A French au pair

[Ivykaty44]

I had a french girl come to stay on an organised trip about three summers agao - delightful girl of 15 and we have stayed in touch. Her english is to a good standard and her vocablary extensive. Eat everything I put on the table, doesn't do cofee or rench smell cheese! but loves a cup of tea and a scone. Lovely to have in the house, happy and cheerful girl.

Had an email yesterday from her and she would love to come over to practise her english again as an au pair in the month of August.

So lots of questions, where would she look for work? What sort of pay would she expect? What sorts of duties would she do?

Any other info would be gratefully received.

how old is she now? 15 or 18? look on gumtree.com, greataupair.com, aupairworld.net, nannyjob.co.uk. you can browse jobs offered and get an idea of duties and pay. bare in mind that for the summer there is loads of aupairs and not that many families.

She could put a profile on aupairworld.net and if she had a particular region where she wanted to stay she could try gumtree.com.
For 25 hours of helping out she would get £60-80 per week pocket money, plus food (and sometimes perks like gym membership, use of a car).
My au pair does a bit of childwatching (supervision of kids after school for an hour or so), walks the dog and light cleaning (ie. dusting, hoovering but not bathroom cleaning, scrubbing etc).

There are a lot of au pairs who want to come over just for the summer, but I have to admit that I would be unlikely to take on someone who only wanted to come for 1 month though (the whole 'getting them settled in/shown around/car insurance' etc takes a good couple of weeks. I also don't take au pairs who don't have previous child-watching experience so she may like to try and get a few babysitting jobs to build up her experience.

This is great, keep it coming please as I have no ideas about this at all!

I second what Millarkie said - although i'm looking for a longer-term AP plus anyway, the whole experience has been so time consuming and stressful I would not invest the time for only a month. School holidays are more than a month long, anyway.

If she does get some experience with children she will be heads above the hundreds who say they primarily want to travel, and they 'love children because they are so cute' (obviously never having been within 20 feet of a child since they were one themselves). Between now and summer she could check out local youth clubs and lend a hand, get babysitting (daytime) experience, try homework support, give music lessons (or whatever).

If she can cook she will be even more popular! However, at age 18, even if she is a driver, the extra insurance premium will be so colossal that many families won't ask her to drive. That in turn limits the places she can go.

Whereabouts does she want to stay? Could do with an au pair myself during the summer weeks. In North West.

french girl is 18 and I don't think she has a prefrence as to where she wants to stay - I am in the midlands, she came here before.

I suppose it would need to be easy to get flight to and ro Paris (she lives on the east side of Paris)

Hmm, TBH, I'm quite interested. We live near Manchester and 5 mins walk from train station which would get into the city in 20 mins. DP and I are teachers so off for 6 weeks of summer (though I go back mid August). Could do with some help with housework and looking after kids (girls 5 and 7) and French conversation. Couldn't offer more than £60 a week and would rather give less (£50?) for less work but would provide own room, food etc. In fact, would need much less than the 20 hrs the other poster suggested so she could perhaps spend some of the time on day trips elsewhere? Do you think this would suit her? Could she provide references?

Couldn't offer much in the way of a social life or other people her age though. Would that be a problem.

The minimum an au pair can reasonably expect is £55 per week, most people on here seem to pay more.

Could stetch to that. The workload would not be big partly because one or both of us would be there all of the time. Would be more than happy to give the AP whole days/ weekends off to explore etc. As much interested in the French conversation TBH. The dcs' cousins live in France and are bilingual so I would like the dcs to be able to speak French and I have very rusty A Level French which I would like to resurrect.