Ecole - collège - lycée

The end of the school year approaches. Now that language isn't so much of an issue, the children need more challenge to keep them stimulated, so we've decided to change schools next year. We've spoken to a lot of parents and Barral is widely agreed to be the best school in Castres, so we're going for that.

Barral is a private school, but fortunately these are much cheaper in France than in England. Fees for the Collège are €460 a year, plus lunches. Contrast this with Whitgift, back in Croydon, whose website states that 'the tuition fees for the academic year 2007/08 will not be more than £12,412'. About 40 times as much. The difference is possible because Barral, although a private school, operates 'under contract' to the state, which pays for the teachers' salaries. This means that public and private schooling are much more integrated in France than in the UK, and makes possible genuine competition between them.

Not that Fearnley's current headmaster would accept this. He was most miffed when we went in April to tell him that Fearnley would be changing school next year. He clearly detests the private sector on ideological grounds and refused to countenance the idea that any other school might be better than his. When Philomena's class (final year of primary school) went to visit Fearnley's current school recently, he told them that children at Barral all smoke and fight in the streets. And he's still miffed: there was a meeting of the class council this week, and the student reps told Fearnley with great excitement the following morning that the headmaster had blown his top about Fearnley's leaving. Seems fatally blinkered to me - he would do better to accept that competition exists, and to confront it by sharpening up his own act.

Barral is a Catholic school. Religious schooling seems to be a main reason for the existence of the private sector, since religious education is expressly prohibited in state schools, a consequence of the separation of church and state introduced in 1905. Surprising that the state still pays the bulk of the costs of religious schools, then, but I'm not going to complain.