The École alsacienne is the only private school of its standing in Paris that publishes how selective it is. No estimate, no range: a figure, on its own website. Around 1,400 applications for 210 places, and an average admission rate of 15.7%.
One applicant in six. That is discouraging, and also very useful, because once you know the figure you stop building a strategy around a single school.
How many places, and at which level
The school's second piece of transparency is even more useful than the first. It publishes the number of places per year group, so you can see where it is possible to get in and where it is not.
In practice, there are five real ways in: moyenne section (the middle year of nursery school, age 4), CP (the first year of primary, age 6), CM1 (age 9), sixième (the first year of collège, or lower secondary, age 11, Year 7 in the UK, 6th grade in the US) and seconde (the first year of lycée, or upper secondary, age 15). Everywhere else, you are applying for places that may never exist. The school also publishes that 38% of siblings who applied were admitted to the collège and lycée, which means that even having a brother or sister there is no free pass.
The calendar: eight weeks, in November and December
The École alsacienne opens its admissions campaign once a year, in November, for entry the following September, and closes it in early January. For September 2026 entry, it ran from 7 November to 2 January. The school publishes its calendar late, often only a few days before opening, and its pages keep showing the previous campaign for a long time, so do not be too quick to assume nothing has changed.
Two things are certain, though, because the school repeats them: the campaign opens in November, and no late applications will be accepted. There is no enrolment during the school year either. Watch the page from the end of October of the year before entry, and assume you have about eight weeks.
Selection: a written test, and an interview that may not be what you expect
The application is made entirely online, through a single form that you can fill in over several sessions. After that, the process depends on the year group.
On one point, the École alsacienne is unlike any of its neighbours, and its own words say it better than I can.
In nursery and CP, it is the parents who are interviewed, not the child. But from CE1 (age 7) onwards, the school writes: "we do not see the parents", and "we recruit pupils, not their parents".
Compare this with Saint-Jean de Passy, where both parents must attend the interview. The difference goes well beyond logistics: the two schools see admission in different ways. One assesses a family's plans. The other assesses a child, alone, for ten minutes, in front of a teacher. The preparation is different, and anything the parents might say carries no weight at all.
Fees: the only school where your tax assessment is part of the application
The application fee is €100, non-refundable, charged by card when you apply. According to the school, it covers processing the application and organising the interviews and tests. Two exemptions are published: families who apply for a bursary, and pupils from partner schools.
Tuition itself is indexed to taxable income, in eight bands. The first band is worth knowing about, because it runs against everything people imagine about a school in the 6th arrondissement.
Discounts can be combined: 15 to 30% depending on the number of children, 1 to 3% depending on the payment method, 10% for teachers. The school publishes that 13% of its pupils received assisted tuition. Fees are voted every June, which means you apply without knowing the fee for the year you are aiming at. Count on the current year's fees, give or take a few per cent.
Decisions, and a trap for pupils in state schools
For September 2026 entry, decisions came out in March for sixième and seconde, in early April for primary, and at the end of May for the other secondary years. Everything arrives by email.
One last warning, which many families discover too late. A pupil at a Paris state school who applies for seconde must go through the education authority's placement procedure and put the École alsacienne as first choice. An offer of admission is useless if the choices were not listed in the right order.