Decroly are having open days on Friday 25th and Saturday 26th February. Enrolments for primaire for next year are by telephone only on Monday 28th February and it would not surprise me if every single spare place in primaire gets booked up within a couple of hours.
be.ecoledecroly.net/avis.htm
Remember Décroly has a class in premiere secondaire for those who do not get CEB. Here's the full list of schools in Brussels which have these classes. Most are not the most academic. A quick look down list and I can see a few schools which were oversubscribed last year for 1ere secondaire mainstreams classes for those with CEB, so they might be good choices. College Roi Baudouin in Schaerbeek, Athénée Royal in Auderghem, Notre Dame des Champs in Uccle, Athénée Charles Janssens, St Adrien and CS Ma Campagne in Ixelles, as well as Ecole Décroly.
here
If you were to move a year early, your elder son would be going into 1ere secondaire. If you were wishing for him to go to a local school, you still have to use the same enrolment form as those children living in Belgium. From info received from parents in similar circumstances, you have to ask your first preference school for the application form. As your child cannot pick up points under the points system they use to order applications, as the point are based on distances between French school attended and secondary and also home, you get given the average points for all those children who apply to that school. For example, a school has 200 non priority places in 1ere secondaire receives 500 first preference applications, your child gets placed at 250 on the list, therefore will be 50th on waiting list, a school with 200 non priority places gets 300 first preference applications, your child gets placed at 150 and therefore gets a place. Sorry, hope you understand, it is rather complicated. The final hurdle is that the French ministry has to accept in conjunciton with the school that your child is able to attend 1ere secondaire without any French, apparently based on the last 3 reports from whichever school your child is currently attending. Enrolments for 1ere secondaire commence 14th March until 1st April, the application form goes back to the first preference school, you hand with it a sealed envelope with up to 9 other choices of secondaires.
www.inscription.cfwb.be/index.php?id=300
No it does not matter how clever your child is, it used to be the case under the French system, it meant schools could pick and choose and I bet that the children from poorer areas were discriminated against. Now the secondaries have no right to ask for primary school reports (except when arrving from abroad). But there are still very academic schools and less academic ones and it's up to parents to choose an appropriate school. If you choose a school which is too academic for your child, there's a risk they will fail their years and be "asked" to leave. I chose an academic school for our child but not the most academic one in our area, I followed the advice of the head and the class teacher.
For choosing schools, every school must have a "projet d'établissement" and "projet pédagogique et éducatif". I find these documents incredibly boring to read, but if your school's ones are like other schools, in fact it is spot on in describing the "ethos" and "values" of a school and how children are evaluated and how the school communicates with the parents.
Theoretically you are supposed to submit your "compostion de ménage", that's the family document you get when you register at the local town hall showing who is in the family, but in practise, all but the most difficult school would waive that document for new arrivals. We visited schools in the September before moving and enrolled then with only a photocopy of passports, took the children around all the schools we had visited a few months earlier during the Easter holidays and still preferred the school we enrolled in, we finally submitted our "composition de ménage" and a copy of the health insurance cards called "cartes sis" to the school in the September when the children started. Know plenty of families who have also enrolled without any proof of residency, in some parts of Brussels, registration is apparently a nightmare lasting months, they can't expect children ot sit at home whilst bureaucracy is at a standstill. We are lucky, at least in our commune it only takes 2 visits about a month apart to register and get residents cards.
Finally, yes the CEB would be hard to get t