I will start with the point that sinks more applications than any other, because there is no way to recover from it: Franklin only accepts applications for sixième from 15 to 30 September, during the year of CM2, a full year before entry. (Sixième is the first year of collège, the French lower secondary school, at age 11, equivalent to Year 7 in the UK; CM2 is the last year of primary.) The school's website is explicit: once that period is over, the form closes and no further application can be submitted.
Two weeks a year. It is the shortest window of any of the leading Paris schools, and the only place it is announced is a web page that does not even state the year.
If you are aiming for sixième, the date that matters is therefore 15 September of the CM2 year, and preparation starts well before that. For other year groups the calendar is more flexible, but it is not the same everywhere.
The calendar, year group by year group
The application: entirely online, and nothing published
Applications can only be submitted through the school's online platform. The website is clear that no paper application will be processed. You need to have read the school's educational charter before you start.
The published process has four stages: submission of the application with its supporting documents, receipt and checking, review of the file by the director or the préfet (the senior staff member in charge of the year group), then a reply in the form of either an offer of an appointment or a rejection.
There is no written test, at any level. The interview is with the director or the préfet, and the school takes care to point out that being offered an appointment does not mean being accepted.
Franklin is hard to prepare for, for a reason you will not find at any of the other leading Paris schools: neither the list of documents, nor the application fee, nor the tuition fees are published.
The list of documents only appears inside the form, once you have created an account. The fees can only be seen through an external simulator. So a parent cannot know what they will have to provide, or what they will pay, before committing to the process.
The only figure the school publishes about its size is an indirect one: an average of thirty pupils per class in collège. No number of places, no ratio of applications to admissions, no date for replies.
On financial aid, on the other hand, the school publishes a solidarity scale and, for its classes préparatoires (the two-year courses that prepare students for the competitive entrance exams of the grandes écoles), precise rates of support: half the cost for a student on level zero bis of the French state grant scale, sixty per cent at level one, seventy-five at level two, and the full amount from level three upwards. Bursaries of two thousand five hundred euros are also available in the prépa.
What to do, depending on your timeline
If you are aiming for sixième. Set a reminder for 1 September of the CM2 year: families who discover the window on 1 October are a year late. Until then, the only things that count are the bulletins (school reports) from CM1 and CM2, since there is no test to prepare for.
If you are aiming for a collège year. Apply as soon as applications open, without waiting for 31 March. These places come from pupils leaving, they are rare, and the first application submitted for a place that becomes free has a real advantage.
If you are aiming for the lycée. The lack of a closing date is no reason to wait. Quite the opposite: it means the school closes when it is full.
A word on method, for Franklin as for the others
This school's lack of transparency has a practical consequence you have to accept: you will not be able to compare Franklin with the others on objective criteria, since it publishes none. Do not waste time looking for a figure that does not exist.
What you can do is build a coherent list and apply to each school within its deadlines. The six leading Paris schools do not share the same calendar, the same selection process or the same approach to the interview. The École alsacienne sees the child alone and publishes its admission rate. Saint-Jean de Passy requires both parents and publishes no closing date. Franklin publishes almost nothing and closes in two weeks. A serious application starts with a table of dates kept up to date, and early submissions everywhere.