Préfleuri Winter Camp — Ski and Language Immersion at Chesières

The programme pairs language learning with skiing. Classes run Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 12:00 for children aged six and over, in French or English immersion, with academic support available alongside. Children are placed in classes by level, so beginners and confident speakers are both accommodated. Afternoons are spent on the slopes with qualified instructors, and there is leisure skiing on Wednesday afternoons and at the weekend with the school boarders. During the intensive ski week in February the timetable moves to the mountain morning and afternoon, with no language or academic classes.

Stays are booked a la carte with a two-week minimum, and two, three and four-week packages are published. The fee covers tuition, accommodation in the school chalet, full board, group ski lessons, lift passes, the hire of skis, boots, ski suit and helmet, ice skating, routine laundry, Swiss illness and accident cover, and two sweatshirts and two polo shirts of school uniform. The ski test, occasional outings such as bowling, cinema and the thermal baths, pocket money and the medical excess are also covered. Extracurricular clubs and airport transfers are charged separately. Stays longer than four weeks are quoted by the school on request.

Children live in the Préfleuri chalet in rooms of four to six, arranged by gender, age and nationality. The camp team lives on site and supervision is continuous, day and night, with each child told where to find the staff member on duty. Evenings leave time to read and talk with roommates before a staggered bedtime. Routine laundry is handled by the school.

Full board is included. The kitchen serves balanced, varied menus in a family-style European tradition and takes account of the cultural backgrounds of the children. Swiss specialities such as fondue and raclette appear during the stay, alongside themed buffets. Lunch is taken either at Bretaye on the mountain or back at the chalet, depending on the weather.

Skiing and snowboarding across the linked Villars, Gryon, Les Diablerets and Glacier 3000 area, served by around one hundred kilometres of pistes, sit at the centre of the week. Beginners and the youngest children start in the resort snow garden, which has a conveyor belt and a baby lift. Away from the slopes there is tobogganing in the resort and on the school grounds, ice skating on the indoor rink in Villars and the outdoor rink in Gryon, winter walking and snowshoeing on marked trails, the thermal springs at Lavey-les-Bains and dog sledding. A midweek rest day is used for cultural outings such as the Cailler chocolate factory or the Olympic Museum, with a short shopping stop. Evenings bring group gatherings led by the education team, and every child takes a ski test at the end of the stay and receives a certificate and a medal. The final day of the season is given over to a slalom race in which parents take part.

The camp is based in the school chalet at Chesières, above Villars-sur-Ollon, which provides both the residential accommodation and the classrooms used for morning lessons. Laundry is done on site. A qualified medical referent at the school administers ongoing treatments and liaises with the three doctors practising in the resort; the paediatric department of the hospital at Aigle, about ten kilometres away, is used for anything more serious. Skiing takes place on the resort lift network, which the fee covers.

A stay here is a Swiss Alpine winter in full: mornings in a small language class, afternoons on the snow with an instructor, and evenings in a chalet with children from many countries. The rhythm is deliberately unhurried, with a rest day in the middle of the week and time each evening for games and letters home. Ages three to fourteen are grouped as Mini-champions, Juniors and Teens so that the youngest are not skiing alongside teenagers. Because the school runs an academic boarding programme in the same building, camp children share weekends and leisure skiing with a bilingual group of resident pupils, which is part of what makes the language immersion work.