School Trips: Passport and Visa Requirements

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

Some ID cards are among the least secure documents seen at the border, as they were before we left the EU. As a rule, they are not as secure as corresponding national passports.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare a family interest in that my younger daughter is a schoolteacher at a rural lycée in the centre of France in the Sarthe region. Every two years, until recently, she would bring a party of up to 40 of her 16 to 18 year- old students to London for a week’s cultural visit, which gave them an amazing experience and a lifelong love of England and English people. These have all now stopped because very few of the students have a passport; as a result, as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, referred to, they are now looking at destinations such as Ireland. Will she take on board the comments of President Kennedy about the value of international exchange students, when he said of foreign students studying in the US:

“I think they teach more than they learn”?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I do not disagree with the noble Lord about the value of foreign travel for students at any age. It absolutely enriches their experience. However, we expect tourists who visit the UK from outside the EU to hold a passport and we will now be expecting those from EU and EEA countries and Switzerland to do the same.