Your child doesn't speak Serbian. What are your Belgrade school options?

What each school teaches in

English support, and where it stops

Every English-medium school here will tell you it supports children who arrive without English. The useful question is how much, and what happens when a child needs more than that. Only one Belgrade school answers it in public.

• ISB includes up to 150 minutes a week of additional support, counted across English-as-an-additional-language and learning support together rather than 150 minutes of each. Beyond that, an offer of a place may depend on additional support the family funds, with the school employing the teacher and passing on the cost. There is also a separate one-time EAL charge. Notably, ISB sets no English proficiency requirement at all from Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 5 — the support question only really begins in secondary.
• The British International School states that ESL is provided at no extra charge.
• Chartwell describes a comprehensive ESL course and says many children arrive with no English. Whether it carries an additional charge is not stated publicly.
• Every other school either mentions support without describing it, or does not address it. That is not evidence they provide nothing — it is a reason to ask.

Three questions worth asking in writing

1. How many hours a week of English support are included, and is that budget shared with learning support?
2. Who delivers it — a specialist, a teaching assistant, or a class teacher with extra time?
3. What happens if my child needs more than the included amount: do you fund it, do we, or does the place come under review?

The French and German schools

Two Belgrade schools have language conditions rather than nationality conditions, which makes them more open than families assume — and more structured.

Deutsche Schule Belgrad teaches in German and gates entry on German competence. A non-native German speaker needs at least one year of kindergarten before Vorschule, and at least two years of pre-school — one kindergarten plus one Vorschule — before Grade 1, together with an aptitude test and a separate language assessment. Transfer students take a language test. There is no nationality requirement: the gate is the language, not the passport. In practice this means a family arriving with a young child can enter the German system by starting early, and a family arriving with a twelve-year-old with no German generally cannot.

École française de Belgrade teaches in French and tests children arriving from a non-French system; children transferring within the French or AEFE network do not sit a test at all. It also runs a track with reinforced English alongside the standard one. Full homologation for all fifteen levels means a pupil can move into any French or AEFE school worldwide without an entrance examination — which for a family expecting another posting is worth more than it first appears.

What Serbian law requires of a state school

If your child is going into a Serbian state school, the law is more helpful than most families expect.

• Access is equal. Article 23 of the Law on the Foundations of the Education System provides that foreign nationals, stateless persons and asylum seekers enrol and are educated under the same conditions as Serbian citizens.
• Language support is required, not optional. The same article obliges institutions to organise Serbian-language instruction for pupils who do not know the language. The Law on Primary Education adds an individual Serbian-language programme for such pupils, and allows Serbian to be taught as a foreign language.
• It is free, and primary education is compulsory and eight years long.

How well this works in practice varies by school and by how many other non-Serbian-speaking children are in the building. But it is a legal entitlement, and a school that shrugs at it is not applying the law.

How fast do children pick up Serbian?

We are not going to give you a number, because nobody who does is measuring anything. What we can say from the experience of students at these schools is that children in a Serbian-medium environment generally reach conversational Serbian within a year, faster than their parents, and that a child at an English-medium international school who is only taught Serbian as a subject usually does not — the exposure is not there. If your family expects to stay in Serbia, that difference is worth thinking about before you choose.

Questions families ask