Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. The daily 45-minute session in the French language laboratory room is where the discipline is at full intensity.

The bumbling English schoolboy struggling to ask for a baguette on holiday is a familiar caricature, but his plight has now deteriorated. According to Ofsted, British children are struggling to hold ...

Each afternoon, I spent an hour or two by the beach or by the pool poring over vocabulary Credit: Photo: Alamy Somehow, studying the tangles of French irregular verbs seems far easier when turquoise ...