What to expect from the school enrolment process when moving to France

I have jumped off some precipices in my time – both literal and figurative. I have moved to cities on a whim, trekked solo across continents, once jumped out of a plane with a parachute.

This year, for the first time, I had to watch my 12-year-old daughter take a leap of faith all of her own. It’s one thing to throw yourself into the unknown, but it’s quite another to see your child do it.

We are moving from the US to France in August. We are delighted at the prospect but also overwhelmed at the ever-expanding to-do list. High up on that list has been the enrolment of Alice in the French school system.

The process began at the start of 2026, and during emails with the local education authority, the Académie d’Aix-Marseille, it became clear that we needed to visit the school district before August for an in-person assessment.

This is known as an évaluation CASNAV, and is used to assess newly arrived non-French-speaking students (élèves allophones nouvellement arrivés, or EANA) before they enter the French school system.

The evaluation is not an exam that a student passes or fails – all children residing in France have a right to education regardless of nationality or immigration status.

Instead, it is an assessment to determine a child’s level of French and overall educational level in order that they can be placed in the most appropriate grade and provided with the necessary language support to help them transition.

Last-minute nerves

So on a warm day in May, after a red-eye flight from New York and a TGV trip down from Paris, Alice and I found ourselves at the gates of the collège in Avignon she is set to attend.

Collège in France covers ages 11–15, and is preceded by école primaire and followed by lycée (roughly equivalent in the US education system to elementary school, middle school, and high school).

This collège was small compared to a typical American middle school but big compared to the tiny private school Alice had attended most of her young life.

We had arranged in advance that she should spend the day at the school, carrying out the évaluation when classes were over.

But as the day of the visit approached Alice began to get nervous, pleading with me not to leave her alone at the school.

“I can’t speak French,” she told me. “I won’t be able to talk to anyone.”

I tried to reassure her everything would be fine but the truth was I had no idea. I had done a lot in my life but I had never had to attend school in a country I barely knew.

My wife and I are both francophiles, who grew up in Europe and vacationed most summers in the south of France. We speak French fluently and had long entertained the idea of moving here.

For Alice, the country remained a vague place, and until fairly recently a series of pop culture references – Eiffel Tower snapshots, celebs shilling for French fashion labels, Emily in Paris on Netflix.

Watching her disappear into the halls of her new school with the prof d'anglais I felt suddenly guilty.

For while she had told us she was happy to move to France, I had been the one pushing hardest for it.

Had I let my self-interest blind me to her needs?

Because, for all the professed adaptability of kids, thrusting her into a foreign culture on the cusp of adolescence was surely going to bring up all kinds of challenges none of us could anticipate.

Reassurance

At least I felt reassured in the choice of school.

The collège had been recommended to us by an American family we knew in Avignon, whose daughter had transferred to it after moving here from Brooklyn.

The school was used to welcoming kids from around the world, and had a specialised section dedicated to helping non-French speaking students assimilate, known as UPE2A (Unité pédagogique pour élèves allophones arrivants).

As in the US and UK, the school you attend in France is determined by where you live.

Known as zoning in the US, or the catchment area in the UK, the system in France is called la carte scolaire, and students are expected to attend the establishment whose school district they live within.

If you are moving to France from abroad and don’t yet have permanent accommodation, don’t worry.

Your secteur scolaire can be determined from a temporary address, either a short-term rental or the address of friends or family putting you up.

In our case, the collège de secteur had no UPE2A section so we asked the local académie for an exemption (dérogation) which was quickly granted.

'Welcome cards made to greet her'

After Alice had joined the classes for the day, I sat with the principal, an affable French-Moroccan man who told me that the school had a number of pupils who were mineurs non accompagnés (unaccompanied minors), children who had travelled to France alone from Africa.

Hearing this put Alice’s situation into context. Whatever struggles she was going to experience, she was still in a position of incredible privilege compared to so many.

I left the principal and went for a walk around Avignon. It’s a great town, with a vitality you rarely find in places with such august histories.

I returned to the school in the mid-afternoon, a little apprehensive about what I would encounter.

I needn’t have been. Alice came out to greet me looking completely at ease. The kids were great, she said; so much nicer than she had hoped.

They had made welcome cards and crowded around to meet her; this exotic bird who had just flown in from New York. We went inside for the evaluation and after 40 minutes it was done.

Within a week we had returned to the States, back to the familiar routines of our American life – waving Alice off on the yellow school bus each morning, working from my laptop in air-conditioned cafes, jogging in the woods near my house.

It’s hard to believe the dream of Avignon will soon be a reality, and that my American daughter might one day also be French.

I got confirmation it was really happening last week: an email from the Académie d’Aix-Marseille containing a notification d'affectation, a notice that tells a student which school they have been assigned to attend.

While the notice confirms you have been allocated a place at the school, it is still necessary to complete the school's enrolment forms (dossier d'inscription), which we will do upon arrival in Avignon.

Then the adventure will truly begin, and while the leap into the unknown might come with a few bumpy landings, it’s sure to be interesting.

As the poet Muriel Rukeyser once noted: “Your biggest surprise comes after Yes.”