Guide

Maths tutoring for students in French schools abroad

Your child follows the French curriculum outside France. Same syllabus, same exams, same competitive entry to higher education — but a school environment that creates its own difficulties. Here is what I observe most often in maths and science, and what actually helps.

The same syllabus, a different context

A French school abroad teaches the French national curriculum: the same Brevet at the end of middle school, the same Baccalauréat, the same Specialities, the same higher-education application process. On paper, nothing changes.

In practice, three things do change — and they weigh most heavily on scientific subjects.

The three recurring difficulties

1. Teaching continuity

Teaching teams abroad change more often than in France. A student can go through three different maths teachers in three years, each with their own approach and pace. In a subject built entirely on what came before, that is where the real damage happens: a chapter half-covered in Seconde resurfaces in Terminale.

2. Specialities that are not all available

Smaller schools cannot always open every Speciality. A student aiming at engineering may find that Engineering Science or Computer Science simply is not offered, or that Advanced Maths does not have enough registrations to open. The scientific path is then built with what is available rather than with what the goal requires.

3. Distance from the French system's ecosystem

Open days, preparatory-class fairs, older students who have just been through it, teachers who know a given school personally — all of this exists far less abroad. Families are well informed about the exams, and much less about what comes after: which path, which school, which strategy.

Why online lessons fit this situation particularly well

Online tutoring is often seen as a fallback. Here it is the opposite — it is the more sensible option, for three concrete reasons.

• The pool of tutors on site is small. In many cities, finding a tutor who actually masters the French syllabus — not the local one — is difficult. Online, that constraint disappears.
• No travel time. A lesson fits into an evening without eating up two hours of commuting. Over a school year, that is what makes regular work possible — and regularity is what produces progress.
• Time zones are an organisational detail, not an obstacle. A slot is agreed once and stays fixed for the year.

One practical point: a shared whiteboard during the lesson replaces paper very well in maths and physics. What is written is kept and sent back after each session — which, precisely, restores the continuity that is missing.

Brevet, Baccalauréat — and what comes after

The exams themselves are identical to those taken in France, and are prepared in the same way. The real difference lies further along: choosing the right High School, choosing the right Specialities, and knowing what a preparatory class or an engineering school will actually expect.

These decisions are taken early — often as early as the end of middle school. Taken without information, they close doors that no amount of later work will reopen.

It is exactly for this that I offer a separate one-to-one guidance session, distinct from the lessons.

Who I am, in three lines

A former student of a French scientific preparatory class and a qualified engineer, now an independent private tutor with three years of teaching experience in a French school abroad. I teach maths, physics-chemistry, engineering science and computer science, from primary school to the final year — in French, English or Russian.

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