schools in france - any happy experiences?

[letrangere]

We are setting ourselves up to move to France in the summer and I am starting to find things to worry about. DH is french and has always said teachers are v strict,always on strike and so on.

DS is in reception in uk and loving it, he's bright and getting bags of stimulation/ play etc - of course it's reception and people tell me things are v different in y1. But can anyone tell me nice things to look forward to about French schools and teachers?

And if anyone knows what papers I will need to get translated to enroll, that would be good too!

Thank you

Reception is age 4, right? So he'd be 5 when you come and going into grande section?

Actually I found the entire French maternelle was excellent, and as I understand it they go slower than in the UK as the children don't really learn to read until they turn 6 and go into primary school.
The teachers my son had were excellent and did lots of interesting craft activities with the children. It probably was stricter than in the UK but not excessively so.

However, I did have a lot of reservations about subsequent schooling - though in the end haven't experienced it myself as we moved to Luxembourg at the end of the maternelle. My son's friends have gone into rimary and are enjoying it ok I think, although they sometimes get a bit stressed about homework. I do think a child would cope much better having been through the grande section in France and having the right kind of preparation though.

What part of France are you moving to? and will it be permanent?

Meant to add - although the style is a bit different, I think in many ways grande section would be like an extension of your play-based reception year, whereas in the UK your son would be going into Y1 and having to grapple with reading, maths etc - so I think you could definitely see that as a positive!

I have experience of a small village state primary (about 150 children from two villages). IIRC to enrol I only needed to show vaccination record.

The education system seems quite rigid and expectations of the teachers are high as regards behaviour in the classroom. There is a lot of homework. But my DCs have experienced 4 out of the 6 teachers in the school and I would say that they are lovely people with the best interests of the children at heart and not overly strict.

Teachers unions organise lots of strikes but they aren't always widely supported. The teachers have only been on strike for two days in the last 3.5 years.

I am quite happy with our experience so far.

Your DS may love it, he may hate it, it depends on his temperament and the teachers he gets.

When is his birthday? If he goes into CP he could find it a bit of a shock coming from the UK, more so than Y1 would be. Does he speak French?

thanks for all of this - he would go into grande section as opposed to CP (one of the reasons we thought now would be a good time to move). He understands French perfectly but chooses not to speak it, basically - this would have to change, of course!

Feel much better about this now! I just kept getting negative impressions

Our friends experience of children moving from UKreception to grande section echoes what weta said.

They still play a lot but are definitely expected to sit still. The classroom environment is very different. they sit in pairs facing the teacher, whereas in UK year 1 they are still in little groups and moving around the classroom is not an issue and even rather encouraged.

As far as homework is concerned I find it similar from CP. Not more than in the UK system.

I went to a french school and the main difference is that teaching is more fragmented in the french system. There seems to be a more holistic approach in the british system with an emphasis on learning objectives rather than a subject based approach iykwim?

Agree with slim re: subject based approach. Also on the expectation of classroom behaviour.

My experience is mostly in a bilingual school so not a French state school, although it's state approved, and they did work hard - harder than children that I worked with in the UK did. There was a lot of homework, more so than I would have expected, and it was learning by rote - words for dictation, addition or multiplication tables or poems. IME they also moved very fast, but it was a private school and they only had maybe half the time to cover the same amount of material. Even if I slowed it down to FT school pace they covered more in a year in terms of actual 'knowledge'. Children are expected to 'learn' certain things by the system such as dates, places, spellings, grammatical rules but the teacher will dictate how it's taught.

I think it depends on the teacher's approach. There are very old style teachers out there, and the system allows for their style of education, but also some more relaxed ones.

Going into Grande Section from the UK definitely better than going into CP. Grande section is very much a preparation for school and learning in terms of how to behave and classroom discipline, even if they cover less academically speaking. In the UK it's almost the reverse as academic work starts but the classroom discipline doesn't.

agree with frakkinaround

I think she pretty much summed it up:
"I think it depends on the teacher's approach. There are very old style teachers out there, and the system allows for their style of education, but also some more relaxed ones."

When I was in school, it always felt like the system is completely teacher focus rather than pupil focused.
The survival of the fittest. In retrospect, now that my child is in a different system, I definitely still think the same.
It does produce brilliant results for the academically focused but is too rigid.

hmmm ... all very interesting. I am glad we're going to do this before CP. DS is very wriggly, so may get into trouble, but at the same time he responds well to nice clear boundaries and structure (not so much when I'm the one trying to impose them!) so maybe all this will be ok.