The difference with France is that kids (at least mine) learn cursive from a very young age - in the UK where I'm from we learnt cursive when I was around 9 or 10 by which time the bad habits have already been formed.

Yes, when I said "we learn to write in cursive" I should have said, this is the first and only way we learn to write :) . We actually have the opposite issue. My script handwriting is awful because I never had to learn/use it. For paperwork we sometime have to write letter separately, but it is different than real script writing.