Why we decided to abandon private education

It was just a year and a half ago that we were compelled to leave Germany and Luxembourg because of Livia’s education. The idea was that we needed to make sure she received a solid education in English, as she refused to speak French or German. With the UK off-limits, it came as a no-brainer to us when we discovered the province of Valencia in Spain had three times as many international schools with English as the working language compared to Luxembourg and our region of Germany combined.

We always saw our time in Valencia as an experiment where we would take stock of the situation on a regular basis. The first year passed quite quickly, but Livia was once again rejected from the private school she had been welcomed into only nine months earlier. Fortunately, they had the decency to tell us in early January of their decision not to renew our contract with them, which gave us time to look around for a better match.

Livia had been accompanied in class by a professional from a psychology centre most mornings for several months, paid for on top of the fees for three children. Despite this, the complaints about her behaviour started rolling in a couple of months later. We knew about her inability to stay focused and her propensity to misunderstand people’s intentions, but the idea was that the professional assistant in the class would help her settle and focus. It was working. So it came as a shock when the head of the school and her teacher called us into the office for what one might call The Little Chat.

The initial line was “it isn’t working”, then it dialled up to “she needs to be in a school with a far smaller group”, and finally it reached “we will help you relocate her as soon as possible” (but they won’t). You know how these “escalation” conversations go – a similar trick is applied to employees being told they’re about to be made redundant, or to unsuspecting partners in one-sided relationships. If you want to get rid of unwanted baggage without upsetting them, you need to start small and gradually build up to the main point. They were insistent that she needed to go to another school with smaller groups as soon as we could find another place for her.

And so the manager promised to make some calls, but in fact the burden really fell on us. We looked around for other schools as after this, we were pretty upset that they hadn’t really given Livia the choice to stay until the end of the school year. There was the Waldorf School in El Puig near our apartment, but they didn’t get back to us after our visit. So we thought about putting all three children in the semi-private (concertado) school near our office in the Cabanyal area of the city. I called for an appointment and a very kind lady invited us for a visit. We just hoped all three children would like the place. The day came quite quickly and we went all five to see the school.

Livia in all honesty hated it. But we felt this was nerves about having to make yet another change rather than an actual dislike. Dainoris walked round with us and found it a pleasant experience. As for Milda, we lost her on the way round, but we later found her sitting in another classroom taking questions from an audience gathered round her. She had only recently turned four at the time, and here she was, holding court amongst about ten other children and their teacher. She was going to fit in fine.

So in the first few weeks of 2024 I made the appropriate moves to try to enrol them all in that school and withdraw them from the private school at the behest of the latter school’s manager and Livia’s teacher. This is when the hilarity began… I first had to request the papers from Valencia city council. Arriving there, the employee at reception said my journey was unnecessary. All I needed to do was to download the city’s app and go to the education section. Oh, that sounded much easier, didn’t it? Nope. It took longer than it would have done to just queue up at the council and speak to a human being. It required you to set up a digital signature with a disproportionate set of hurdles to clear, and then upload a list of documents longer than those required to get a mortgage. And this was just to establish your profile.

To actually effectuate the enrolment, I had to undertake such a daunting and prohibitive procedure that I can honestly say was the most futile waste of my time I have ever been forced to experience. And I have taken a speeding awareness course. In German. Which took place on four consecutive Saturday mornings. And it cost me hundreds of euro.

In Luxembourg, for example, you sign in once and you gain access to everything from social security to housing, from health to education facilities, from unemployment benefit to reporting defective street lighting, noise pollution or stray cats. In Germany, we showed up to the council buildings, took a ticket and someone did everything necessary to be able to live and work there in about ten minutes. Here, though, I was confronted with a barrage of dubious and intrusive questions, many of which had nothing to do with education, all just to prove we were who we said we were and that we wanted what we said we wanted.

Meet the low-trust society head-on.

It was the most Kafkaesque, Byzantine, tortuous, and flawed procedure ever dreamed up by the depraved mind of a civil servant this side of the grave of George Orwell. Even the French couldn’t muster up such a pile of utter blethering gobbledegook if they forced all their hundreds of thousands of employees to eat a tinful of shrooms and tasked them with inventing a new procedure for the registering and licensing of electric scooters for dung beetles.

And at the end of the online application process, having spent a good hour answering the plethora of questions and uploading everything necessary to satisfy the city education ministry’s great and good, which I had to do three times for each child, I pressed “SEND”. And the longest error message ever written appeared on the screen, which in the type of stuffy, haughty and circuitous language that had been banned in most northern countries in the eighties, explained I had missed one pathetic little piece of information a few pages earlier, and I had to do the whole thing again. No recourse to correct the mistake, no red highlight of the erroneous data, just the obligation to go through the entire demoralising process once more, making sure I didn’t forget how I did it last time. Instead, though, I went for an angry walk on the beach where I kicked a lot of sand and shouted incoherent profanities at the sea. My mental health had already started to come apart at the seams due to the previous traumas, but this set off a load of alarm bells that screamed to everyone around me “he’s clearly potty, keep your distance!”

So Bonny Bee took it off my hands and did it all a few days later, having learned from my mistakes. It went through. Apparently. Not that we’d know, apart from the little message on the screen saying the process was complete.

Several days later, we received a very short, terse message from the city council, all in capital letters, that essentially said that nobody was going to allow Livia to change schools in the middle of the academic year. All that effort for nothing. I was getting really tired of doing the bidding of people who clearly had no sense of proportion when it came to handling citizens’ needs. But then I realised that actually, they had a point. Why should Livia have to change schools half way through the school year? It made no sense.

So I told the head of Livia’s school what the city council had said – it would mean they would have to keep her there for the remainder of the year, which would be the most ethical outcome. For despite all the moaning and carping from her educators, Livia had made a lot of progress.

The head and Livia’s teacher were disappointed, but they had never done this before, so they had learned something – that it took a furious faceless bureaucrat sitting in an office to act as a moral compass in all this. Imagine that.

The thing which had disappointed me most was that I was under the illusion Livia’s teacher had been showing a lot of eagerness in her efforts to help her, as she had initially said it would be her special mission. But the reality in the end was, like the staff at her last school in Luxembourg, she just wanted the quiet life. She didn’t want the hassle of an eccentric and confused little girl disturbing the class.

This was confirmed when, a week or two later, she complained about Livia’s behaviour again as Livia had been giving one boy a particularly hard time. To give her and the others in the class I suggested they swap Dainoris and Livia around, as they were in the same year but in different classes. The teacher did her very best to look shocked before making the most self-condemning statement of the year: “we could never do that to a child – if we moved her to another place, she would think she was being punished!”

Well, Ms Poppins, if this is how you felt about moving classes, then I wonder what you thought forcing her to change schools was going to do to her… if you read this, I would love an answer. I’ll print your reply anonymously, of course – I wouldn’t want you to start getting quality control inspectors, or worse, hate mail.

Despite all the condescending, Teachers-Know-Best sermons and the We-Only-Have-Her-Best-Interests-At-Heart homilies, we don’t hold any grudges. We just want to know whether the founder and owner was worried about her beloved school’s position on the education league tables, rather than being the outstanding pillar of education that all the advertising material alluded to. That included a whole spiel on their website about a special needs department, which was obviously another fallacy, as the only allusion to special needs was a visit once a week from an external child psychologist who would do the rounds and have a few chats with sad-looking munchkins.

I mean, I don’t mind the fact that a huge private school with exorbitant fees doesn’t have the facilities to cope with one solitary difficult child, and I’m glad in the end the head teacher admitted it, but I truly felt that everyone in there gave up far too early. Along with Livia’s classroom assistant we were paying extra for, we felt we were making progress. Livia came home happy four days out of five and had been making a huge amount of progress. But her teachers didn’t even wait for a diagnosis before pulling out.

This was the second year in a row that a private school had given up on Livia, riding a coach and horses through their own shiny charters that proudly show off their Duty of Care To Every Child. What’s the point in promising to do your best if in the end you hide behind your school’s deficient infrastructure (despite those huge fees) in order to justify running up the white flag of capitulation? I can only imagine how badly they must have felt in having realised they had failed a child. Again.

All this has led me to conclude one major thing: the private schools in every place we have been to all have one thing in common – they really aren’t as competent or as qualified as the public sector to take care of your child. If they can’t cope with one child with a restless spirit, causing havoc with their mythical multitasking skills, then you may as well save your money.

Now you may get the idea that I’m bitter about this. No, not really.

However, I feel it’s my duty to warn everyone thinking that sending their child to a private school is going to give them a massive head start in life.

But for some, nothing could be further from the truth. Their facilities may be cleaner, their gadgets more modern, their playing fields bigger, but that’s just cosmetic. What matters is the people running it: from the head of the facility to the caretaker, a school is there to give every child the means to cope with the essentials of life, and to send them home feeling happy and fulfilled.

I was sent to a private school, and I really don’t recommend it. There are several reasons why you should not send your child to a private school, in my opinion. And this is only based on my opinion, not a broad assumption. I am sure there are many fine institutions out there. I myself went to one outstanding preparatory school which sadly closed down in the 1990s. The other private school I went to had the same toothless leadership as those at Livia’s schools. This is because ultimate accountability is not to parents, but to the board of governors, aka the shareholders, many of whom have absolutely no interest in the wellbeing of the pupils or the desire to invest in better facilities if it means losing out in the short term.

But this is not the only reason I would warn parents off private schools. Let me take you through them one by one:

The first reason is what it does to the child’s psyche. Because of all the money being spent on me, I felt under the greatest pressure to perform. But every test that came up, I flopped, because I could not handle the pressure. I would have much preferred to have been a slightly higher than average pupil in a state school than a less-than-mediocre performer in a paying school.

The second reason is that private schools are under no obligation to hire teachers competent in their field. In fact, in a few of the private schools whose interiors I have seen, the teachers have been completely out of their depth. Qualifications are becoming an issue now, especially when it comes to education authority inspections, but a lot of them are failed state school educators.

And the third reason is that no matter how much money you plough into the school, it still doesn’t have the same amount of access to important resources as state schools do.

In the end, we managed to fill in the application for the three to go to the semi-private school near our office this year, and so far they seem to be coping well, but they need some assistance. In fact, although Livia is still visiting therapists and is still quite a handful, she is far more settled than her previous two schools. Furthermore, she comes home and surprises us with the number of Spanish words she can speak. Considering the principal reason for our move was her refusal to speak anything except English, the dial has most definitely moved on this front.

But this is not all we have decided to abandon. I will elaborate in another article coming very shortly.

A short advert for parental education

Education and upbringing just isn't what it used to be. People don't have respect for one another, don't seem to care about the community spirit of past generations. The solidarity of the social states has given way to materialism, selfishness and decadence. Although most remain good mannered people at heart, there is a tendency towards the attitude that it's not worth being too helpful, because you're sure you wouldn't get it back.

There are several layers of this social inertia - on one hand whilst some smile or say hello to you, half of the time you don't receive a greeting back. On another hand this is minor compared to the following, which is my pet hate and, I honestly believe, the root of our social ills today:

MP3 players on public transport. I hate them. I despise everything about people who feel the need to let the rest of the bus hear the "music" these individuals need to listen to in order to feel like they're still at the weekend's party and looking forward to the next one. I feel nothing but contempt for those who destroy the peace. I can't concentrate on reading my book when I hear these noise machines blasting out their satanic messages. Can't these people find something else to do? Read a book, for example. Although by the look of them I'm not sure they have a concentration span long enough to manage. But we can tie other anti-social, or even aggressive, acts in with this: feet on the opposite seat, talking loudly on the mobile phone, putting bags on the seat beside, talking loudly to others, refusing to get up for an old person or pregnant woman, spitting chewing gum on the floor, etc. If you do one of these things, you'll probably do the others.

And why? It came to my attention on the number 44 tram the other day - a woman of about 30 was occupying a four-seat section with her 9 or 10-year-old child next to her. The tram was quite empty to begin with but the amount of passengers built up gradually. Nothing unusual yet. Until you note that she allowed her daughter to put her feet on the chair opposite her and she kept her handbag on the seat next to her, thus occupying three of the four seats. If the parents don't say anything, the children think it's OK to carry on doing these things.

Another time I witnessed a family of four out for lunch - but that quickly became three when the youngest, no older than 6, got up to run off his half-eaten sausage and chips. The mother called the child back to finish off his "meal" but was ignored. So she got out a sweet and said he could have it if he sat down again. Nope. The boy carried on running. The plates were taken away and
the little shyster carried on annoying people. Mum and dad continued their chat as though everything was all right. That was, until one of the clients got up to complain to the parents.

He told the mother that the child was really disturbing him and the others around him by staring at them and every now and again shouting, running away in that heavy-footed way kids like to make noise. The mother was so astounded at this unusual and daring act that she even raised her voice to the child. But still she didn't get up. It took the little blighter to have an accident with the waiter carrying empty cups back to the bar for her to motivate herself. The child was unhurt, the waiter only unbalanced, but the cups had made a heavy landing on the concrete. Now he was seated, he began to clap his hands, put his fingers in his warm and gasless fanta drink and make monosyllabic outbursts but the parents did not tell him to be quiet. I then wondered why potential stepparents are unable to adopt children without the most rigorous of tests, but anyone with the right sexual organs can just make their own.

A third event took place last week when I was in Germany. I was at a village celebration where they set fire to a load of wood to commemorate the arrival of spring. They had set up a bar in an open tent and tables and chairs were placed outside to sit and have a good drink and chat. I noticed that all the adults were sitting or standing around getting slowly unconscious on alcohol while the kids were running about the field, playing with the fire and putting drinks down each other's shirts. I remembered one of the children from a previous visit and had got chatting to her - her friends were interested in the arrival of a foreigner so we all had a chat in the dusk light. Some of the questions were typical of kids to try and embarrass you, but I handled it fairly well, considering German is one of my weaker languages. When I said goodbye to them and headed back to the house I was staying in, two of the less-than-vertical fathers shouted at me to stop where I was. One asked, "what have you been doing with our children?" I didn't quite understand the nature of the question and felt quite threatened, so I asked the spokesman to repeat it. He said he didn't like strangers hanging round the kids and wondered what I was doing with them. If he had looked up from his glass, he would have seen. I told them what happened and they went away.

However, I felt like saying, "and what did you do with them?" Because it was plain to see that they just parked their kids on the grass while they went off to get drunk. Saves on the babysitting costs.

But I didn't, because we don't, do we? We don't correct others because it's not our responsibility. We are too shy to interfere in the lives of others for fear of upsetting them, or even worse, being the victims of violence. And the only thing the police would do is tell you to keep your nose out.

[That reminds me of the ultimate keep-your-nose-out example: not so long ago, in Brussels, a family called the police because the television had been on in the house next door all night for the past two weeks, and there was a terrible smell of rubbish. What they found was horrific. The old man who lived there had been dead for two weeks at least and had obviously passed away while watching the television. God help us if that is the way of the future. I think we need to make subtle inquiries into the health, wellbeing and stability of those around us. If we carry on getting more and more insular, we will end up all in a dysfunctional society, with relationships and families where we barely communicate to each other.]

Parents have great responsibilities to society as a whole - they need to pass on the social and moral ethics which allow our society to function. But many don't, or cannot. Many are far too lenient. In the case of the child in the restaurant, if that had been me as a boy, I'd have got a slap. Oh damn, we can't punish physically any more because some researchers told us it could psychologically damage you in later years. It didn't damage me. It didn't damage my father, who had it far worse. In fact, out of all the people I know who were punished as children, they have turned out far more balanced than those who grew up without it. Bullying damages you, punishment does not. It puts you in your place. Having a sense of justice helps, but these days, teachers are losing control of the classrooms, parents need to work all day because they can't live off one salary and so friends, computer games, DVDs, TV and the Internet take over the role of chief educator and kids create their own Lord-of-the-Flies view of the world.

I am not a traditionalist, but I firmly believe that a return to stay-at-home parents is a must for the future, but it is not important which parent stays at home. The main obstacle is the lack of policy to bring this about. I believe that the unemployment figures can be dramatically reduced and the amount of parents bringing up their children at home can be raised in one go by creating a partnership between the government and the business world where companies who offer an employee whose spouse quits work to look after their children a significant rise in salary. The companies taking part are offered tax breaks of the equivalent amount or more to compensate. This not only places the family at the heart of government policy, it also creates space for another potential employee who would be otherwise unemployed. This could have knock-on benefits, for example an incentive to produce more children, thus an upturn in population figures setting off the aging population.

This will not happen though, because governments of our day are only interested in offering cheap, temporary and diluted policies. They need to continue filling big business with tax incentives and helping reduce expenditure. The age of the benevolent government is over, stand by for the end of society.