Hello, I’m a former preschool teacher living in Southern California. My husband and I are seriously considering moving to France within the next five years. I’m curious about what working in an early childhood setting is like in France. In the US, even at a “good” center there are so many issues (pay, demanding parents, time off, work/life balance, unrealistic administrators… I could go on…). I’d like to connect with at least one person in the industry who can answer the questions I have. I’m open to connecting here or off platform via email or another method.
And of course if you have any insight, go ahead and respond here.
It would also be helpful to know how much education I need to be a serious candidate for jobs within the field. I have a BA in Communications and an AA in ECE… do I need a BA in ECE?
How is your French? What sort if visa would you be on? Realistically you’d either have to go back to uni to qualify here or possibly get a position as a teachers aide.
You need 5 years of relevant higher education ie a Bachelor’s degree, followed by a Master’s degree (edited to add recognised by France) followed by success in the national civil service competition. Your French needs to be educated-native level. Obviously if you aren’t working in a school recognised by the government, things may be different.
People who work in maternelle here are necessarily qualified to teach every class of primary education up to age 10/11.
My French… well, there’s a reason its a “within 5 years” plan. LOL. Working on it…
Still determining what visa(s) are options.
Step one for me is determining if I want to work in ECE in France. I definitely don’t want to do it here. If not ECE, then I need to figure out another career option. I jumped into it in the US not knowing how terrible the conditions are. I do love working with children but it’s not a viable profession here. I’d like to do the research before committing to more studies (and the costs) and potentially visas and then feeling “stuck.”
Unfortunately on top of the hurdles of your qualifications, and language skills, there is also an issue with your visa. To work in a salaried job you need to get a job offer in order to get a visa. And the employer has to jump a couple of hoops to show there is no european candidate suitable.
Perhaps it would help if you defined exactly what you mean by ECE as it is not a term that some, including me understand. Personally although I have a background in Early Years Education and speak reasonable French I wouldn’t have entertained a similar move and that’s without looking at the hoops that I would have to jump through to get the necessary qualifications. What I can say is that the list of negatives that you gave would sound very familiar to practitioners working in a similar role in the U.K. and I would be surprised if France was significantly different.
I know nothing about ECE, but you might find it simpler to look at Ireland, which of course is in the EU and where there isn’t a language barrier, but also it’s a country that’s more immediately receptive to Americans.
My son is a prof principale in english at a big city collège here and his wife is an institutrice (qualified teacher) in a nearby primary school to where they live. She teaches from CE to CM upto leaving age but not the very small ones. It can be very difficult at times and she has been involved with some of her pupils being abused by male members of their families, criminal parents and other difficult issues involving the gendarmes and social services as a witness. They both work long hours and the stress is enormous with not just the actual teaching but other aspects of school life such as parent meetings, staff meetings, external activities and fund raising. The qualifications were via Master’s degree and one other for the wife and my son did his CAPES and then to validate that you must do a Master’s degree within two years which cost him €4000 as he was over normal student age. They have both seen colleagues off work with anxiety and stress, DIL was offered the directrice position at primaire but refused because she was wanting another baby and had a 2year old so no fair on the family. Therefore for the OP fluent french language skills are an absolute must to be able to communicate and write well. Inspections are often too!
What ages does a pre-school teacher teach in the US ? That would probably help us understand a little better whether any corresponding job description exists here in France.
Children in France can start infant school (école maternelle) age 3, in some cases, if they are toilet trained, but it does often depend on a decision of the town hall and the head/principal of the school.
I seem to recall that state infant and primary schools in France have 3 main levels of bureaucracy:
rectorat - has the responsability for implementation of education policy on a regional level (académie) ;
mairie - local town hall via the education representative sitting on the town council and reporting to the mayor ;
principal/head of school - entrusted with the day to day admin and running of the school ;
There are other organisational instances that get involved in the running of the school, usually a parent-teachers association, and there may be health/safety oversight representatives (I don’t remember all of this completely now).
Infant and primary school teachers, as @vero has pointed out, are civil servants, and are required to pass state exams before being allowed to be recruited into a school. If you qualify, and decide to take up employment, you will be initially recruited in the Académie where you passed your exam. Although you can express a preference for teaching at a particular school, those preferences are rarely met, at least for teachers starting out in their careers, and the choice will depend on where the Académie and Rectorat decide they need to send you (which could be a significant distance away from where you may have chosen to live, e.g. a 2 hour drive away on country roads).
Someone should be able to correct me if I’ve missed anything out.
That’s basically the question I asked and you’re right, without that information it’s impossible to offer advice. In the U.K. the Foundation stage covers development from birth to five years old, from long before the child enters any form of formal education. It’s almost impossible to get a job in any of the formal settings without specific qualifications and I’m guessing that France will be similar. Language is particularly important during this critical phase of education and any applicant would need to speak and understand the native language to a very high level.
An 88-year-old neighbour of ours is a retired institutrice and she loves reminiscing. Every time there is a report in the news of bad behaviour in schools she shakes her head sadly and says it never happened in her day, children never insulted their teachers and there was a good relationship between schools and parents. But as she remembers it, things were beginning to change when she retired, which must have been the late 90s. She never encountered this kind of behaviour personally in her village, but she used to go to meetings with other headteachers and local officials (she was the official liaison person for her school to attend the meetings with mayors and schools and education authorities in the region, there is an acronym but I cannot remember it) incidents of children being abusive were beginning to be reported, and at some schools the teachers started parking at some distance from the school for fear of their car being damaged. Listening to her stories (which we have heard many times) it sounds like a different world where she was fond of the children and they were fond of her, she had a logement de fonction right next to the school, there was next to no staff turnover and she eventually taught children whose parents she had taught 20 years previously, and when she retired the children and their parents organised an event with a big cake and a room filled with flowers.
One of our friends is a retired teacher of a certain age. She was an old school teacher from what we can gather and to this day her ex-pupils greet her with much deference. We find it quite charming that mature adults, some big burly blokes, revert to childhood in greeting her in the street.
I’m fairly sure that this thread isn’t asking about becoming a ‘teacher’ and working in a school but is more about working with pre-school children in what in Britain they would call Foundation.
They are obliged to start at maternelle at 3 now (the vast majority did anyway, you could exceptionally start at 2, which may be what you’re thinking of) and naturally they should, barring some medical reason, be properly out of nappies. Maternelle is about learning to behave like what French people consider a civilised person, wash your hands, eat a 3 course meal with a knife and fork sitting at a table, share and take turns, work on bodily coordination and control of yourself etc. reading etc comes later.
In that case it’s crèche and the rules are different again, it goes from 0 to 3 and you have to be a trained puericultrice and speech is considered very very important so you have to speak French.
My grandson started at 3 years old and is now 4 and enjoying school. My 2 year old granddaughter has been offered a place this coming September because she is very advanced for her age and the crêche she attends bores her stiff because there is no stimulation as the staff are overrun with babies and crawlers at the moment.
3 was always pretty much the norm for maternelle, I read a statistic somewhere that said over 90% of children start in PS. There’s always a contingent of end-of-year babies who are 2 when they start in September. Not all maternelles have a très petite section, for 2 year-olds but obviously it’s horses for courses isn’t it, if there’s room they take them, that’s what my two youngest did, the others weren’t in France at that age
Edited to add for those who don’t know, that the class you go into is based on the civil year you were born, obviously you can skip classes or be kept back, but that’s how it starts.
My family hope she will start in september as its free and her big brother will already be there meaning logistics are easier for us the grandparents to help out. Currently they pay over €350/month for the crêche of just three full days per week with no CAF help as their income is €200 over the help limit so that would help them as a family enormously as you well know how they go through clothes and shoes at those ages.
