A new school tour operator, French Horizons, has been launched in a bid to link UK and French schools together so they can build a relationship and jointly produce a range of exciting trips.
French Horizons focusses on linking together UK schools with French schools at both primary and secondary level, through French language visits, music tours and cross-curricular trips.
To begin with, the teachers involved from both sides of the Channel have direct contact to organise pen-pal letters and video lessons for the children to help build a relationship. This culminates in a tour when the visiting UK group spends one or two mornings at the French school, experiencing school life and enjoying lunch in the canteen together. The group will also experience a range of cultural visits as part of the trip.
Tours typically run from a Monday to Friday, which opens up the possibility of staying at beautiful accommodation centres that are used as wedding venues at the weekends.
A sample itinerary…
Day one will be your main travel day. The local tour liaison meets the group on arrival to ensure everyone is comfortably settled before dinner, and then leads a traditional French board games activity evening.
Days two and four have a similar structure, with the morning spent in the French school, with a mixture of large-group linguistic activities, and dividing off into smaller groups to attend some regular timetabled lessons with their pen-pals. After lunch, the afternoons are spent on historical and cultural visits.
Day three is the central tour day, which is generally a whole day of purely fun activities, whether it’s an adventure centre or theme park which are all within easy reach.
More about French Horizons
This initiative has been created by husband-and-wife team Chris George and Emmanuelle Dumas, who have been organising school tours for eight years and are both teachers themselves.
Initially this began in Jersey with the Chateau Vermont project, where they helped to create a new music school for the island which doubles-up as an accommodation centre for visiting school groups.
After moving to Normandy in 2020 they established Musique Anglo-Normande, focussing on school music tours to Normandy. This quickly grew beyond music to encompass school French trips under the French Friendships project, with 35 UK schools visiting in 2024 and a growing list of French schools that would like to participate in the scheme.
For 2025 the different strands of the project are now under one name, French Horizons, with the launch of a new website.
One of the special aspects of the website is the ‘Build Your Tour’ quotation page. Every aspect of the tour programme is outlined in great detail, and users can therefore see where each penny goes in the booking.
Passionate in connecting schools
Emmanuelle Dumas, said: “Being a bi-lingual French/English family ourselves, we believe passionately in connecting schools, teachers and students together, and have seen that long-term friendships can quickly develop. Now, more than ever, we need our countries to connect at all levels, and if our project can help in its own small way then this is at least a step in the right direction.”
Chris George said: “We felt that as a teacher organising a school trip, we would want to know exactly how the tour costs are structured so that parents can have complete confidence in what we are proposing to them. We are very lucky being based here in Pont L’Evêque, as our own operating costs are very limited, groups effectively come to us, and therefore we can offer superb value for money.”
French Horizons works with several accommodation centres for different group sizes, ranging from groups of around 30 students right through to whole year-group tours for over 200.
The company organises every aspect of the project, from the school connections through to the coach transport and activities.
For more information, go to www.frenchhorizons.com.
