Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Schooling in France starts from age 2 or 3 (depending on the local area) with education being compulsory from age 6 to 16.

Schools generally run Monday to Friday but on Wednesday some close or only operate in the morning and in some areas schools operate on Saturday morning. The hours are generally 9am to noon, 2pm to 5pm at all ages although the 2 and 3 year olds often only go in the mornings.

There is no “supply teacher” arrangement in France so if a teacher is off sick you will frequently get a phone call to come and collect your children.

From age 2 or 3 up to 6 you can enrol your children in nursery school (ecole maternelle) although this is not compulsory. This is more of a schooling environment than the equivalent in the UK and aims to prepare the children for entry to the next level of schooling.

For enrollment you will need to bring along ID for the child (passport or full birth certificate is equivalent to the “livret de famille” that they will ask for), proof of address (sometimes), proof that the child is insured (about EUR 10 per year) and, if the school is not in your commun, a letter from the mayor. In some cases you may be asked for proof of vaccinations. Even if your children speak no French you should have no difficulty in enrolling them in the local school at this level.

The age used is based on the calendar year so in the year in which your child is 6 they start primary school (ecole primaire) in September. The documentation required is as for the nursery school and if you want to go to a school outside your area then you’ll need a letter from your mayor too. There is usually no difficulty in getting non-French speaking children into primary school.

The secondary and high schools (college and lycee) are not tied to the local comun and operate over a wider region. Consequently you don’t need a letter from the mayor if you are going to a school out of your area. Other documentation remains the same with the additional requirement of a report from the primary school or alternatively your child will have to sit a test (UK school reports usually aren’t accepted).

For the college (age 11 to 16) you may be limited to the college in your local area as others can sometimes refuse to accept non-French speakers. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t have a problem if your child has previously attended primary school in France (ie they can speak French).

At age 17 pupils enter the lycee. These come in three varieties: general, management and technical which roughly correspond to UK high schools, business schools and technical colleges. This is the point at which children need to choose subjects though pupils in the French system study a much wider of subjects than they would at A level in the UK. As at entry to college, a report from the previous French school will help.

If your child does not speak French at this point, you may find that they need to attend a different school. What happens seems to vary widely across France with most areas accepting non-French speaking children at both college and lycee level whilst others refuse to do so at lycee level (see our post here).

As you may know, I’ve been experimenting with the hosting location of several of my websites over the last few months and indeed years.

To begin with I hosted mascamps.com in America basically because that’s where my earlier websites lived and it was handy to just add the new one to the existing account. Anyway, about a year after we got here the various Our Inns had started off on 1and1.co.uk basically because it was handier to have multiple domains in one account but only pay for one webspace account.

Anyway, come 2006 and I needed to upgrade the account to run the database version of the Inns sites. That meant, on 1and1, a move from £25/year to £10/month so I started shopping round and ended up plumping for godaddy in the USA. Snag was that almost immediately after the move, the site traffic started dropping. In fact it ended up dropping 90% before I figured that perhaps £10/month wasn’t too bad after all and, guess what?, well the traffic went up x10 in the two weeks following the move back to the UK!

So, of course, over the year or so after that I gradually moved everything to 1and1 UK. Well, I say “UK” but in fact it’s actually in Germany.

Soooo, come this year I started wondering about hosting in the UK properly. Up ’til quite recently that’s been quite expensive as I need a sort-of “reseller” account in that I need to be able to use the one webspace but have lots of domains pointing to it. However, now it’s dropped to around £20/year (eukhost.com) so time for another experiment.

OK, not so spectacular this time but a jump of around 100% in site traffic does seem worthwhile so over the coming winter I’ll be moving the rest of the sites over and thereby a) getting a lot more traffic and b) saving a fortune compared to 1and1.

What I’ve not done until now is to try out a .co.uk domain for sites largely aimed at the UK market. That’s in the process of changing as I’m putting Whole Earth Guide on a .co.uk domain to see how it goes. Snag is that I’ve not really got a truly comparable domain to check the performance against.

As you can see we’ve started offering the option to buy prints of the photographs from this site and others that we run.

However, as soon as we started doing that we hit the problem that the resolution of our camera ain’t good enough to produce the largest prints and indeed isn’t high enough for the images to be accepted by some services.

Related to that we’re now looking for more images for our Whole Earth Guide and it seems to make sense to do something about the camera for that too (we’re hoping that we can supply the majority of the photographs for that from our own picture library).

Which is where we hit our dilema. We have a massive library of slide photographs and could continue to take those using the Nikon F3 but would need a slide scanner to be able to use them properly. That would run to £500 or more.

Alternatively we could buy something like the Nikon D40x (also £500+) and use that to build the library for the future.

At the moment I don’t know which way to go. Ideally, of course, we’d buy both but there isn’t enough money in the site development kitty to do that.

Google’s adsense is a peculiar product in many ways.

On the one hand it seems to pull up adverts that are just what people are looking for on webpages. Yet, if you think about it, they’ve arrived at that webpage looking for something and presumably haven’t found it if they’re clicking on one of the adverts.

That being the case, sites that are full of useful content don’t do too well from the adsense point of view. So, for instance this site is quite information rich yet doesn’t get a whole lot of income from adsense. Similarly, our Pyrenees guide is fairly packed with information (and getting more complete by the day as we’re in the midst of an update) but does quite poorly in terms of adsense.

So, what we’re planning is to have an experimental site which is designed with adsense in mind to see if that does better. Anyway, that’s why Whole Earth Guide will be a little light on content (well, that plus we won’t be properly starting on it ’til after September).

Hopefully we’ll manage to get all the right keywords packed in to get people to the site and adsense will provide them with the content that they’re really looking for.

The travel news site from RatesToGo isn’t the “in your face” promo of their bookings site that it could so easily be and in fact has gone to the other extreme with only a logo to indicate that they even run a hotel booking service.

That makes it quite an interesting site to read as it covers a really wide range of articles such as the most expensive hotel room (in Las Vegas) which at $40,000 is hardly one that you’ll be booking through their site.

They do link to hotels on their site for instance in their top 10 binge drinking getaways but that’s not really limiting the content of this very informative blog as the range of hotels which they have doesn’t act as a limitation to them. Besides their occassional self-promo is more than offset by general travel articles such as the beds on Lufthansa flights.

Overall, it looks like they write the articles then look for a suitable hotel on their list. As in their piece on Japanese fireworks festivals where the mention of the hotel seems very much an afterthought.

At the moment this is a fairly young blog: let’s hope that they maintain the variety of articles that they’ve produced up to now.