Each year, thousands of students from around the world travel to Canada to experience school life and learn another language, writes Susan Young

It’s almost lunchtime at École Secondaire Notre Dame High School in Red Deer, Alberta, and two students are heading to the canteen with their new friends. Just weeks ago, Andreas and Miguel were living with their families several thousand miles south, in their home towns in Mexico. Now the teenagers – aged 16 and 18 – are looking forward to a Canadian winter, getting academic credits for university and improving their English.

To their 1,600 classmates at Notre Dame, and in hundreds of other Canadian public schools, the boys are the latest teens to join a long-running cultural exchange, which has been welcoming students from all over the world since the 1980s.

“These programmes started first and foremost to bring diversity to schools in parts of Canada which, 20 or 30 years ago, were not so diverse,” said Bonnie McKie, executive director of the Canadian Association of Public Schools – International (Caps-I). More than 600 high schools in 128 Canadian school districts have international student programmes, which are managed and marketed worldwide by Caps-I. In 2015, around 26,000 students attended academic year or semester programmes, with thousands more on short-term stays.