Moving to a French School for a 13/14 year old from the UK

General Discussion
21

Just came across your comment. I am so curious to hear about your experience as we are doing the same thing in August and my daughter will be 14 as well.
Thanks

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I don’t think that poster has been back since 2011 so you might have a long wait for a response.

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23

And their child is nearly 30 years old now…! :smiley:

Maybe the child even has children of their own now.

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24

We had friends who moved to Marseille about 20 years ago, and their eldest daughter was about 13 at the time. She found integration extremely difficult, and although I believe she came through it in the end, it was quite traumatic. Her younger siblings integrated much better. Much will depend on the child, their personality, aptitudes etc, but one should be very cautious about doing that to a child at such a stage in their development.

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Here’s my 2 cents as a teacher/mother/French person
It will be very complicated for her to do well academically if her French isn’t completely fluent, since she’s at the age for important decisions about what comes next. Generally if their French isn’t up to it at that age it is extremely hard for children to fulfil their academic potential as many doors will be closed to them. I wouldn’t, personally, move a child older than primary-age if I cared about their education.

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Mine were very young but still had problems at the start with not speaking fluent french. We were told back then that there would have been problems if we had waited a lot longer until they were both older and entering their teens and thus in collège where it is essential to have a good grasp of french grammar and language skills to understand the different subjects. My son is forever grateful he got the chance to go through the french system and end up by giving back in his job as prof principal of english in his large collège where there are many linguistic problems of children coming from N.Africa and trying to learn english as well as proper gramatical french in some cases. He did say that the Ukrainians that came a couple of years ago, were well ahead of the french pupils in nearly all subjects but spoke no french so they had to go to classes laid on to help them integrate and learn some. I agree about the OP’s child being too old, that age is when they have to start to decide what Lycée and subjects they want to do for future careers.

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28

We moved to France with four kids aged 9 to 14, all four have been through Uni and have successful careers.

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