Daddyjammy1

Hi,

Hoping to get a bit of advice on where to start with this. We're so fed up with the UK and Brexit that we're desperate to get out with our 2 kids, aged 11 and 13 before youngest starts secondary in September. We would love to go to the Annecy region having spent holidays there at various times of the year and looking around a bit on our last visit and thinking of possibility to work in Geneva.

I've got good French and have worked in the country before. Wife and kids have only very basic knowledge, however.

Although I've been looking for the past few months it doesn't look likely I'll have a ready made job to move to but could commute Monday to Thursday and still work in London at least in short to medium term until finding a good role more locally.

Would appreciate advice on practicalities such as:
- enrolling in local schools
- finding somewhere to rent (documents we would need, how to deal with the fact I'd have uk employer and presume we'd have to find somewhere near the school we liked, for example)
- tax implications
- getting French lessons!
- could i actually work in Switzerland and live in France post Bexit?

All very scary but not as scary to me as living in a UK I no longer recognise.

Thanks

EuroTrash

I can't answer most of your questions but:
If you and your wife are both holders of British passports and nothing else, then in order to qualify for residence in France post-Brexit you need to get your status sorted during transition.
If you're going to live in France but commute back to work in the UK then your status would be cross border worker / transfrontalier. This involves obtaining the relevant paperwork from the UK to cover your and your family's healthcare in France. As I understand it, everyone who is correctly registered as a cross border worker prior to the end of transition (assuming there is one) will be allowed to continue with the same arrangements. After the end of transition, Brits will be excluded from the cross border worker/healthcare arrangement. You need to get this sorted with HMRC. Google will fetch up information about cross border workers and Brexit.
Tax - you would pay income tax in the UK (because that's where your bum is when you earn the dosh) and declare worldwide income in France (because if you live in France then by definition you are tax resident in France), and the DTA would ensure that you're not taxed twice on the same income. Brexit won't affect this.
Renting - as you say, it could be a challenge, but not insurmountable.
Switzerland - I don't know. You would lose the automatic right to work in another EU country at the end of transition. I guess Switzerland, as a non EU country, could make special arrangements for Brits if it wanted to. Although I don't see why it would - I doubt the UK is going to grant special privileges to Swiss citizens.

I think it might be difficult for a 13 year old without much French to find her feet in the French school system quickly enough to do well in her BACs. But that's not my province.
Enrolling in local schools - I believe your point of contact is your mairie, but again, not my province.

Hope this helps.
Bon courage, I hope you work things out.

BuckinghamshireBoy

Howdy and welcome.

Annecy is a lovely place, but pricey to rent - as are quite a few places 40-60km from Geneva.

Does your UK employer have a presence in Switzerland - that would really help on the 'permis de sejour' front.

I no longer have feet on the ground in Geneva, but if I can answer anything that unfolds, feel free to ask away.

Here's a starter for you for all kinds of goodly stuff: https://www.ch.ch/en/

To echo EuroTrash, bon courage!

dmu

Hi, and welcome to the forum!
ET has given good info on your employment status, healthcare and tax.
From the schooling standpoint, take a look at the Schooling thread in the Read-Me: Moving to France FAQs above, which is more or less up to date except for the recent BAC reforms.
From observation (not experience, as my two were born here), 13 and even 11 are bad ages to start school in a foreign country, esp. one where the Education System is so different and the children have no knowledge of the language and culture (history, literature, ...) which their peers were born into. The younger one could possibly do last-year Primary, at least to get used to the System and make friends, but their level of French after a year wouldn't be sufficient to cope with Collège. French kids are experts in grammatical analysis at the end of Primary and a lot is expected of them in "6ème".
A 13-year-old would be a year away from doing the Brevet (O-levels) which is normally the key to going up to Lycée. Some pupils who fail the Brevet might be allowed up if their overall averages over the 4 years of Collège are sufficient, but hardly a foreign pupil who has barely arrived in France. Sorry to be blunt, but it would be advisable to put your 13-year-old at least in an Internatnional School with a British Curriculum. This is expensive, of course, and another drawback is that pupils take longer to speak French and integrate.
On a practical note, you enrol at the Mairie for Primary School and the procedure to move up to Collège is almost automatic, but I admit that I don't how you enrol directly in a Collège. There hasn't been any feedback in similar threads in the past....
Fore-warned is fore-armed! I likewise echo Bon Courage!!

Listen Very Carefully

You need to bear in mind that commuting long distance and being away from your family is not an easy thing to do especially as they will be dealing with the problems of living in France as newbies Also after the transition period Brits will be treated as third country nationals and will require to jump through hoops to stay one of which will be an income test and do you have a job in France Bearing in mind that third country nationals can only be employed if there is no suitable French/EU nationals available you may struggle to find employment so please do your research and use forums to ask questions if you are not sure but remember the UK/EU relationship is now changing and things that we took for granted will not happen any more

EuroTrash

But the OP is looking at arriving during transition. I believe the agreement is that anyone who is correctly exercising freedom of movement as a frontier worker prior to the end of transition, will be entitled to continue on that basis and will be entitled to a CdS.
Whether that CdS gives them the right to work in France, I don't know for sure. The OP would need to look into that. But on principle, changing status and retaining your right to reside will be possible.

Your points about long distance commuting being hard on both the commuter and the partner who stays in France are very valid though. It can be quite a test for any relationship.

Daddyjammy1

Thanks very much for all the advice so far - didn't expect anything like this support having posted on similar forums before.

My current employer is the UK Government so not relevant for working abroad! However, my job skills are very transferable so am hopeful that I am pretty employable if Brexit will allow (don't you just love all those Leavers who say, "if you love Europe so much then just go and live there"!!).

Sadly 2 kids in International school just doesn't seem financially viable. My UK salary is very good but costs of commuting and relocating will wipe us out and French salaries seem much lower for any roles I've seen advertised so far.

Not feeling very optimistic at the moment but will keep up the research

petitefrancaise

you're going to have to really work your network to get a decent job - French employers really like it when a potential new employee is a bit more of a known quantity.

Salaries are lower because the french equivalent of NI is higher - your employer will pay more if you are a "cadre" (professional/university educated). The up side is you are supposed to get more benefits in terms of unemployment and pensions.
Depending on what you do, it's fairly common to start out on a shorter fixed term contract and then work into a full time one.
I wouldn't put my kids straight into secondary school in France without at least 1 parent who was native/near native speaker. There were plenty of kids in my daughter's lycee near Toulouse who were from outside France but the ones who did ok/well had that french speaking parent to help out. And money for subject tutors.
It's a difficult age to move kids too - having to rebuild their social lives at this age and in a foreign language can lead to them being very isolated and kids of this age can be really, really horrible anyway.
I hope this hasn't come over as too negative!
1. look for CDD work and not just full time if that's an option for you.
2. network!
3. Seriously look into schools that have "option international" at Bac level and see what colleges feed into them and maybe one will be dual language taught too? (The exact word for this escapes me right now, maybe someone will come back with it?) Kids do better when they are around kids that are similar. Don't stick them into the local yokel school -investigate.

dmu

Although I hinted that the younger child could make friends in last-year Primary before going up to Secondary, I didn't mention this aspect in my post, but it's true that pre-teens/teens have got their own social lives and it would be a wrench to leave their friends, even moving to another part of the UK, let alone a foreign country. They've got their own adolescent problems which parents are the last to know about, as they confide in their friends or other members of the family. They'd have no one's shoulder to cry on (on these issues) when thrown in at the deep end among strangers that they can't communicate with, let alone quickly make friends with. Just a thought....
"Classes bilingues"? I thought these only concern classes in History/Geography, all the other classes being in French? But I stand to be corrected....
As for "yokel", we used to live in the 92 near Versailles and the Maternelle/Primaire were anything but yokel. When we moved to our holiday home in rural Hérault, it was a culture shock, with most children in the village Primaire coming from wine-growing/mining/artisan families who had never been out of the Département. It could indeed be defined as "yokel" However, this didn't prevent my two making good friends and having a good education, even at Collège and Lycée in the nearest town with a high unemployment rate (= poor families).

EuroTrash

13 can be a difficult age.
I used to notice quite a difference between a typical anglo-saxon 13 year old girl and a typical 13 year old French girl. Not sure it applies so much to boys, and it might be different now because I don't have many teenagers amongst my acquaintance these days. But I used to find that UK or American teenagers seemed to look, act and consider themselves more grown up than their French counterparts. They tended to be more cliquey, more independent from their families, more into fashion and makeup, more interested in boys for sure, more rebellious in general. When they landed in France they complained that French girls their own age were very young. The French girls were happy to spend plenty time with their families and didn't seem as independent. And at first the French girls tended to be impressed and even a bit in awe at how grown up the anglo saxons were. But, underneath, often the French girls were actually more mature and more confident. After a while they stopped being impressed by the pose and "attitude" of the anglo saxons, decided they didn't want to be like that and stopped trying to copy them. My conclusion was that UK girls tend to be impatient to grow up but a lot of it is pose and "attitude" covering up insecurities, while the French kids seem to stay children for longer but in fact within the family circle they are developing just as fast, learning to think for themselves and form their own opinions. I don't know how fair or how generalised this is, of course it depends on the individual, but certainly, where daughters were concerned I saw a lot more teenage angst and crises in anglo saxon families than in French.

BuckinghamshireBoy

As can 64, but let's not digress.
Good and valid observations to my mind. I 'inherited' my two girls when they were 8 and 9, they (them?) with no English, me with caveman French. Game on.

We had our tussles for sure, but it kept me on my toes, I consulted mates back in Blighty with similarly aged female offspring and after a couple of years realised that our girls were showing maturity and 'street-wiseness' way above my Brit friends' progeny.

From time to time on this forum I use the term 'island mentality'; sometimes in jest on the political threads, but I honestly believe deep down that exposure to another mindset in formative years can be a massive bonus in life.

It's not that bad for grumpy old gits like me, either.

Listen Very Carefully

I think the main problem with Brexit is that no one really knows for certain how things will pan out We can give our opinions based on what we have read on the official government www.brexit.gouv.fr or from how other third country nationals are treated for the purpose of employment etc but IMO everything is so fluid that just about anything could/couldnot/may happen.
I think all of us wish we could have some clarity really

BuckinghamshireBoy

Are you sure that you're replying on the correct thread?

petitefrancaise

I have a teenager who goes back and forth US/France - she was born in France and left when she was almost 11. I don't think there's any big difference now. Instagram/FB/Snapchat has been the great leveller I think. I certainly found that my eldest daughter was different to her British cousins but not now.