The first day at ski school is in so many ways like the first day at any school. You turn up, deposit your children - and sometimes yourself - in the hands of people you've never met and hope that by the end of term they'll have learnt something useful.
There are, however, no league tables. There is no way of assessing the quality of the staff, and their assessment of you can be rudimentary. Perform one poor turn when they're deciding what group to put you in and you can be stuck in a class well below your station for the rest of the week.
There are many ways in which an instructor can inspire confidence in his charges. Raising his hands to the heavens and exclaiming: 'Not more! We have no room!' on first sighting the six of us trudging to the ski school reception area is not one of them.
We had booked morning sessions two months before, warning the Ecole du Ski Français at Val d'Isère that we would be arriving a day late, but would still pay for the whole week. Even this had thrown the school's bureaucracy into panic, with a succession of emails flying across the Channel before we were assured that they could cope with such a patently bizarre request.
After a lot of wrangling, our two youngest, then aged 10 and 11, who had already earned their ESF grade one pass, were dispatched towards a group of six-year-old beginners for the week. My 15-year-old son yomped off with the top group to hurtle down black runs, while my wife and eldest daughter crammed into the funicular with the intermediate level adults, despite my warning that they weren't quite ready to bang down reds on the first day. The problem was that there was no intermediate group of their standard in the morning sessions. 'Why can't they go in the afternoon?' asked one instructor. Because the afternoons are cheaper than the mornings, which we'd paid for, and it would disrupt our family skiing afternoons, I said.
So how did all of this work out? Those of us who were competent or better - my son and I - fared well. But my wife and eldest daughter, both competent but cautious, spent long and tedious mornings with a group who could barely snowplough and an instructor who spoke little English. They learnt nothing, and would have ended the week as poorer skiers had they not worked hard at improving their technique every afternoon.
As for my youngest two, banished to an icy nursery slope with a tricky drag lift, their confidence took a battering - particularly as the instructor made a point of giving detailed explanations in French and nothing more than a cursory word or two in English, seemingly more out of principle than any lack of fluency. Both started their class as better skiers than they were by the end of it. You could argue that the language barrier issimply a chance to acquire greater fluency in another tongue. But the language of skiing is technical: I doubt a French speaker would like being drafted into a game of cricket and told to field at silly mid-on, with no explanation of what that means.
We learnt two lessons that week. First, the division of skiers into three grades - beginner, intermediate and advanced - takes no account of the very varied standards within each group. Second, that, for all its attempts to promote itself as ideal for all grades of skier, Val is not good for beginners. The easiest runs are farthest away from the ski school assembly point in La Daille, while the green and blue runs at La Daille all have tricky sections that make it hard for beginners to get up a confidence-building run.
And, of course, it's very busy: On the weekend we left, the local radio station said 26,000 people were heading out of the resort and 32,000 were coming in. Val has a huge range of runs, but once you factor out the extremely difficult ones, you have a lot of average skiers competing for space on the others. The best way to give the children quality time on the slopes was to head up high first thing in the morning or ski through lunch.
The ideal solution is to teach them yourself - as long as you don't inculcate them with your own bad habits. And you'd be best to do this at a smaller resort if your kids are complete beginners.
We will go back to Val d'Isère but next time we'll have a look at other options. The resort has other schools, such as Snow Fun, which sub-divides its classes (intermediates are grouped into those just starting parallels, those who are competent and those who have perfected them) - which should make it easier to find a group at just the right level for your children. There's also the option of private tuition, which looks more expensive but which can be much better value.
It may be that we just hit a bad week, but ski school last time round proved an expensive way for some of us to learn very little.
