Spanish and German programmes offer a mix of on-site adventure activities, combined with local excursions and visits, to provide an authentic taste of local culture.