Foreign Perspectives

Archive for September, 2006

If you’ve been watching the “moving to France” TV series that seem to be on almost non-stop these days, you’d think that there would be no problem in getting kids into school here. After all, the kids just seem to go to the local school and if they don’t speak French, it doesn’t seem to be a problem. Perhaps you’re thinking that the presence of a TV crew eases the process considerably and I’ve no doubt that it does. However, we’ve friends and aquaintances in other regions of France and they’ve never had a problem in getting their children enrolled in school regardless of age or ability in French.

Things are different in the Pyrenees Orientale though.

If your child isn’t a fluent French speaker by the time they hit 16, then they will not be educated by any school in the state education system within the Pyrenees Orientale. What happens at that age is that you are passed onto Inspection Academic who in turn pass you on to the College Albert Camus and specifically the CIPPA class so that you can learn French and thereby get into an appropriate lycee (for age 17-18). There is only one problem with that scenario: Madame Benzine runs CIPPA as a remedial class for children from French speaking countries and just treats any non-French speakers as an inconvenience to be gotten rid of as soon as possible. The net effect of that is that if your child has no other option than CIPPA (and they won’t be given any other option if they reach 16 and don’t speak French fluently here), then that’s the end of their education.

Surely, not? Don’t children have some right to education up to 18? I thought so, but apparently the French locally read the fact that schooling is optional after age 16 as meaning that they don’t need to provide it and in particular don’t need to provide any means to teach you French after age 16. Having said that, everyone in the administrative side of education seems to think that CIPPA does actually teach French (and perhaps it is supposed to) but Madame Benzine chooses to ignore that and seems to go out of her way to encourage non-French speakers to leave the class as soon as possible. “You missed a class because your car was being repaired and the bus drivers were on strike? You should have walked in”. “How? It’s over 30km: it would have taken five or six hours”. “I gave him a question sheet every morning and he didn’t answer any of the questions on it. He has no motivation.” Emmm, he can’t read French and couldn’t understand the questions. “It’s mathematics: of course he could understand it:. He’s just lazy. ” Actually, no, because the questions are entirely in French. That’s the kind of person running CIPPA in Perpignan.

It’s not much easier from age 11 to 16 either, as all colleges that don’t have to take your child, quite simply won’t take them if they don’t speak fluent French (and I do stress “fluent”: they won’t accept anything less). Instead, they will direct you toward the Inspection Academic in Perpignan who in turn will pass directly to the CIPPA class. If your child is in that age range, you can get them accepted into the college designated for your commune but even then it’s not always easy but never accept the CIPPA option if your child is in that age range.

What about primary school then? That’s a little easier than the college as they are attached to the various mairies therefore the one associated with your commune will have to take your children from age 6 to 11. However, those not attached to your commune will usually refuse to accept your child unless they happen to be fluent French speakers. Would you be happy with your 11 year old having to get up around 6am to catch the first bus into town, then changing buses in the centre of town to get to a remedial class in a country where they don’t speak the language? That’s the option you’ll be given if you don’t push the matter with your own mairie.

We have, surprisingly, managed nursery school with, so far, no problems. However, we fully expect that James will encounter problems getting into primary school in this area. Even now, the local doctor couldn’t understand why he couldn’t speak French. Why would he? If we spoke French to him he’d just end up with a dreadful French accent not to mention bad grammar and vocabulary. Oh, and he’d not learn to speak English.

The strange thing is that the French always talk about integrating immigrants into French society. I don’t know about elsewhere, but in the Pyrenees Orientale, it’s definitely all talk because there’s certainly no support given to you if your children don’t speak fluent French.

The other strange thing is that the teachers (except Madame Benzine) all seem to be quite supportive of the kids and fully expect that children of all ages will pick up the language fairly quickly. The problem seems to be that the administrators simply won’t let them try and without the approval of an administrator you just can’t get into a school.

Arnold

I spent the third week of August in Santiago de Compostela on an intensive residential as part of the Open University’s Spanish programme.

When you get all the documentation about the residential school a few months in advance the immediate reaction of most people is “Ahhhhh!!!! I can’t do this!” but in reality the relaxed atmosphere makes it seem relatively easy once you get going on it. As it’s part of a second year university course, right from registration on Saturday through to checking out on Friday, everyone is quite insistent that Spanish is spoken all the time. It might seem hard at the time but the idea is to force you to think in Spanish and to do that the best approach is to “live” in Spanish as far as possible.

As it was going to be quite a packed week, I went on the Friday which made for quite a relaxing Saturday (or would have done if I’d not walked right round Santiago in the morning) as the enrollment doesn’t start ’til after 2pm and the course doesn’t formally start until 7pm with the introductory lecture and first introductory class. Usually the first class seems to be amongst the hardest as if you’re not that fluent it’s often difficult to keep the Spanish operational late into the evening.

Sunday was quite short and not really as good as it could have been. In the French residential you have to write up a questionnaire in the morning and then go around the town interviewing people but in the Spanish one, we were given the questionnaire which I didn’t find to be nearly as useful in terms of learning and using Spanish. One unexpected problem we found that the very high proportion of tourists on the Sunday meant that we were often asking tourists the questions rather than the locals.

For the rest of the week, classes generally run all morning with the afternoons being effectively free though included in that “free” time is a visit to the cathedral and La Coruna. Surprisingly, Friday was actually quite a full day as it usually winds down with people leaving for their flights but the departure times in Santiago are quite convenient for the course so just about everyone was there until lunchtime.

Was it a good course though? I think so. Yes, it didn’t seem intensive but with around 20 hours Spanish classes in a week that’s what it was. The relaxed atmosphere makes it feel easier than it is but you do work hard and are tired at the end of each day. One thing that did surprise me was that all of the lecture rooms that were available to us were very much lecture rooms. The fixed rows of seats don’t really fit in that well with modern language teaching as it tends to involve a lot of group work and therefore moveable tables are much better. I assume that this seating arrangement is typical for Spanish universities but don’t really know for sure.

Strangely for a language course, the OU doesn’t have a residential for the final year of the Spanish course when most people feel that they’d need it most. Net effect is that a group of the tutors got together and set up what is effectively the OU residential in Alicante. Unfortunately, it isn’t part of the OU and therefore they can’t really advertise it as such so it’s a much smaller affair and only runs one week. It’s also quite expensive at around £500 for the week. However, there are alternatives to that and indeed the University of Santiago runs two week courses for around £400 so, at the moment, I’m thinking that I’ll do that next year: almost twice as much Spanish for £100 less seems like a good deal to me.

If you’re moving to France with kids, you probably think that, naturally, they’ll grow up to be bilingual.

Think again. If your kids are broadly between 7 and 17 when you get here, then their current level of English is the highest that it will ever be. Surely not? Well, think about it: if you move to an area without wall to wall brits, then their friends are going to be French and once they start going out with their friends around 10-ish then it will be their French that gets better and better, not their English. If you send them to a French school, it will be the French names for countries that they learn in geography, the French names for chemicals in chemistry, etc.

In fact, it’s worse than that might appear to be. We have friends who arrived here about 5 years ago and are now finding that it’s starting to become difficult to speak to their ten year old daughter. The two sisters always chat to each other in French and so begins their loss of English. I’ve seen what happens in such cases years down the line in that we met Christopher who was similarily born in France to English parents but whilst able to speak French fluently, wasn’t fluent in English and we found it almost impossible to communicate with him in English as it had so many gaps in it. In fact, he had more key gaps in his English than many a foreigner learning English has. All the little phrases that tie things together are specifically taught to foreigners, but he never learnt those.

So what can you do? Well, where Christopher’s parents lost out was that they didn’t make a point of developing his English language abilities. When he was born there was no satellite TV, no Amazon, few British shops, and no discount airlines. These days, you can create a little bit of “home” in the midst of France by letting your kids watch the TV as though they were still in the UK (one of the worst things you can do is to let them watch French TV). As indeed should you for otherwise you’ll find yourself becoming more and more of a foreigner when you return “home” or talk to friends & relatives that you left behind. You need to buy the English childrens’ story books and teach them the nursery rhymes that they won’t learn in a French school. Take them back “home” on holiday too. It’s not just English that you need to teach them but British culture too.

But go further than that: as they begin school, use the Wednesday afternoons to bring their English reading and writing up to speed when they’re young. Later on, you’ll need to consider a bilingual or international school or perhaps boarding school in the UK.

Yes, it sounds like a lot of hard work. It is. But unless you want to lose the ability to communicate with your kids, it’s work that you need to do.

Santiago is world famous for its magificent cathedral and the thousands of pilgrims that it attracts throughout the year, but what is the town really like?

In fact the section of the town that is most famous is actually quite small. It’s very easy to walk right around the famous section in under an hour if you don’t dawdle and in fact almost all of the tourists and pilgrims (it’s often difficult to distinguish between them) see a very small portion of the town which is consequently incredibly crowded. Even in the evening you can find it difficult to get a table in a restaurant, despite the large number of them in this area.

However, it doesn’t take much of a walk to get outside the touristy parts of the town. Almost everyone appears to cross the road from the park and walk along the Rua Franco to the cathedral which makes this, of course, one of the most crowded streets in the town. But, if instead of going straight towards the cathedral, you turn right within a few hundred yards you’ll find yourself in the modern section of the town which is full of “normal” shops and almost completely devoid of tourists. You almost get the impression that the inhabitants of the town like it that way as you’re immediately into a very Gallician area with signs in the local language rather than Spanish.

Whereas the tourist sections are lively at night with street theatre, in the modern town you don’t get any of that and the streets are almost deserted when it gets dark. If you’re looking for nightlife it seems to be best to stick to the areas around the cathedral as we found that most things seemed to close down around 10pm in the new town with just a few things such as some restaurants and cinemas staying open a little later than that. If you want to watch a film, bear in mind that in the new town all the films are in Spanish and there are no subtitles.

If you’re looking for a quiet stroll in the evening, try some of the numerous parks in the new town. In many cases, you’ll find that you have the places pretty much to yourself which makes a welcome change from pushing through the crowded streets in the cathedral area. There aren’t nearly as many restaurants in this area but it’s very easy to get a table and, of course, you get much more authentic Gallician food than you’ll find in the restaurants in the tourist area.

Customer service is one of those wooly concepts that few people really think about most of the time. OK, just about every place has a “customer service” department in some form but as far as most people are concerned, it’s where you go when you’ve some kind of problem. Change of address? Just see Customer Service? Want a refund? Customer Service deals with that.

At the other extreme you have the likes of First Direct where there doesn’t seem to be a “customer service” department as such because everyone you talk to considers that it’s their business to be serving you. In fact, in over 10 years of using them, I’ve only once or twice been referred to someone else and that’s been for a specialist thing like buying shares or whatever.

What we all forget though is that “customer service” isn’t something that the Customer Service department do. It’s done in part by everyone in the various companies that we deal with.

Except in France.

Here, the customer very definitely is considered an inconvenience to be tolerated. Not just in the dreadful companies either.

Consider Carrefour, one of the largest retailing company in the world. In France, it charges EUR 25 for a charge card that can only be used in its own stores. In Spain it offers a Visa card free of charge. Why? Simply because the French will tolerate such behaviour and the Spanish won’t.

Last year we ordered heating oil from them because they said on their adverts that we could pay by card. I even checked that when I called to order the oil. As it happened we were out the day that it was delivered so the delivery guy left a phone number for us to call to make the payment. We called them. Nope, we don’t do that, call this other number. Nope, we don’t do that, call this number instead. Turned out that was the number we had just called so they said a supervisor would call us back. A month later a reminder arrived to say we’d not paid so I faxed them with the card details. About two months later a further, slightly threatening letter arrived telling us to pay up or else. I posted a recorded delivery letter this time (businesses often ignore anything that isn’t recorded delivery in France). A week later, I got a call from a guy who wouldn’t take my card details for the payment but said that he’d get someone else to phone me back. No phone call but a month later we get a letter saying that our case had been passed on to the debt collectors and adding EUR 100 or so of charges. I faxed and posted yet another recorded delivery letter itemising the above saga and telling them to come and collect the money (legally businesses in France must accept cash). Finally, I got a call from the debt collection guy who admitted that in fact they don’t accept payment by card because the machines that they had issued to the delivery guys don’t work. So, in Carrefour the customer is definitely a nuisance to be passed on to someone else if at all possible.

Just two weeks ago I was in Santiago. We could have had breakfast in the place we were staying but instead thought that it would be nicer to have it in the town instead. As it happened we got a little lost on the way (and had a very pleasant tour of the town along the way) so were looking for something to eat around 11am. We had loads of choice and ended up in a nice little cafe just behind the cathedral. In France, we’d have had no choice at all: outside noon to 2pm restaurants simply won’t serve food. In fact this reaches the peak of absurdity in Perpignan airport where the restaurant is only open from noon to 2pm yet until quite recently there were no flights at that time ie no customers!

This nonsense extends to almost all areas of retailing. Whereas elsewhere most shops open during lunch to catch everyone else, here almost all shops lie closed.

Even three years down the line, it still confuses us. For instance, last year a couple came to us enquiring about us hosting their wedding reception. We gave them a few ideas for the meal but said that we could change that around to suit them, never thinking anything about that. Turns out that we were the only restaurant to offer them the chance to tailor the meal to suit them. In France, when you go to a restaurant asking about hosting your reception, the restaurant give you their wedding menu and that’s it: take it or leave it, you certainly can’t make any changes. How crazy is that?

At the end of last year we had someone from a French hotel staying with us. One comment that he made really struck us as symtomatic of the low level of customer service that is experienced throughout France: “This is France. You always greet guests in French”. Actually, no, you don’t: you should, of course, greet them in their own language where possible. At least it’s “of course” everywhere else in the world, just not in France.

Why is it like that here yet completely different in Spain? I think because the French just put up with it whereas the Spanish won’t.

So in France, customer service means telling the customers to clear off and come back sometime that it suits the employees.

Arnold