Château de la Baudonnière

Overview

Château de la Baudonnière is nestled within 100 acres of forest with two lakes and a river running through it, its own apple orchards, cider press and mini-farm, making it a magical and safe location for students and teachers alike. Voyager School Travel took over the centre in 1997 and since then we have continued to invest in the centre, staff and learning activities to create a market-leading school language immersion programme.

Just 10km from the city of Avranches, the Château was originally built as a home for a local wealthy landowner and was later taken over by the military during the German occupation in 1939. By 1992, the Headteacher of Riverston School England had converted the stable blocks into dormitory buildings and began to welcome school students to improve their French.

Accommodation and facilities

The Château is fantastically equipped with fun and adventurous facilities set in a naturally beautiful setting. The facilities include a lake for raft building and canoeing, a ‘tough mudder’ assault course, climbing walls, three archery ranges, woodland and meadows, volleyball court, aero ball courts and boule pit. There are also two well-equipped fencing rooms and aero ball courts as well as floodlit hard court area and artificial grass court which are both perfect for football, tennis, hockey and basketball.

The Château is our largest centre, accommodating a number of school groups and their teachers in comfortable modern rooms with excellent en-suite bathroom facilities. Students stay in gender-specific en-suite bunk rooms in accommodation blocks throughout the chateau grounds whilst teachers stay in en-suite twin bedrooms.

Centre staff

The centre has a dedicated team of operational staff and French-native animateurs under the leadership of our established management team and head animateur. Staff are carefully chosen for their skills and experience as well as their ability to create a friendly and encouraging environment for our language learners. Uniquely, all the centre’s staff are French speakers, the majority being native French speakers, which means that French is spoken everywhere and the pupils quickly get used to conversing in French during their stay.

With over twenty years experience in language immersion, the Château is our centre of excellence for language learning and the team is responsible for training and development of all our animateurs, from all our French centres and programmes. They also hold additional responsibility for maintaining the quality standards of our German language and Spanish language learning instructors.

Activities and learning

We have been welcoming French learners to the Château for the last 20 years and it is the home of our flagship French immersion and adventure programme where French is the sole means of communication. We believe that students staying at the Château on this voyage to France will have more exposure to speaking and hearing the language than is possible in an entire term of formal lessons back at school.

Perfect for...

• groups who want a longer trip
• adventurers who don’t mind getting wet and muddy
• exchange trips with French school children
• intensive French language immersion at all times