2020 has been an unprecedented year. We are now familiar with words such as lockdown and pandemic and probably even tired of them! This has been with no doubt a very challenging year for all of us.

As citizens and professionals, we saw our countries going through a massive hurricane of health crises, lost jobs, shaken economies and many people in need of help. All of this along with the impossibility of seeing and hugging our loved ones resulted in an experience we don’t want to repeat. Ever!

As a business operating mainly in the Asian market, we started feeling the repercussions of Coronavirus very early in the year. We were only able to host a few groups of students in January, having more than half of our groups cancelled due to the virus. Then the closed borders, the first lockdown and the uncertainty we all lived forced us to close the company for a few months. 

Once we had the chance, each one of us safely working from home, the whole team gathered efforts and we started working in finding ways to adapt our business and to keep in contact with our students, families and clients.  Obviously we soon realised we had no other choice but to go online: a new challenge and adventure!

Since to provide a cultural exchange experience has always been a very important part of the work we develop and one of our main passions is to offer our students the unique opportunity to get to know a new country while learning a new language, and since Coronavirus took that possibility from us, we decided to develop an online programme to offer our students the possibility to contact and learn about a different culture despite being at home. And that is how our Virtual Buddy Exchange Programme was born, a programme where the students have the opportunity to meet a foreign buddy and his/her culture while chatting about several interesting topics addressing relevant issues such as Technology, Social Media or Environmental Protection.

We are also working on a new and improved website and we are now on social media (Facebook, Instagram and Youtube). We are trying to get closer to you and make it easy for you to follow all our new projects. One thing we have learnt in 2020 is that we really don’t know what the future holds, but at Kingston Study Centre we always try to face new challenges with an open mind in order to overcome the adversities and we work hard to keep up with our students needs. So stay with us, stay tuned!

The unique circumstances of 2020, the impossibility to travel abroad and the need of protecting ourselves and our loved ones by staying at home, took from us the opportunity to host students in the UK and to offer them the chance to immerse themselves into the British Culture.

Therefore, we decided to embrace the challenge and try something different and totally new from us: an online programme designed to offer our students the possibility to contact and learn about a different culture and to meet new friends without leaving home. Besides that it would also allow us to be closer and available to our students, so that was how our Virtual Buddy Exchange Programme was born.

The Virtual Buddy Exchange Programme enables the students (and sometimes the parents as well!) to meet a foreign buddy and his/her culture by chatting about several interesting topics such as Technology, Social Media or Environmental Protection. The programme has been designed to promote soft skills such as empathy, patience and problem-solving while developing more practical precious skills like to be able to communicate in a  different language with a person from a different background. All of this while learning about very fun topics such as Language, Culture, Gastronomy or more relevant and current issues such as Environmental Protection and the positives or negatives of Social Media.

The current version of the VBE was developed to be a 6 weeks programme, with a 90-minute session per week to talk about 2 different topics but we are able to develop a tailored version according to the group needs. You can find more information on the website and we are always available to hear your thoughts and answer your queries. Don’t hesitate to contact us, we want to hear from you!