Editor's Blog August

“I was told that my kids - and all British children - are a waste of space” a mother in Manche tells me, while the head of local college complains his efforts to help are undermined when children go home “to English TV and English friends.”

Another mother reports that her children’s head has threatened to throw them out and a teacher in Calvados throws her hands in the air and asks: “why don’t the parents try to learn French so we could at least communicate with them? They don’t even turn up to parents’ evenings.”

There is clearly frustration on both sides: parents complain the schools won’t help, the schools counter that British parents often fail to support their children.

In this issue we look at the challenges facing teenagers who move straight into college (secondary school) from the UK and suggest how parents can help. We will return to the subject in the autumn and ask the French schools how they are tackling the challenge of growing numbers of non-French speakers in their classrooms?

What comes across clearly from the article on P.5 however is that parents’ attitudes are a crucial factor in how quickly children adapt. If Mum and Dad make no to effort to speak French or to integrate, children get the message that these things aren’t important. In our September issue we will compare different methods of learning French for adults.

Children will also be less inclined to make a go of it if they know their parents are not fully committed to life in France themselves. Even if you think you may go back to the UK, either because of the children’s problems or your own, keep it between yourselves. One friend of mine even told her son that if he hadn’t learnt French by the end of the year they’d go back to Britain. Since he hadn’t wanted to come here in the first place, all he had to do was keep his mouth shut!

Most important, however, is the message that stressed and anxious children won’t achieve anything. If you want yours to learn French and do well at school, the best help you can give them is to stop worrying about both and concentrate instead on having fun as a family. It’s August: sign them up for a sailing course, learn sand yachting, spend lots of days on the beach, enter our competition to win a bungy jump. It’s not hours of extra coaching they need: once they’ve decided France is where they are happy to be, they’ll want to settle down and the rest will follow.