What would a state school do with a pupil who arrived bilingual in a language that was compulsory at the school?

[castille]

Would a school make any provision for a pupil who was already bilingual in French, for example, or would s/he have to do the same lessons as everyone else?

Frakkinnakkered - you are so right! I'd totally forgotten that some schools do German from 6eme instead of English but it's probably a minority around here.

FingonTheValiant - it seems a shame about the standard of spelling in the UK. What percentage of marks would a child lose for poor spelling in an exam? A poor speller in France could never get top marks in any subject.

My kids are quite bright and I don't want to put them at too much of a disadvantage by a move. They have only ever known school in France and we have been looking at sample SATS and GCSE papers during the holidays. They can all easily achieve 85% + in maths papers despite not knowing some of the terminology as the papers seem quite easy by comparison to here. However, when we look at some of the other papers, particularly English, they are very hesitant purely because they are not used to so much expressive writing. The bigger learning curve will be in method for us.

How old is your child?

Primary children start languages at age 9 and due to a surfeit of teachers some schools will do German at this stage rather than English.

we live in a selective area and I know of a bilingual child at the high school who got A* in yr 9 who is going over to the grammar school, just for language, to do AS instead of GCSEs - so there are options, if the school isn't proactively making provision, perhaps they need a bit of a nudge