In his first year at his new primary school in Cornwall, my son Gabe gave a talk to the class about his experience the previous year at school in France. "The teacher shouted all the time," he informed his fellow pupils. "She wrote a 'naughty list' on the board. She waved a bamboo stick around. And the reading book was really boring." To emphasise his point, he ripped up a picture he had printed from the offending book and threw it into the air, concluding: "I like English school."

Seven years ago, James and I were thirtysomething backpackers with two small children, not quite ready to stop the adventures. We moved to France because, as a Tefl teacher and a writer, we could, uprooting a two-year-old and a tiny baby and taking them to live near Europe's best surf. We bought the regulation crumbling house and did it up. We spoke French, went to village functions and drove to the beach every weekend. When Gabe turned three, we sent him to the maternelle (nursery) section of the village school, where he settled happily and became bilingual. Many of our friends in Brighton were mired in panic about getting their children into the right schools, whereas everyone knew that the French education system was among the best in the world. It was academically rigorous, dependable, secular. We may have been slightly smug.

But five years later we returned to the UK, desperate to get our children into a good primary, to send them somewhere without a "get it right or you're rubbish" ethos. By that point, I only wanted Gabe to go to a school at which someone would notice or care whether the children were happy or not.

When I read the interviews that the journalist Peter Gumbel has given to promote his new book, On Achève Bien Les Ecoliers (They Shoot Schoolchildren, Don't They?), published this week in France, I felt sick with recognition. Gumbel is a journalist and lecturer at the elite Institut d'Etudes Politiques (better known as Sciences Po) in Paris, and he has two daughters in the French education system. His book lays bare the system's inadequacies. "French children . . . are more anxious and intimidated in school than their peers in Europe or other developed countries," he writes. "They're so terrified by the idea of making mistakes and being lambasted for them, that they'd rather keep their mouths shut than put their hands up." He found his children and his students stressed, ill and massively lacking in confidence.

I remembered the seven-year-old girl who was so scared of not progressing to the next class that she stopped eating. The 10-year-old who was put up a year because she was bright, and found herself in the first year of secondary school in a class with 14-year-old boys who had been kept back repeatedly and who were frustrated and aggressive.

However, this reality did not hit us for several years. Pre-school provision in France is second to none, and we managed to carry on being smug while Gabe, and his little brother, were happy at maternelle. The younger ones would spend much of the afternoon napping on camp beds. Lunch was a three-course meal, and the children danced, painted and played all day long, learned to write their names on squared paper and to count, but with very little pressure.

We moved to a different village an hour's drive away, for James's work, just as Gabe reached six. When we went to visit the new school, the head showed us around, on a day when no children were present. He seemed to be an "Etre et Avoir" kind of superman, running the school, teaching the last year of primary, and also – did he mention? – he was mayor of the village. Alarm bells should have rung, but I ignored them because I wanted it all to be wonderful.

When the new school year started, it did not take long for it all to fall catastrophically apart. Gabe's class teacher, whom we liked, left three days into the school year. She was replaced by a young supply teacher whose heart was not in the job and who had no idea how to teach.

On his first day, Gabe clung to me. On his second day, he clung harder. I waited for him to settle, but it got worse. He cast around for reasons not to go. He invented headaches, stomach ailments. I sometimes let him stay at home, but often sent him in because I had to work. Once or twice I peeled his arms off me and flung him at the teacher. Although he made friends quickly, and his teacher assured me he was doing well, it was heartbreaking, and I look back on this period now and feel I failed him.

School in France has no assembly, no school plays, no music, no clubs. There is a hastily thrown-together entertainment at Christmas. There is no pastoral care. Children go through the system and emerge with a body of knowledge, and everything else is down to the parents.

In CP (cours primaire, aged six), Gabe and his class sat at individual desks, copying handwriting from the board and taking dictation. They learned by rote, and every child in the class would read the same two pages of the reading book on the same day. Some would be bored and frustrated because it was too easy, others stressed because they didn't understand it. The teacher came down harshly on anyone who did not get to grips with the subject, or did not behave acceptably: there was always a "naughty list" on the board, never a "good list".

Victoria, an English woman with a French husband and two children, lives in north-east France, where her eldest child is at a bilingual secondary school. Her daughter "sees huge differences between her native English-speaking teachers, trained in the UK or US, and her 'normal' French teachers," says Victoria. "The former engage with the class, teach creatively, encourage discussion and mark positively, whereas the latter (with exceptions) tend to lecture rather than teach, and mark with terrifying harshness and negativity." Victoria's daughter cannot bring herself to ask if she does not understand something. "In the past we have encouraged her to speak up in class when she hasn't understood," she says, "but other pupils have been greeted with frosty sarcasm by some teachers and the ridicule of classmates, so she won't do it."

We had known for a long time that we were not going to stay in France for ever, but Gabe's unhappiness propelled us home sooner than we anticipated. Gabe and I came to Cornwall to look at schools. When we stepped into St Francis, his current school, his face lit up. The head showed us around, and I watched Gabe's eyes widen as he looked at the PE equipment, the art room, the playing field. Best of all, he plucked up the courage to tell her that he wanted to be a time lord when he grew up, and she said, "Oh good – can I be your assistant?" This is a school that has an overwhelming pastoral ethos, and is not all about the grades. It has a community choir and a vegetable garden. The school production of Alice in Wonderland was rehearsed to such a high standard that many of the children were performing like professionals. Gabe is happy, and there are no "boring" reading books.

That is not to say, of course, that the British system is perfect. There are good schools, and bad schools, and they are driven by the personality of the head. The unseemly scramble for places at desirable establishments would horrify French observers, and rightly so. As would the pretence at religion that goes on.

Dean Dorrell, a British man with a German wife and three French-educated children, also points out that, "One of the great advantages of the French system is the fact that there are basically no private schools. There is no 'them and us' attitude enforced from a young age, which I believe is endemic in the UK education system and translates into the class system that is still quite evident in UK society."

Now, if French schools could become less rigid, and if British schools could be more consistent, then we might all be on to something.