Where the Helicopters Land
In the early morning sun that is typical for Normandy in September, the town of Verneuil-sur-Avre seems like most others in this part of France. It is a picturesque town, with old stone churches and a cafe lines central square, but hidden just a few miles away lies one of the most prestigious, mysterious and elite private schools in the world.
One former student, speaking on condition of anonymity, remembers his first day this well: a helicopter, dropping off the son of a well known French film producer, landed on the grass near the sports stadium. Just minutes later came the heir of a Hotel empire, riding in an enormous bright yellow Hummer, and moments later a French royal (the lineage still exists even if the family no longer sits on the throne) in a Bentley. For the 13-year-old from a village near Paris, this felt like stepping into a dream world. For most students, returning to school from their luxurious summer breaks in various palaces and manors around the world, it was simply “back to school.”
Set amongst wheat fields and chicken farms, about ninety minutes from Paris, École des Roches is a 120 year old French boarding school with the kind of mythology that attaches itself to institutions designed for the very wealthy. It was founded in 1899 by sociologist Edmond Demolins, and was originally seen as a progressive “middle-finger” to rigid French schooling—an experiment inspired by the British boarding school ideas of autonomy, character-building, and outdoor life.
Today, École des Roches has become its own small world. It spreads across 60-hectares, and includes carefully manicured lawns, forests, tennis courts, residential housing and, of course, the school buildings. There is a feeling of quiet confidence amongst both staff and students, built mostly upon the reputation of an institution that has educated generations of European and global elite. A long avenue approaching the entrance displays rows of national flags—170 of them, representing the nearly 170 nationalities that have passed through the school. It is both a campus and a gathering of international privilege.
Claude-Marc Kaminsky, who led the school for decades, once described the student body with unusual candor: “We welcome the children of the world’s elites,” he said, listing among them Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, advisers to Dmitri Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, and industrial dynasties from China to Western Europe. The French speaking African nations have long been represented too: Ali Bongo’s children attended; Teodorín Obiang, son of Equatorial Guinea’s president, is a former student; and before independence, members of Morocco’s royal family studied there, including Moulay Abdallah.
The cost of joining this world reflects its clientele. Annual fees range from €20,000 to nearly €30,000 depending on the grade level—making it France’s most expensive boarding school, though still cheaper than Swiss peers like Le Rosey or Beau Soleil, which can charge over triple the price. For the families that choose École des Roches, the cost feels small compared to what their children get: the school boasts nearly perfect pass rates for the brevet and baccalauréat, classes are small compared to other similar institutions, and even smaller daily study sessions with expert tutors.
In recent years, the school has started to reflect the changing dynamic seen around the world with new hubs of wealth and ambition being more represented than before. During its ownership by Dubai-based GEMS Education from 2013 to 2025, the school was increasingly presented as a global hub for ambitious families—with recruitment drives in Delhi, Beijing, and Dubai. They also mapped out major upgrades including a theatre, an Olympic-size pool, and expanded sports facilities.
But behind the polished brochures, much of the school’s identity remains rooted in its rhythms. New students are picked up in chartered buses at Porte Dauphine in Paris and driven to Normandy for an initiation of sorts. Older students—called “captains”—help sort them into one of the large boarding houses, each with its own coat of arms and traditions. Resident teachers, often couples, function as surrogate parents. For the new 12-year-old quietly clutching their suitcase, this becomes home. For their classmates arriving by helicopter, it already was.
A Normal Day in an Abnormal World
The outline of a school day at École des Roches looks surprisingly ordinary on paper. Wake-up, breakfast in the house dining room, classes beginning around 8:30 a.m. There are lessons, exams, and the usual teenage anxieties about marks, friendships, and weekend plans.
What distinguishes this schedule is the landscape in which it unfolds.
The campus is large enough that students take buses simply to get from their house to class. The walk to the dining hall might pass tennis courts, a theatre, an equestrian center, a swimming pool, and—unexpectedly—a go-kart track winding through the trees. There is even a small airstrip, periodically refurbished so that students can take aviation lessons. A school spokesperson once remarked, with understated pride, “It’s good to be able to offer pilot training,” as if discussing a new art elective.
Inside the classrooms, the world shrinks into manageable scale. Officially, classes hold around fifteen students; occasionally a popular course pushes this to the low twenties, but the atmosphere remains intimate. Teachers circulate in the evenings through supervised study sessions to check comprehension, clarify lessons, and offer encouragement. It is a degree of academic oversight that borders on one-to-one tutoring.
The linguistic landscape is equally varied. Students may study ancient Greek, Mandarin, Arabic, Hebrew or Peul—a nod to the school’s African intake. Those who arrive without a word of French spend months in FLE (French as a Foreign Language) before joining mainstream classes. Kaminsky has often boasted that students become bilingual within a year.
Afternoons bring to life the images that populate the school’s brochures: rugby on rain-soaked fields, tennis in crisp winter air, music rehearsals in professional-quality music studios, theatre workshops in a cozy auditorium. For some, there are riding lessons. For others, karting or aviation. What looks like an improbable list of extracurriculars is, for these students, simply the rhythm of youth.
Yet for all its luxury, the school imposes discipline that would surprise outsiders. Students make their own beds, clear their trays, and—depending on the year—participate in rustic “nature camps,” where they cook, clean, and do laundry themselves. Catherine Janvier, a deputy head, once remarked that some students arrive without knowing how to tie their own shoelaces.
In the houses, social hierarchies are both formal and informal. Leadership roles like “captains” and “pupil of the week” are elected, reinforcing the school’s emphasis on autonomy and responsibility. Beneath this structure, subtler divisions emerge: between old money and new, royalty and commerce, “very rich” and merely “rich.” One former student described being assessed not on personality but on brands—classmates would flip the collar of your shirt to inspect the label, a ritual as ruthless as it was absurd.
Weekends add another rhythm: many students leave on Friday afternoons for Paris or abroad, returning Sunday night by bus. An alumnus recalls those return trips as strangely silent journeys—teenagers staring out of windows, faces drawn, the excitement of wealth giving way to the quiet fatigue of adolescence.
Inside this insulated ecosystem, extraordinary experiences become mundane. A presidential child watching news of a coup unfolding in their home country; a dorm-mate disappearing mid-term; a helipad visit from an absent parent rushing between global commitments—these moments land with little glamour. For the students living them, they are simply facts of school life.
Growing Up Rich, Watched, and Alone
The question that lingers is what such an adolescence does to a person.
Many students at École des Roches are, in a sense, outsourced children. Some come from diplomatic families stationed abroad, others from divorced households stretched across continents. Many have parents running companies, governments, or global investment portfolios—lives incompatible with school pickups or nightly homework checks.
For these children, the school becomes not only an institution but a surrogate home. One alumna, now a communications professional, speaks of the deep loyalty alumni feel toward the school: for some, it filled gaps their own families could not.
Yet the environment can distort perspective. The former Clio-riding student remembers housemates casually storing thousands of euros in drawers; at thirteen, this barely raised an eyebrow. Over time, he says, you stop seeing money altogether. Poverty becomes defined not by hardship but by a lack of designer labels.
There are darker undertones. As in many boarding environments, boredom and isolation can feed risky behavior. Former pupils recall incidents of antidepressant overdoses, alcohol-induced comas on Sunday-night buses, and, in one case, a classmate who later appeared on a television reality show—her chaotic adolescence packaged as entertainment.
The school maintains strict policies: random drug tests, the possibility of expulsion even for off-campus consumption, and an ethos framed around producing morally grounded young adults. The motto—returning to parents “a son or daughter who is in order, upright, educated intellectually and morally”—reveals the deep paternalism underpinning elite European internats.
And there are genuine successes. Alumni speak warmly of the friendships forged across continents, the network that has become a quiet currency in global business and diplomacy. For students from politically unstable regions, École des Roches can provide safety and educational continuity that might otherwise be impossible.
But many graduates describe an ambivalence that takes years to parse. The former student from near Paris writes that the school left him “completely unprepared for the outside world.” After three years surrounded by Gucci sneakers, private jets, and the children of heads of state, ordinary life felt jarringly unfamiliar.
“No matter how successful I become,” he concludes, “I would never send my own children there.”
That tension—between privilege and displacement, opportunity and distortion—sits at the heart of École des Roches. For the children who board those buses at Porte Dauphine every Sunday night, school is simply school: classes, sports, friendships, heartbreak, and the slow process of becoming oneself.
For the rest of the world, looking in from outside the gates, it is something else entirely: a childhood lived in first class, in a place where the extraordinary has been engineered to feel entirely normal.
