What exactly is the role of a modern au-pair?

[new2cm]

I started this thread following a discovery I made during an AIBR thread.

This is what I thought an au-pair was:

A young woman between the ages of 16-26, going to a country to live with a family, with the primary aim to learn its language and its culture, by attending a recognised English course for a minimum of 10 hours a week. Like a student, but instead of the student paying the host for lodgings, the au-pair lives free of charge with a family, in exchange for doing free childcare and paid pocket money of up to £70 per week (in other words, £10 per day) for doing light household chores (e.g vacuum cleaning the children's bedroom, preparing the children's meals, tidying up children's bedroom, doing children's ironing).

Apparently, this is not the case. They are now employees, doing a nanny's job but being paid an hourly rate rather than a salary.

Does this mean that a modern au-pair no longer needs to attend college to learn English?

This has completely thrown me. I will google some more tomorrow morning but I am interested, seeing that I am a part-time childminder, I should know these things. and

New2cm - Yes an AP+ does 35 hours a week but that is stipulated in the contract and you pay more for them. But again there should be NO sole charge of small children and the older ones are likely to be at school/nursery so dont need 7 hours worth of care.

If you are AP+ there should be some sort of contract/agreement in place as to what your actual job is. Why take on a job if you dont actually know what you are going to do? If its stipulated that you will be doing 10 hours of cleaning then you cant really compalin afterwards if thats what you have already been told.

Even if you're a 'straight' AP you need to have a contract in place which should specify what your job is.

Whether there's sole charge or not, or extended care or not, is entirely down to the individuals involved.

The terms au pair and au pair plus should definitely be scrapped as they're horrifically misleading.

AS ever agrees with everything FRak says, bows to MrA superior knowledge of employment law and is horrified that some people are still claiming they are not employees no matter how many times it is proved with links to the relevant case law.