Back in carefree 1994, when Ace of Base and exchange trips were de rigueur, I spent a happy week with a fun and slightly crazy French family near Lyon.

The dad had built their house with his own bare hands and slaughtered his own pigs to make saucisson.

The vast meadow-like garden sloped down towards the Rhone Valley, the children were free and boisterous and took things in their stride. I was stiff and English, but open-minded and keen to improve my French.

Health and safety was also relaxed - from the bare wires springing out of the wall in the bathroom to the 12-year-old daughter riding pillion on her dad’s motorbike as we crammed in the back of a tiny Renault.

These were my formative years, and besides an awful lot of French, I learnt that there were other ways to live life.

I learnt that school canteens didn’t have to serve disgusting food and that not everyone had compulsory piano practice.

My week away evolved into further visits…they were exhausting and occasionally maddening but formed some of my sharpest memories of youth.

So, it is with dismay that I read this week that the foreign exchange trip is under threat. School leaders have said they are increasingly less keen to even take children on the Eurostar to Paris because of the fear of terrorism.

The bureaucracy around carrying out checks on host families is proving too much for some. There are also concerns about passing the costs of exchanges onto families.

We are all too poor, and too scared, to even travel to a neighbouring European country, it seems.

A British Council survey in 2014 found that only 39 per cent of schools are now running them and this is sure to have dropped.

But cancelling the school exchange trip - which offers a unique insight into life beyond the tourist-zones - is surely folly. It means that foreign visits and language learning are allowed to become the preserve of only a privileged few whose parents have money and contacts to arrange things privately.

Costs are not an insurmountable barrier. Some parents will be able to pay, and ongoing fund raising can surely fill in the gaps. Exchanges are certainly cheaper than ski trips and outdoor adventure weeks as accommodation is free.

And as for parental fears, I’m not saying I won’t be anxious when my boys pop off abroad in their early teens. But they will be checked up on by teachers, take part in group activities, and have plenty of chances to blow the whistle if anything dodgy is going on. A large number of schools still do manage, so it is not impossible.

I have been teaching my boys French since they were born, and they speak it, badly, with cockney accents. I can’t wait for them to go and find out how French people really speak.

And they will have the chance to swap swear words and phrases describing amusing body parts in their respective languages, as I did with my exchange friend.

If more young people were allowed to have these sort of international interactions, perhaps we would not be facing Brexit right now.

Let’s not allow our paranoid fears to take that chance away from them.

Irena Barker, a writer and mother of three children, two of whom are at primary school

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