Foreign Perspectives

James started his education in France today in a nice little country school not far from us.

Frankly, we were quite amazed how easy it was to get him accepted at the school. Back in June we found out that the enrollment for the school closed on June 23rd so it was a bit of a rush to get to the school to find out what they needed from us to enrol him there. A birth certificate, of course, then they wanted a copy of his insurance (all of EUR 10 a year), medical certificate and, as we don’t live in the schools commune, a letter from our mayor to say that he was OK about James going to their school. Very surprisingly, they didn’t consider farming him out to some school for non-French speakers which is the usual tactic in this area.

So far, he seems very happy with the school and couldn’t wait to get back after lunch.

We’re told that he’ll be speaking his first French words in a few weeks. You’d think that he would grow up bilingual but that’s not usually the case unless you put the kids into a bilingual school. Just before we bought this place we met someone who would “obviously” be bilingual: he was born in France around 20 years ago to English parents. In fact, although he had a perfect english accent he wasn’t fluent in english. How come? Well, 20 odd years ago there was no satellite TV, no Amazon and few brits in that particular area of France. Net effect was that the only english he heard was that of his parents so his accent is perfect but when he reached maybe 12 or 13 he started to go out with his friends more than being in with his parents. So, his english is that of a 12 or 13 year old. For instance, although he was working as an estate agent, he didn’t know the names for parts of houses because, of course, those are words that you learn as an adult. All his specialist vocabulary would be French too as it’s hardly likely that his parents would have spoken to him about geography or physics. These days it’s much easier as the children can watch UK TV, read books in english and even get magazines but you do need to make a point of developing their english if you want them to be truly bilingual.

One other thing to watch if you’re moving here with kids is that once they hit 16 they won’t get any education unless they’re either fluent (and “able to get by” doesn’t count) or you move to an area with a relatively large expat population. What happens in areas like this is that at 16 they are sent to CIPPA which is a France-wide organisation with the objective of getting kids prepared to go into the lycée (ie age 17-18 school). Now, that’s fine if you’re in an area where the main reason that kids aren’t able to go into the lycée is that they don’t speak French because they’ll teach them French. However, in our area CIPPA is almost exclusively aimed at getting children from French speaking countries with low education standards up to the required standard and they don’t teach French: in fact in our area it appear to be impossible to get into a school after age 16 unless you speak fluent French and there is nowhere for such kids to actually learn French either. Funnily enough, everyone assumes that there is “some place” that will teach your child French at age 16 but having spent almost three years being passed from one such organisation to another around here, I think I can safely say that there isn’t such a place.

Actually, we started off pretty sure that there was no problem getting kids into school regardless of their age. You never see any problems like that on the “moving to France” TV programmes for sure but I guess that arriving at enrollment with a TV crew in tow helps remove any problems that there might be. However, in “real life”, when you start off at a school their first reaction is to send you off to the CIO to have your educational level tested. Fair enough, but CIO can’t actually test a child that doesn’t speak French so they send you on to another outfit (can’t remember the initials). The other guys just send you straight to CIPPA who, as noted above, are worse than useless in this area if you don’t speak French. CIPPA in turn immediately send you back to have tests of your ability done which, of course, the CIO can’t do if you don’t speak French but, eventually, CIPPA do accept you. Not that there’s much point as we found that they just brand non-French speakers as being lazy and lacking in enthousiasm when they can’t answer question papers in French and hand back a blank answer sheet at the end of the day. So, if you’re unlucky enough to be directed to CIPPA in an area with few non-French living there, you may as well give up any hope of your child receiving an education in France.

Arnold