Become host family to foreign students

It's nearly the new year, time to get busy thinking of ways to bring in more income during 2009; time to become host family to foreign students.

Become host family and host and or teach foreign students is a great way to earn a good income. There is plenty of opportunity to do this full or part time if you organise yourself in sufficient time and in January, foreign students will once again begin to look at possible host families who can help them improve their English during the year.

Better than ever, the Euro is now strong against Sterling and so all possible host families and tefl teachers need to capitalise on this while they can.

To become host family to foreign students, you first need to decide when in the year you are able to take students; will it be all year around, a few weeks or just once or twice during the year.

The busiest periods for one to one homestays in the UK tend to be during the holidays. In France the holidays in the summer are generally slightly longer than in the UK. Students will generally arrive at the end of June with the first two weeks of July being by far the busiest times for European students.

The number of visitors tapers off into August with students being back at school or university by the start of September. Note as well that many French students like to take their annual vacation to the South of France the last two weeks of August.

Other peak times for students include Easter and October with a few at Christmas.

Don't forget though that the above times tend to be for students at or under university age and there will be thousands of students who are older and prefer to visit out of season.

Consider this when you advertise your rates on Xilfee. If you want to keep busy all year around then maybe offer incentives for mid to low seasons rates.

To advertise yourself to become host family to foreign students or to teach see
www.xilfee.eu for more information and to build a profile which only takes minutes.

Top tips for well paid part time work jobs you had never thought of

If you are looking for part time work jobs and you are finding it difficult to find something which fits in well with your situation, consider hosting foreign students or teaching English as a foreign language from home.

This type of work is so flexible and if you have a family or young children, it fits around your domestic arrangements really well as the students will be expecting to spend time with all of your family.

By registering as a host family or tutor on Xilfee.eu, you will be signing up to one of the most flexible arrangments you can hope to find. To sign up is completely free and you are able to choose your students, so for instance, if you only want female students staying with you, choose only female students. You can choose their age and other things too.

Part time work jobs are not easy if you have family but with hosting, you don't have to stick ridgedly to your routine and so if one of your children is sick or just tired, you can change your day to fit around you and your family.

See the web pages of xilfee to find out more about becoming a host family or tefl teacher and how to register your profile for free.

See www.xilfee.eu for more details.

Hosting foreign students

Well, we are nearly there again, Christmas eve tomorrow.
This year it doesn't seem so much like nearly Christmas, the weather may have something to do with that.
We have worked non stop on the site trying to get it all ready for you when the new year starts in earnest. New year is the time when overseas foreign students start to look for host families for their visit to England to improve their English.

If you are interested in hosting foreign students, then now is the time too to begin preparations.

Hosting foreign students is tremendous fun. As I have probably mentioned previously, we have hosted foreign students for more than 8 years, since our daughter was very small and before our son was born (or even considered!).

In fact it was the year I was pregnant with him that we finally decided that we would make it easier for everyone to choose their own host family or foreign student by setting up an online data base.

This way it means a host family can also make more profit as there is no 'middle man'.

I would much prefer to choose the family my children are going to visit than to have some organisation who deal with thousands of children (or adults), choose for me. Believe me when I say this, I've been there and we always put ourselves out to get the best. We always felt we were a minority.

For tefl teachers who are interested in hosting foreign students, it is a great way to make money.
For parents or mothers at home with children (or who want to quit the 9 to 5) hosting foreign students is a fantastic way of making money - I will write more about this in a later post.

You can always email me if you would like more information, we have so much experience but its going to take some time to get it all down onto paper. I'm always pleased to hear from anyone interested in hosting or wishing to teach or even thinking about taking a tefl course.

If I don't get to post tomorrow, Merry Christmas to all of you.

For more info on hosting foreign students see www.xilfee.eu

New front page

We have updated the front page to hopefully, make the site easier to explain what we do.

To start with we would like to attract English host families or families how want to host and teach or tutor English. As I mentioned in a previous post, there are over 600,000 students who visit the UK annually to learn English; what better place to learn or improve your English than to live with an English family?

For more information on how to find work by joining for FREE! see www.xilfee.eu

The end of homestays in sight?

Its been talked about vaguely for years, but this year the government announced it for real.

Homestays (with homefamilies) are to be somehow legislated; that is, all families have to be police checked.

It will be very interesting to see how this is possible for homestay organisers to orchestrate. What happens if a host family drops out the night before, what happens if you need an extra family last minute?
From my experience, good host families are not abundant (not in my neck of the woods anyway), or maybe its ok to be a host family if you pass your police check and there is not a lot of other criteria? We will see.


See this quite serious piece of news dated November 14th 08 in the Independe
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/aids-orphan-choir-hit-by-red-tape-1017938.htmlnt which will affect all host families although when I called the CRB back in August, they couldn't tell me anything about it at all (they hadn't even heard anything about it).

This is the closest I could find on the CRB site for information http://www.crb.gov.uk/default.aspx?page=4696#CHANGES


See this amusing piece regarding homestays in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/jun/26/schools.uk1




Visit www.xilfee.eu to see the website

Teaching foreign languages for profit

I took a look at the British Council website today. It states that there are over 600,000 people who come to the UK each year just to learn English, not necessarily in an English school but I presume to improve their English one way or another.

That is a lot of students looking for English lessons, and a lot of students looking for hosts or host families. This is without the students who learn English online, there are many more thousand if not millions of these.

Visit www.xilfee.eu if interested in hosting a foreign student

Watch English online

Students who wish to watch English online, or any language for that matter, let me have your comments with regards to what you would like to see as short video clips.

We can then pass this on to our teachers and request that more English speaking video clips are put online. Please also let me know what are your favourite topics so that we can post videos which are interesting to you.

Of course this isn't just for learning English, its for French, Spanish or any language you wish to learn.
If you are a teacher, please post a video of the language you wish to teach.

Visit www.xilfee.eu if interested in hosting a foreign student

Teach French to Students

We are hoping to attract French teachers to the site to teach French as a second language. Does anyone have any idea what we can do to increase the level of people signing up for the service? Its completely free, no commitment and will potentially be an economical and productive way of earning money worldwide.
Is it something we are not doing or doing which is putting people off I wonder? Either way, its frustrating, Matt has worked so hard putting it together and the potential is vast.

Hosting a foreign student

Its that time of year again when normally we would be rushing around checking which host families are or or not able to host again next year for us.

However, today I have sent them all an email wishing them a happy Christmas and New Year as we are no longer directly involved in organising any trips or students ourselves.
We have made some great friends over the eight years of taking students (some years we 'processed' over 1000 students) but it was hard work physically and emotionally demanding.
Apart from being very time consuming. I'm not sorry to not be doing these trips any more.

Also, by the time the language school had taken their fees, then we have to take some out (otherwise what would we be doing it for) the host family is left with very little and they are the ones who have to feed the children.

Now that host families have the option of signing up to xilfee, they can earn more, quite a bit more as it happens.

Likewise, if you are looking for an English teacher, or a language teacher of any sort really, lessons will be less expensive as you don't have to pay a chunk of your hourly rate out to a third party.