In one sense, the students are on their own. As has already been suggested, it is important that they should develop an increased self-awareness and self-confidence as a result of confronting and overcoming challenges of various sorts. The responses of students in debriefing sessions after their return indicate that, in a great majority of cases, they certainly feel that they have done so.

None the less, problems arise. Students are occasionally the victims of crime, as they could be anywhere, or come up against a range of unpleasant situations. In such cases, a support system is essential and the students must be aware of what it is and how it operates on their behalf. Every few years, an article appears in one of the national dailies, reporting that students on a year abroad claim to have been abandoned by their university: no-one at the host institution is interested in them, the courses they were promised have not materialised, the response from the home institution has been inadequate. The facts often turn out to be different from the report but the perceptions are important.

In fact, the support systems have been improved in recent years. The creation of ERASMUS/SOCRATES exchange schemes has meant that it was possible for the first time for British HEIs to expect that a member of staff in the host institution would be made responsible for pastoral care. Given the novelty of the concept in many countries, the practice often falls short of the expectation, but the principle is one that systems can be built on. When students undertake a work-placement, even if they have set up the arrangement themselves, the home department will normally expect there to be a supervisor in the firm who will be responsible for their general well-being.

The data assembled by LARA indicate that normal practice in the majority of HEIs includes visits by staff and contact by letter, telephone, fax and email, as the following returns from the NRAD survey show:

Contact at a distance usually involves providing the address, telephone and fax numbers and email address of a tutor or departmental office, with an invitation to report any problems or raise any queries about the period abroad. Some departments issue a newsletter from time to time as a means of maintaining contact.

Support via the Internet

The rapid and universal development of the Internet provides an excellent opportunity to tackle the perennial problem of students abroad feeling cut off from their home institution and consequently losing sight of the need to maintain a forward momentum in all their activities, which in extreme cases may lead to their failing to fulfil the requirements of the period of residence abroad.

An effective method is to set up a web-page specifically for the students abroad. It can remind them of deadlines, inform them of tutors' visits or changes at the home institution and serve as a notice-board providing details of, for instance, accommodation available after their return. If "dead" information is removed as soon as possible and a regular input of news maintained, the students will fall into the habit of checking it regularly. Once the page is set up, it requires only some simple web-skills and an hour or so a week on the part of a member of staff.

Even if the students do not have easy access to the Internet through their host university or workplace abroad, the number of Internet cafés across Europe has been increasing rapidly, offering the facility of picking up e-mail via an ISP's website for the price of a cup of coffee. This means that, if every student has been required to register for e-mail with one of the free international providers, e.g. Hotmail (http://hotmail.com) or Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) or Rocketmail (http://rocketmail.com), and to leave details of their e-mail address, the home department can set up appropriate e-mail groups (one for those at a particular university, one for all those in a given country and so on) and have instant communication with any group of students, even to the point of targeting those enrolled on a particular module in the following year. One of the great advantages of such a system is that it can be used not only for sending out information from the home department but also for exchanges of information and views between students. This is valuable in the area of intercultural learning in that it allows a broadening of the debate on cultural matters across different centres, regions or even countries.

Video-conferencing

Video-conferencing has been mooted as a further support mechanism and one or two HEIs are investigating its possibilities. However, given the cost, the time and expertise required and the difficulty of establishing links with institutions or companies abroad, it is unlikely to get beyond the experimental stage in the foreseeable future.

Visits by staff

From a position twenty-five years ago when it was unusual for a student abroad to be visited by a tutor, the practice of sending one or more members of the department on a tour of centres where students were grouped rose to a peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It has now been declining again for some years. Responses to the NRAD questionnaire showed that 49% of course-teams visited all their students abroad, 33% some of them and 18% none. 60% said they had funds earmarked for visits; those who visited only some or none of their students cited financial constraints and inadequate staffing as by far the most important reasons. 15% thought that visits were unnecessary.

It is rare now for students spending a year abroad to be visited more than once and the single visit is most likely to be in the first semester. That suggests that, apart from the opportunity to discuss administrative matters with colleagues from partner institutions, the visit is seen primarily as a way of reassuring the students and offering advice on problems that have arisen during the early weeks of their stay. The students certainly appreciate such reassurance and, in the case of work-placements, a meeting with a representative of the company at that stage is often the only way to sort out the confusion and difficulties that may have arisen. However, the value of a visit towards the end of the student's stay is that it can be used as an opportunity to carry out a part of the assessment (an oral test, a written report, the submission of a diary, the assessment of data gathered for a project or dissertation). Units/modules/parts of the course are, in most institutions, assessed at the end of the unit. If none of the outcomes of the student's learning over the period abroad is considered in any way until the start of the following academic year, the student is less motivated and less inclined to see the period abroad as an integral part of the course.

Parental involvement

The point at which the line between student self-reliance and support from the home institution should be drawn is not clear and seems to vary from one HEI to another. LARA has received reports of an increasing tendency for parents to intervene on behalf of their offspring and to assert their own expectations of what constitutes reasonable support, in some cases going straight to higher authority within the university. Respondents to the NRAD questionnaire referred to parents 'fretting' and made comments such as 'some parents expect us to look after their children much more while they are abroad than when they are in the UK'. As a result, departments are covering themselves by requiring their students to sign for receipt of the advisory documentation or to register their attendance at preparatory sessions prior to departure, so that it is clear that advice on key aspects of residence abroad was given even if not acted upon. Such precautions are in fact advisable in the light of the legal liabilities of universities (see 13. Current issues).

That need not necessarily be seen solely as a by-product of an increasingly litigious age. It can also be interpreted as a first, albeit small step towards making explicit the respective responsibilities of the student and the home institution, a principle which can lead towards the development of a proper learning agreement and make the assessment of the experience of residence abroad a fully integrated element of the course.