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Education advice for our 12 year old


Patrick
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to the OP there are plenty of previous threads on the subject of french education e.g

http://www.completefrance.com/cs/forums/1/1523981/ShowPost.aspx

http://www.completefrance.com/cs/forums/2369097/ShowPost.aspx

In my view, little has changed since these earlier postings. If anything it is now a lot worse with the various budget cuts and staff reductions, although at least the government appears to have woken up to the fact that secondary school (college) is in a dire state.

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Frecossais, yes life is a risk and an adventure, but it is one thing to take a risk on your own behalf and totally another consideration if it is in regards to a child's education. After all where a teenager is concerned, is it seriously worth risking the future of a child in making a move now, against the slight inconvenience of a few years delay to enable the child to complete their secondary education. This being against a background of the majority of Brits moving to France leaving within a few years. Especially those who still have to make a living.

I also get the impression that a lot of Brits moving to France with children, end up with the children returning to the UK for higher education or work anyway.
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I didn't reply immediately, but have been looking into a few things since and calling people too.

Rose, I did think long and hard before saying what I said, but felt I had to any way.

If I deleted all my posts then where would we be, all positive comments? No, maybe others aren't as gobby as me, but comments that are negative would still have been posted. I don't believe that any one can tell anyone else that it will always be fine, because it was for them, and it isn't as if any of actually expect problems to occur,especially with babies/toddlers/children that seem to be developing well and happily and intelligently enough.  And this isn't as if we are talking about which flour to buy or creme, it is about children's educations and futures too.

RRE, maybe you thought I hadn't read what you had written, or not read it properly. I had. Things done quicker these days. Well they were for me too, being a pushy maman, and realising that there was a problem, I wanted help fixing them. And I will add, much to the surprise of the teachers who were used to parents who don't want to know, or hear that their kid has a problem. So maybe they are done quicker, but you didn't tell me what was being done, other than the children being moved on, away from the teachers to other professionals. Please tell me that they all work together, that things are put in place whereby the orthophonist and/or psychologist works directly with the teacher in primary and ALL the profs at college and to help children move forward in their education, AND I have to add, without being forced into this.

 

As I said, I have been looking into quite a few things and parents are now getting a bit more militant by the looks of it and demanding that things are done. The teachers, well, that appears to be a bit of another story altogether. The system is there to instruct, and very basically that means that lessons are given and the children will learn (or not) and then have to spew all this out when they are tested. This rigourous system works, until it doesn't and the teachers even now are not trained how to deal with 'problems'.Hence they like the children to be moved to people who can 'cure' them, or other organisations, people, have to be contacted to help. Apparently, there are still too many teachers who do not know what things like dyslexia, well all the dys's are, even now and they do not like well informed parents telling them. The 'class' system in France says that lower beings are not allowed to inform teachers of anything really.

RRE, please tell me that the Vendee is the most enlightened dept, (I have also been told that some depts are better than others incidentally and why shouldn't it be yours) where everything is in place, there are children with scribes in class, with their ordi, with special set ups for extra time or when being tested having fewer questions to answer, which is the way some are making up for the lack of extra time being given. I would have been overjoyed if you had told me all that little lot to start with.

None of this would have helped us incidentally, at all. Even the new stuff, but that is us and we had an extreme case on our hands and still do.

Re moving children to France, well, if they are just normal kids and then all the normal things come into play like their intelligence, their ability with languages, as some are better than others. Remember lessons at school make no allowances for stragglers/strugglers french or 'other'.  Due to budget cuts I would think that many schools would be hard pushed to have people to help with foreigners learning french. And the program is as it is, it moves on relentlessly and re-sitting common. Strugglers/stragglers can have as many problems as children with other difficulties. And may be packed off the the SEGPA, which in itself is a good idea, but is a convenient place to put children that the system cannot, but should be able to cope with.

 

 

 

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Rose - You need to read the actual report rather than what the Guardian said. I've read it cover to cover including the notes about statistical anomalies. France might, overall, have a higher ranking but it also has less people over-achieving and more people underachieving. Also if you look at the results for the constituent countries of the UK it tells a very different story due to the poor performance of Wales in every category.

Interesting article from Les Echos about the same report the DM article quoted

http://www.lesechos.fr/economie-politique/politique/actu/0201630291486-l-ocde-dresse-un-tableau-severe-sur-l-etat-de-l-ecole-en-france-218517.php
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penofmyaunt... Nice name by the way... I did read the full report, there is a link in the Guardian article; I also went onto the website and read quite a lot there too.  I actually felt that overall between France and the UK very few differences where found.  And yes, some results were better, some weaker and I'm sure different areas of both countries will imapct on the results.

Do you  know what... generally I think I've been misunderstood a fair bit through this thread.  I am not saying France is better but I'm also not saying the UK is better. 

If I could choose, I would pull the best from the UK system and the best from the French system and I think we'd be closer to an ideal. 

What I have been saying is that there are good and bad in both countries.  For us it's been fine... I would have reservations about an older child.  

I'm struggling to see what there is to disagree with... unless we're saying that France is universally poor and the UK is universally good... which I dont think anyone is saying?

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[quote user="Rose"]penofmyaunt... Nice name by the way... I did read the full report, there is a link in the Guardian article; I also went onto the website and read quite a lot there too.  I actually felt that overall between France and the UK very few differences where found.  And yes, some results were better, some weaker and I'm sure different areas of both countries will imapct on the results.

Do you  know what... generally I think I've been misunderstood a fair bit through this thread.  I am not saying France is better but I'm also not saying the UK is better. 

If I could choose, I would pull the best from the UK system and the best from the French system and I think we'd be closer to an ideal. 

What I have been saying is that there are good and bad in both countries.  For us it's been fine... I would have reservations about an older child.  

I'm struggling to see what there is to disagree with... unless we're saying that France is universally poor and the UK is universally good... which I dont think anyone is saying?

[/quote]

Rose - you're quite right: the differences are really too small to be important.

As for statistical anomolies... Wales dragging down the results? Cut it off! I suppose then you'd have to cut out Scotland for dragging them up, which would leave you with England (plus NI where the population is too small to make a statistically significant difference) whose results fall pretty much slap bang on the UK averages. And what should we make of the observation that while there has been a marked fall in the UK rankings over the past two or three surveys, France stays practically immobile, firmly mired in mid-table mediocrity? Is that significant? Is a sample size of only 470,000 children (an average of about 7000 per nation surveyed) ever going to give truly useful, properly representative, data? Probably not.

I suppose conducting, compiling & analysing surveys like this must keep quite a few people in gin, tonic & peanuts, but beyond that they seem to serve little useful purpose.

Idun - please don't think me rude, but I can't really believe that anything I can tell you about how our particular school conducts itself will really convince you or anyone else whose child didn't thrive within the French system to look upon it any differently than they already do, so I don't see much point in giving a full and frank response to your post. If you think I am being unjust, and you really do want to know, PM me and I will be happy to give you answers to anything you wish to ask.

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I suppose that anyone with children contemplating a move to France would be weighing up the consequences of such a move, as the OP is doing. Whether such a move is made must depend on the parents' personal circumstances, and on the children themselves, especially if they're secondary age pupils.

I  understand many people's reservations about interrupting children's education, but I did say before that others had proposed alternative arrangements to simply putting older children in lycees and hoping for the best.

However, it is for those parents to make that choice, in the certain knowledge that life is totally uncertain. And I guess that at least some of the Brits who return to UK after only a few years in France will be glad they had the experience.

As for the quality of education in some schools in France, having always thought that things were pretty similar in Britain and France, I was quite shocked when reading of some Posters' experiences. It may very well be that under-achieving children (for whatever reason) have fewer resources than in UK where there's a high level of  knowledge and competence among the teaching and support staff in general. Village schools, as in France may be less well served.

The Wales statistics are disturbing. What is that about?

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And some kids will be fine in any system; that never means that 'all' will be, unless the system is particularly nurturing and caring.

Of anywhere I would risk Finland at any age, they always did well in those lists and I have seen reports when I was in France as to how good Finland's system is.

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  • 7 years later...
So who has been fiddling with this post eh??

Because it said I had posted at 14h56 yesterday the 14th May 2019 and I had not been on here yesterday and certainly did not touch the last post I made.

IF anyone wants to change a post, and maybe they could even be putting an update in, why not just make a new post on the thread!!! That would be best thing to do.

Any updates from the OP would be interesting, as their child, who was a teen at the time will be an adult now.

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I'm guessing someone posted something (an advert?) that was deleted by the mods. After that the thread will show the last legitimate post, but with the time and date of the deleted post. Quirk of the forum software. Often see it on the FAQ threads too.
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