Anyone here moved to France?

[Whatabloodycircus]

I wasn't quite sure where to post this but as our kids' education is a very important matter for us I've popped it here 🙂.

We have been planning to move to France for about 5 years now. The sticking point has always been being able to afford it without a mortgage (we're both self employed and wanted to stay that way), we now accept that we'll have to rent and find employment to begin with. For me that should be ok, I'm pretty sure I will find employment within my field, for my husband it might be a bit trickier and he might just have to take what he can get.

Anyway, my question is, how do we go about finding a decent French school? Google searches are a minefield and international schools keep coming up when I look for good schools. If we can find a good school then we'll center our search for jobs and rental accommodation around that. We want to be in central/ south west of the country. Our boys are 6 and 8 and we plan to move within the next 2 years.

Does anyone have experience of moving from the UK to France post Brexit? Is accessing education a complicated process? Thank you if you can help answer some questions 😊

The system in France is much simpler !
You pick your area and then the local school HAS to give you a place. And unless you are living in a ‘banlieue’ danger zone, where the issue would be the other pupils, not thr teachers, all the schools are very very similar - and good!
The concept of league tables etc is alien before you get to university. It just doesn’t exist. You will not be able to find any definition of a school being ‘good’ or not before Lycée which is from age about 16. All schools before are ‘good’. Private schools are growing but are absolutely a minority, ans usually only attended for religious reasons.

My only advice for your boys though is to move soon. From age 7 they start on conjugations, grammar etc, and it would make your kids life a lot easier if they can learn this with the others rather than having to catch up. The French system is very academic (and more traditional than the English one, its all about spelling, grammar, etc) and pretty demanding, so better to get in there sooner.