EC Brighton

Student Testimonial

Enjoyable language stay in times of Corona.
When I was planning my language stay to improve my English skills, (unfortunately) the destinations were limited because of the travel restrictions. So, one of the options, which I got from my agency, was Brighton. A lovely town on the south coast of England with a beautiful beach, nice cafés and restaurants and a wonderful countryside, which is easy reachable with the Coaster bus in every 10 minutes. Of course, I was worried about doing a language stay in times of Corona. However, today I know that this was just a part of my experience but not what had a lasting effect on my time in Brighton.
More important are my experiences with my classmates and the passionate teacher Sam at EC School, the evenings, which I spent together with my host fathers, or the time outside of school together with my new friends. Especially EC School Brighton was very accommodating when we from Switzerland had to stay in quarantine for the first two weeks at our host family’s house.
We got our English book personally delivered by the head of the school that we can start with online lessons via Teams and the school made also sure that we can stay as comfortable as possible in our host families. It wasn’t the start we had expected, but we managed well because they were well-prepared with all the different online teams, the online material and the remote speaking sessions and we got also a really helpful introduction at the beginning so we had all information, which we needed. Of course, after quarantine all the joy was then all the greater to explore Brighton and visit the school locally. Despite the pandemic, I felt always safe during my time in England because Brighton wasn’t that affected by Covid cases and also because of the restrictions, which hardly differ from other countries. For example, in school we had to wear a mask (nowadays it is as normal as having your mobile phone with you), have enough space between each other’s table, get additional exercises as an online version, lessons where you bring your own device and they make sure that we can avoid personal contact as much as possible. All in all, the quality of teaching does not suffer from the pandemic. Furthermore, it was also possible to visit famous culture heritage sites in our free time like Stonehenge, University of Oxford and Cambridge, Bath, go for a sightseeing trip to London, visiting the Harry Potter studios or walking on the top of the Seven Sisters. The list could go on! I think one advantage here doing all these things was that theses places were less crowded than normal because of Covid

Katja Urben
Switzerland