About
Charles Eaton was founded in 2000 by a mother and son who wanted to share their vibrant seaside town with the world. We are still family-run, and we are still doing what we started out doing: welcoming young learners from across Europe into safe and secure host family homes in Hastings, East Sussex.
Our work, in numbers:
Families who have been doing this for years
Eighty-three families host with us today, and over the years 91 families have welcomed ten or more bookings of students. That continuity is the whole business. A family who has been hosting for a decade already knows what a nervous fourteen-year-old needs on their first evening away from home, and that is not something we could recruit for or train into someone in a season.
It is also why we are careful at the start. We meet every prospective host family in their own home before they welcome their first student, and we stay on call from arrival to departure for the whole of every stay.
A town with a long habit of welcoming students
Hastings has been welcoming young people from across Europe for decades, and we are one part of a much older tradition. We are a member of HOSAC, the Hastings Overseas Student Advisory Council, which brings the town's schools, hosts and organisers around the same table.
Students who stay with us get to know the town our own families know: the Old Town, the climb up West Hill to the castle, the seafront at St Leonards-on-Sea and the quieter beaches at Bexhill-on-Sea. Sharing that is the part we enjoy most, and it is why a family-run school in a small seaside town has kept going since 2000.
We listen to what students tell us
Every student who stays with us is invited to tell us how it went, in their own words, at the end of their stay. We have more than 800 of those records now, and they are the most useful thing we own. They tell us which families to send students back to, and they tell us where we need to do better.
