Education in France – a Teenage Perspective

A guest post from our man in Cognac, Graham Downie

I’ve just read this excellent blog post from one of me fellow FrenchEntrée property finders.

Val Walmsley runs Poitou Property Services and recounts a conversation she had with a young lady who came to France at 14 and who has now passed her Bac.

I really liked this quote:

“Moving to France…”,she said,“…is the best thing my parents have ever done for me. My life is far richer. I’ve learned a new language,I have great relationships and I love life here. I’ve been pushed to extend my limits and am really proud of what I’ve achieved”.

As regular readers will know, our experiences of the French education system have been largely positive with small class sizes, plenty of discipline and caring teachers.

I say “largely” positive as I wasn’t particularly happy last week when our 12 year old came home and said she was going on strike for a day and was going to spend the day listening to Justin Bieber & Katie Perry instead of conjugating verbs and learning about French history.

I’ve managed 49 years without striking and wasn’t too chuffed with her militancy but she explained that the PTA weren’t happy that one of the classes was going to be cut and – being France – they had organised a strike to solve the problem.

Ho hum.