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.

From Luxembourg to Spain: Saving Private Belongings

You have 6 weeks until your kids need to go to school somewhere else in Europe. You have a house full of effects from your life. You have kids that don’t know the meaning of the phrase “tidy up”, and you need to make sure you can carry on your professional activities when you get to wherever it is you’re going. What is your first emotion? If it is sheer panic, you are probably right. But it’s the second emotion that will count, and that is focus. Focus on what you need to do, when you need to do it, and how you can get it done. Our list was daunting, the time frame virtually impossible, but it had to be done if we were to make sure our three children were to carry on their education.

It went something like this:

·       Call the real estate branch of our bank and request to put our house up for sale

·       Close down our Luxembourg office

·       Make a list of countries and cities we would be interested in moving to

·       Check out their suitability: house prices, schools and quality of life

·       Single out some schools and apartments, and start calling round (not just emailing and waiting for a reply)

·       Arrange a couple of days to go to your chosen destination in order to tap on a few doors, because estate agents don’t like to be accessible, unless they are confronted with you in person

·       Order a large container to throw out everything we don’t want to take with us: furniture, fittings, flooring, general waste, etc.

·       Gather all the other waste from the house, sort it, and throw it out: electric, paper/carton, glass, dangerous materials, etc.

·       Put all the utility services on alert that we’re going to close them off

·       Sign out of the local commune

·       Get the car serviced

·       Start gathering things we are going to need, such as different sized house-move boxes, tape, markers, bin bags, etc.

·       Begin washing all our dirty clothes and then do systematic washes of used ones, so that we can pack them easily when we need to.

·       Look for a person to keep an eye on our house until we can return to get more stuff: feed the cat, water the plants, put out the remaining rubbish on the right days

·       Start looking for a storage place or garage to get our stuff delivered to once the house is sold

·       Plan our route to our destination including booking stopovers – that would mean setting a deadline to get it all done

And start doing all this as soon as we can – no thinking “I’ll take a few more days off and then get down to it”, because we risk being assaulted by all manner of extra tasks we never thought of. Take this road, and you will find yourself wallowing in a massive pile-up of uncompleted items. Also, don’t do one and then another – juggle five or six of them all at the same time, prioritising one above the other.

We had to do all this while in the relatively close background, three screaming, self-obsessed kids on their summer holidays kept picking fights with each other, sabotaging our sorting piles, and asking us for juice, food, a push on the swing, or to fix something they'd messed up.

Anyway, first task: deciding where to go and taking steps to organise our successful installation there. As well as plenty of housing and affordable living, the number one priority above all else was finding a place with more affordable international schools than where we were currently living. I looked at various countries on the International Schools Database: Denmark had very few options, although it was cheap. France was OK, but we were a little wary of all the current social and economic problems there, plus their inclusive schooling was also not very developed. Czechia was high on the list, but its international schools were almost as expensive as Eton or Harrow – why cater to a lot of ordinary folk, when you can put the prices up and have smaller classes with just sons and daughters of bandits and oil magnates? Italy was out of the question – we went there in April to check it out and I think the hype is really exaggerated. Sweden would be tricky to carry on working as entrepreneurs. In Ireland, we could just put them in state schools and the system would take care of it, but when I saw the house prices (and the weather forecast), I got cold feet. Which is, incidentally, also what I would get if I went paddling in the Irish Sea at any time of year.

It seemed that Spain was turning out to be a serious contender. Or rather, the only contender. I checked out some cities and found many had more than enough facilities, and the house prices in many areas were quite acceptable. There were plenty of cities with international schools and many had the right facilities.

But where?

Barcelona would be great, but it has a serious crime problem and it’s full of tourists. Madrid is a lovely city but it’s a cauldron in summer. Malaga would be a wonderful place, but the driving habits there are frightening – I think it’s where even Grand Theft Auto refused to go. Bilbao, San Sebastian, Zaragoza, Granada, Cordoba, all utterly marvellous places, but possibly a little too small for what we need.

Hold on… what about Valencia?

You know sometimes when you’re looking for something and you look everywhere else except *right there* because that’s where it’s much too visible? It’s right under your nose, and that’s why you can’t see it. Like when you’re in the kitchen and you’re looking for the knife you were just using. You look around it, over it, even through it, even though it's so visible and so evidently close that you would probably put your hand straight on it if you were blindfold. Well that was Valencia: I don’t quite know how we kept on missing it on the map, quite frankly.

Qualities:

1.       A host of international schools all vying for your business, keeping the prices reasonable and the competition hot.

2.       Located at the very top of the Forbes Magazine Best City To Live In Index, ranked first in quality of life and third in ease of settling in by Internations, it has everything Barcelona has but without being Barcelona: it’s between the sea and the mountains, it has excellent food, splendid architecture, a superb social life, an impressive number of cultural events, and such glorious weather almost all year round.

3.       What it has that Barcelona doesn’t is also worth mentioning: low crime, friendly people, competent governance, and a likeable football team come to mind, but I’m sure there are others.

I had that instinctive feeling that I didn’t need to search any more. This was our next project, and hopefully the last one: we were going south – quite a long way south.

It was vital, therefore, that I went there to check it out, visit a few important schools and estate agents, and see which areas of the city would be good to live in. I booked a flight from Luxembourg via Zurich, and found a cheap room in a student residence for a few days. We had a Zoom call with one school, and they invited me to visit them when I arrived, although I felt they weren’t so keen on us. I resolved to go there anyhow, just to see the potential.

The impressive grounds were located quite far outside the city centre, in a plush neighbourhood surrounded by villas and parks. When I arrived, there was a summer English camp going on and the place was full of Spanish kids enjoying the utterly amazing facilities. But it was more like a sports academy than a school – there were copious sports facilities catering to basketball, football, tennis, golf, track & field. Inside there were classrooms with every piece of technology you could ever need – every room looked like as if the Starship Enterprise had been a children’s space ship. The immaculate marble-and-glass corridors led to different other facilities, such as a fully equipped air-conditioned theatre with seating for well over a hundred, a canteen the size of Gatwick Airport’s arrivals area, tree-festooned walkways, and a rather large trophy room displaying the school’s impressive sporting and academic achievements over the years.

The mouth-watering services and programme on offer, plus the facilities, location and fee structure made me realise that maybe back in Luxembourg we were being swindled. No, hold on, not swindled, robbed. Pickpocketed. Mugged. Cheated. Fleeced. Ripped off. Defrauded. Conned. Hustled. Deceived. Hoodwinked. Shafted. Taken for idiots. Imagine paying a vast amount of money to a school to turn your child into a fully-functioning citizen, only for them to tell you they’re not prepared to let her repeat the year and grant you the time to put in place the appropriate professional help. What kind of crapulous business model are you running when you ask thousands of euro for your rather limited and unexciting services, and you act like you are the client? What school – remember that, school – wants all of the children in its care to conform to the system rather than to adapt the school to the individual? The visit in Valencia had raised a whole new level of questions that my brain was finding hard to answer. All I could think about was that we had not yet wasted our children’s education, and it was vital that we put everything in place by September. It was the second week of July.

At the end of the rather hasty visit, the head teacher said something that made me feel we needed to look elsewhere: “we can take Livia for a week and see how she gets on.” That was never going to work for me, but one of the advantages of Valencia is that it has more international schools than the entire Grande Région, which covers 5 regions in 4 countries. So I aimed my intentions towards a lovely British school in another suburb that had similar facilities and a powerful reputation. I called them up, they immediately arranged a Zoom call for a few days later, we told the head about our situation, and she sent us the enrolment forms.

To say that this woman is a mere head teacher is doing her a disservice. She is a ninja businesswoman and astute service provider. Every email answered, even if only a few words, all procedures explained, and all steps towards onboarding in September laid out in front of us. We were in.

Next, we needed a place to live.

Another thing I did while I was in Valencia was go to some estate agents. I had the impression there were going to be some heavier obstacles in this area, especially as Valencia is quite a popular place to move to. I visited a few of them, dropped my details and what I was looking for, and never heard anything again. Except from one; and yes, another ninja businesswoman. See the previous article for details on how we procured our beachfront apartment.

I also got reacquainted with the Spanish character and way of life. I should elaborate at this point – back in the twentieth century, my family had a strong connection to Spain. We had relatives living in three parts of the country, and my grandparents had a holiday home in the mountains near Malaga. They were special times – I loved the Spanish work ethic, the positive attitude, wicked sense of humour, strong sense of community, laid-back outlook, and ability to distinguish between fun and duty. And I had a proper revisit to these feelings as soon as I landed.

It was a bizarre, disorienting feeling, though, because I had been out of this environment for well over a couple of decades. But it all felt so very familiar, so very comforting, and so indispensable at that point. If I was going to leave behind my house that I had poured 15 years of toil into, I wasn’t going to take a backwards step. And here, in this blisteringly hot climate, with the nightly wind set to hair dryer status and the daytime temperatures reaching a point where even the devils of hell had gone back downstairs to cool off, I had my epiphany. I was, weirdly, going back to my original second home.

But there was a daunting task awaiting us before we got there: there was a house full of our junk that needed emptying, we needed to throw out a lot of stuff that we hadn’t used or seen for years, deal with some crap left over from the previous owners, and find a solution for a grumpy, deaf, twenty-year-old cat called Baldrick. Oh yes, and I needed to plan our route to Spain, dates and places to stay on the way.

I arranged for a container to be delivered to the driveway, and we started to divide all the junk that couldn't go in there into categories to take to the dump, a 35-minute drive away at the other end of Trier. I never realised how much utter rubbish the average household could accumulate over time. It is amazing. I did several runs to the dump, one of them just with electric bits and pieces: old blenders, a few outdated printers, a ton of battery-operated gadgets, obsolete chargers, lamps, broken plugs, sections of the Internet, old modems, clocks, and even a battery-operated oil painting. Don’t ask me what that’s all about, I have no idea, but it was a thing left in the bowels of the house by a previous occupier. Kirsten said she supposed it played a tune. Nobody buys that kind of trash, unless it’s a gift from someone who hates you!

The days went by, July finished and August kicked in. We had boxes and boxes full of our stuff, packed high and stashed in the flat below. I went up and down the steps carrying so much of it, I lost 4 kilos in just 3 weeks. Our gardener, Benek, had also helped to get the place in order, and without him I don’t know what we would have done.

The children were on summer holiday, and they were constantly asking us when we were going on holiday. I felt bad because we had so much to do and so little time, but yes, we all deserved a holiday. We were supposed to start our rental period on 1 September, so I decided that we should finish up on 21 August and the next day make our way southwards. I would find us a good seaside holiday home near Valencia for the week before we needed to move in, and arrange a couple of places to stay on the way that would count as a holiday.

One of the best ways to experience Spain is to go to a place where the Spanish go on holiday. The picturesque town of Peñíscola, about an hour and a half’s drive north of Valencia, is one of those places. It’s a quiet, unassuming resort, but it’s a beauty. Two enormous rocky promontories, one with the old city on it, a small harbour, and some beaches in-between that are protected from the main sea.

I found a delightful house in a typical urbanisation up some very windy roads with its own garage and terrace overlooking the sea – we would stay there for our final week from 25 August to 1 September. Now I could fill in the gaps to get there. I love planning holiday itineraries, and my first and most important tip is planning backwards is so much easier. Book your final destination first, it’s really then just a matter of filling in the gaps.

I used Google Maps to search for a good place in France to stay for a couple of nights, quite a long way south. I decided we should leave early on 22 August, a Tuesday, and get as far as possible towards our end point. Ambitious, but doable. I landed on Camping et Chambres d'hôtes du Moulin d'Onclaire, near the delightful town of Privas in the Ardèche. It had a swimming pool, and we could stay in a pavilion tent under some trees next to a river. I thought the second leg should be less ambitious so we could enjoy the Ardèche more and have a shorter drive. I found a delightful little bed and breakfast in the foothills of the Pyrenees about an hour from the Spanish border called Maury Cat Studio 66, where we would stay one night before our week in Peñíscola.

It was all set, but time was pressing. I would tell you what the months of July and August were like: imagine someone gets a fire hose and sprays you for days on end. Not with water, but with an endless number of tasks. You need to do some more packing, but you also need to collect rubbish, but you need to sweep the toys up that the kids spread all over the house, but you need to go shopping for food, but you need to put some washing on, but you need to clear up the terrace, but you need to go to the council to sign out of the community, but you need to arrange some meetings with a few people to say goodbye, but you need to buy more boxes, but you need to occupy the children before they turn the place into a set from Lord Of The Flies, but you need to cook dinner, but you need to call the agent in Spain for an update, but you need to put all these things in some kind of order of urgency so that you don’t have to choose one of two impossible options later.

You get the idea.

Anyhow, by way of a miracle, we managed to fit everyone in the car on the morning of the 22^nd of August. I think it was just getting to the point where we said “we’ve done enough, we can’t look at it any longer, let’s just go.” So we did, with the aim of returning the following month for a few days to put the rest in order. Good intentions, good intentions…

We unceremoniously sped off towards our new life without looking back. From what I remember, we stopped at a few places as we moved southwards, and each time, we noticed an increase in the intensity of the heat. It was really telling that by the time we reached Lyon, we were starting to flinch each time we stepped out into the sun.

Arriving at the first destination at about 7, we immediately went to the local town, Privas. Having parked the car, we headed into the blazing evening light to enjoy what was left of the day, sweat a little, and allow the children to stretch their legs. There would be no set bedtime that night, not now we were finally able to let go of many of the obligations. Saying that, I think it still took six weeks for us to fully expunge the stress and tension of the summer: for a long time, we were still quite edgy and tense, always responding to every noise or movement, and finding certain simple tasks too heavy to complete, or even start.

The day after, we spent the day at the pool just generally trying to detoxify. However, another rather silly annoyance crept up on us: the brakes of the car were worn and scraping metal on metal. I was in no mood to drive all the way to Valencia with dodgy brakes, not now we were south of Lyon, the kind of dividing line between northern and southern driving habits (with a few southern exclaves, such as Paris and Brussels – and for those who know, Esch-Sur-Alzette too…).

So I drove to a number of garages in the hope someone would be able to change them as quickly as possible. In the French countryside. In August. In a heatwave. A woman at the only garage that said it could fix the situation told me they would order the part and it would be there the following day, when we had to head south. It was the only possibility, so I took it. It was a garage about 10 kilometres from our campsite, so the assistant, a boy of about 19, was given the task of driving me back. The car was a tiny Renault Clio from about the late nineties and I had to heave my legs in to be able to close the door.

That evening, we ate at the camp site’s restaurant, a lovely courtyard terrace next to the swimming pool. There was to be a concert afterwards, and we were encouraged to stay.

There is something about the French and their stomachs that I will never understand. When the French go on holiday, so do their taste buds... and their principles. Between September and June, the French will look down upon the Americans and the British, the Dutch and the Germans, even the Danes, and pour scorn upon their eating habits, always dwelling on how superior their food is (despite there being a lot of cross-over), and yet when you go to any French holiday resort, the only thing they’ll serve is brown or orange-coloured fried food, often straight out of the freezer. There’ll be nuggets, breaded chicken, croquettes, fish sticks, meat balls, these thin, quick-cook fries that crisp up if you leave them in for a minute longer, and they’ll put them all in the deep fat fryer. There will always be loads of ketchup, an almost blasphemous ritual that the French seem keen on keeping alive as soon as July and August roll round. I remember my mother refused ketchup in the house, but in France, this is the summer staple. And they’ll charge you as much for this fattening brown pile of factory-made offal and plant-based leftovers as your local restaurant back home would for a decent salad, followed by an entrecôte, vegetables and potatoes roasted in garlic and rosemary, plus dessert and a glass of decent red wine. Not to forget a proper coffee, not the powdered crap they lazily make themselves as soon as the calendar reaches July. The French will forever bang on about their “marvellous cuisine”, even trying to bully UNESCO into giving it World Heritage status, yet they themselves are close to the top of the world rankings for fast food consumption. Go figure.

Anyway… rant over, back to the point. The evening passed well enough, and we had a lot of fun with everyone else at the concert/party. The performers, a man with an electric guitar and a digital mixer, and a woman vocalist, both local, would regale us with some proper rock songs, many in English. This, despite them not speaking a word of the language. They played really well and their hilarious pronunciation of the English lyrics was just the tonic I needed to cheer me up. I loved Suite Homme à la Bama by Aerosmith, Wok Ziss Ouais by Aerosmith, Ail Oué Tou'elle by AC/DC, Aneuze Houane Bail Tzeu Deust by Queen, Aille L’oeuf Roquenrol by Joan Jett, and Chize Gotze Louque by Roxette. Despite that, they were a lovely pair, and they really knew how to get us all dancing. I’d have hired them if I lived locally.

In the morning, I called the garage to see when I should come and get the car. They said the part would be in but they weren’t sure when. The prodigiously long, unnecessary rural French lunchtime came and went, no car. By 3pm, I was crawling up the walls. We should have been gone by then – our hosts for that evening were preparing dinner for us, and it was 360 kilometres away. Another intolerable hour ticked on, no call. The children were having a thoroughly great time all day at the pool, so the fact that Daddy was having an internal meltdown was immaterial.

Finally, at about half past four, the garage called to say the car was ready, and the boy would pick me up in twenty minutes. I told Kirsten to have all our belongings waiting outside the tent and went there expecting to pay, pick up my car keys and get the hell out of there. Nope. The client before me had a list of demands and gave an explanation each time: “The front left tyre might need some air – I was driving back from Carrefour on Tuesday – or was it Monday? Oh no, it wasn’t Carrefour, it was Leclerc, and there was one of those potholes that you can’t avoid. The local council should be ashamed. Anyway, I didn’t see it until too late so I was going too fast. Must have been about 40. Could have been faster though. Anyway, it hit the pothole and my coffee went all over the dashboard, I dropped my cigarette on the floor, and the suspension took quite a hit.”

Oh please STFU, I have a bunch of kids thinking Daddy’s hidden the car somewhere and I have to be in the Pyrenees by 8. I interrupted the conversation after a while and the chatty guy said “oh, I didn’t see you there!” I wanted to say, “yeah, no surprise there… you’re so self-absorbed, no wonder you hit a massive pothole. Why don’t you move your gaze away from the end of your own nose, you boring old troll, and take a wider look around you!” But instead I said “sorry for interrupting this pleasant little conversation, but I do have quite a pressing need for my car.” Regretfully, I held in my utter rage, because despite firstly the little devil on my left shoulder telling me to give any idiots and time wasters a good verbal slapping, and secondly the lack of an angel on my right shoulder keeping me virtuous, there is a terrifying Kirsten-shaped leviathan at home waiting to murder me for not having a placatory, well-meaning, non-confrontational attitude, even among people who really need to be told they're the main problem in their friends' and family's lives.

It’s a weird, paradoxical, almost hypocritical situation: she has a distaste to point out other people’s idiocies or despicable attitudes, so as not to cause a diplomatic incident, or worse, to offend the bastard, yet I might get a full half-hour sermon on putting too much salt in the pasta water. Believe me, the feeling of self-loathing for not telling a stranger he’s cycling in the middle of the road by hooting my horn loudly right behind him is better than the Full Kirsten Lecture awaiting me if I did do it. But sometimes temptation does win, and I will take the verbal fallout heading my way.

We hit the road at twelve minutes after five. I sent a message to the hosts with our excuses but that we were definitely on the way, and they said not to worry, they would wait. Having committed a few minor traffic infractions, we got there at two minutes after nine, and it was truly worth the stress – from the front, it looked like an unassuming row house on a very steep hill with some very dodgy surfaces, but the view on the other side was simply breathtaking. You walked through a huge room containing a proper, professional kitchen, passing tasteful but engaging décor, into the adjoining entertainment room containing an immense dining table, and a circular sofa for properly cosy moments (I’m quite sure that sofa could tell a few stories).

Our hosts were a couple in their fifties with the attitude and outlook of people half their age. They were in the midst of preparing our dinner when we arrived, so we were escorted to our room. We left through the back door, where there was a terrace overlooking the slope, and up a metallic spiral staircase to a huge wooden platform. Our room was through some hermetically-sealed sliding doors. It was so perfectly laid out in a nautical style and even had a mini cinema at the back. The children’s room was off to the side and had enough playful accessories to keep them entertained, but it was the terrace that was the star. It was dark, the moon was coming up, and we could make out the mountains in the back, the valley below, and the trees straddling the river. I was impatient to see what it looked like in the morning…

Dinner was served – a truly impressive salad to start with, which could have filled me up on its own. But then came a dish of local sausages, potatoes and summer vegetables. Believe me, about five years ago, I would have eaten the lot. But then, I was 30 kilos heavier and had a penchant for assuring an empty plate.

Dessert was equally delicious, and we were thoroughly impressed with the entire experience. We moved to the terrace, where it had got a lot cooler, for cigars and a nightcap, then we went off to sleep. Our quarters, up the metallic spiral staircase, were not to everyone’s liking… Dainoris needed his hand held and Milda was a little sceptical to start with, but in the light of the morning, I was sure the situation would be different.

And yes, it was.

I woke up with the anticipation of a child on birthday morning, and went over to open the sliding doors and the shutters. I lost the ability to breathe for a few seconds – the vertiginous rocky mountains, the fertile valley, the length of the view along the river – it was all so immense, so wild, so raucous in a silent kind of way. I could happily have just decided to move in there and then, but there were three kids to take to a holiday home in Peñíscola, and then there was the little matter of our new life in Valencia.

After a proper breakfast, we thanked our remarkable hosts and once more got back in the car. An hour passed and we crossed the border into Spain. The borders between countries in the EU are becoming more and more difficult to discern, and the difference in my lifetime of crossing into Spain in the 1980s compared to now couldn’t be more stark. Back then, we had to pull up at a huge roadside installation and show our papers to some very strict-looking geezers in odd hats and uniforms who used to make a habit of confiscating cameras, even if they had remained in your bag the whole time. How on earth they could suffer the heat while wearing a buttoned-up shirt and blazer was as baffling as the procedure they put us through. On this journey, we hurtled over the frontier without even thinking about it… it wasn’t until I saw an advert for a restaurant serving tapas that I realised we had left France. The European Union has a lot of detractors – but it has made our ability to move around so much easier. We would never have been able to do what we did back then: just pick everything up and dump it 1500 kilometres further south without even needing to show our passports.

We drove some more through the flourishing landscapes of Catalunya, deciding to pull off the motorway near Lloret de Mar, where there were surely some places to stop for lunch. We found a roadside restaurant that had ample parking and I put our long-suffering car under some trees.

After what was a perfect “Welcome to Spain” lunch, we jumped in the car and headed to Peñíscola, still quite a long drive away, passing exit signs for some of the country’s most well-known tourist destinations: Palamos, Tossa de Mar, Calella, Blanes, Sitges, Salou, not forgetting Barcelona, then crossing the Ebro valley before reaching Peñíscola itself. The children were veering between quietly interested in the scenery outside, to boisterous and annoying. So it was a particular comfort when we arrived in the town. I just had to get the keys from the tourist bureau on the other side of the town, and we’d be all set for our well-deserved holiday.

The town itself is a bright, friendly and laid-back place with a mix of restaurants and bars, tourist tat shops, and mid-range clothes boutiques. There are two main beach fronts on each side of a huge promontory containing the old town, with its castle on the top, seeming to rise out of the land like a massive organ in a theatre. So the first thing we did when we arrived at about five-thirty and got our keys was to change and head to the beach. The evening warmth kept everyone on the beach until after half past eight.

The children released a lot of energy that evening, both there and at the restaurant we went to after, a ranch house with a sprawling tree-speckled complex of tables and chairs, benches, chaises longues, sunbeds and deckchairs surrounding a small raised pool with a bridge over it. The Steakhouse El Campo is a seasonal venue open while there are enough summer tourists, and it’s run by a German man and his son. The Vater runs the restaurant in and around the ranch house while his Sohn runs the outdoor bar and grill near the pool.

Now we really felt like we were on holiday. During the week, we just did some typical tourist activities – visiting the beach, going to the park, walking in the cool night air, going to bed reasonably late, and eating local delicacies. We visited a lot of great restaurants and other places to eat, such as Hogar El Jubilado, an old-style hostelry owned by the local council and run by an elite team of workers. You queue up to make your order, they prepare it there and then, and by the time you’ve paid for it, it’s ready. There were potato salads, seafood salads, Russian salads, tortillas españolas, meatballs, cheeses, fresh fish dishes, chicken drumsticks, and a whole 1-and-a-half-metre-long fridge with whatever dessert you could desire. They opened for breakfast at the crack of dawn with croissants and pains au chocolat and closed at midnight after the last beer was poured. It was the town’s beating heart, and the people working there were happy, mischievous and highly efficient.

You can tell the quality of the place by the amount of insolence they are willing to hurl at you, and this place was right there at the top. Their coffee was tremendous and so was their teasing. It was here that I said to myself “I think we’re going to be all right.” I’ll be honest with you, I was still in mourning for our old life, and I often had moments when I just wanted to cry. Looking back, it was compounded by a deep fatigue from all the hard work before we left, but it didn’t take away the sting from having to uproot the entire family from everything they knew.

All I can say is the younger three were having the time of their lives, and the last thing on their minds was returning to our former house in Saarburg and going back to any schools in Luxembourg. And that was the most comforting thing. Because after this week, we were to start our new lives and they were to go to school.

But that is for another post. 

 

 

The hazards and misfortunes of being a language trainer

There are few things I find more frustrating, upsetting, enervating and infuriating than the English language training sector and the people involved. I shall elaborate, but this is really just a small part of the overall picture:

There is an awful paradox at the heart of it all that needs somehow to be killed off. If you look at people of other professions coming into contact with large groups of customers on a daily basis, like accountants, doctors, lawyers and the like, they keep themselves to themselves and don't reveal their secrets to the world so readily. They also provide a "need-to-have" service, rather than a  "nice-to-have" service, such as artists, restaurateurs and gardeners. For that reason they can charge a lot of money for their services. Artists, restaurateurs and gardeners too, but there are very few of the latter who actually can afford the kind of gated properties of the former. In fact, they are liable to be the clients of the latter. And far fewer in number, which is why most artists don't make a huge amount of sales.

Language training falls in a middle category. For some it is a "nice-to-have", for others a "need-to-have", where half are learning languages to better carry out their job, and the other half so they can hold conversations with strangers on hotel terraces; and herein lies the problem. The managers and owners of language schools are able to get the best of both worlds by charging clients in the "need-to-have" category a lot of money for the services of their trainers/teachers, yet pay their personnel the same kind of fees from the "nice-to-have" category. It is a trick of the trade, and a very prevalent one. Furthermore, a sizeable minority of the teachers are gap-year students, or freshly diploma'd twenty-somethings who can barely recognise the difference between a preposition and their elbow. The rest, who are trying to make a career out of it are terrorised by their employer by making competitors out of your colleagues (ever wondered why many are reluctant to share?) and making every day in the school seem like it's your last one. But the most despicable part of their little ruse is how many hoops they make you jump through for such a paltry salary. Take a look at some of the jobs on offer on the TEFL websites. Here's one I found today:

[Name removed] is a leader in the provision of educational travel programmes. Accredited by the British Council, we've been teaching English to international students for 20 years. Our aim is to provide students with a fun, friendly and safe environment in which to develop their communication skills in English.

We are looking for talented and committed EFL teachers to work on a non-residential basis at our centre based at [name removed].

This is a 1 week post, teaching up to 20 hours.


So far, so good.

Then:

Essential:
- CELTA, Trinity TESOL, PGCE in English or an MFL, or equivalent
-Bachelor Degree

Desirable:
- Experience of teaching students of university age
-An undergraduate degree

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A NON RESIDENTIAL POSITION AND WE ARE UNABLE TO PROVIDE ACCOMMODATION.

So, you're thinking it's going to reward you for the fact you have a degree and you need to pay for your own accommodation? Wait for it...

From £12.50 per teaching hour.

I say, what?

From £12.50 per teaching hour.

I did read that right?

Yep, you definitely did.

That's virtually nothing. I got more per hour for mowing lawns, and that was back in the mid-nineties.

So, let's say you're doing the maximum 20 hours for the week. That works out at £250 for the week. Then let's add in your accommodation. You're in a well-to-do provincial city in the late summer. Kids are back at school but it's still warm. You're looking at £25-£40 per night, for a youth hostel or a cheap hotel. So that's between £170 and £280 for the week. In the youth hostel category, you come out with £80 profit, leaving you with just over £10 per day for food. In the cheap hotel category, you're £30 out of pocket even before you've bought a muesli bar for your evening meal. And you still have to factor in that you need to travel there. Oh yes, and UK tax. And that's not for preparing lessons, correcting and marking work and doing the admin. It says "From £12.50 per teaching hour".

This repeats itself over and over again in varying forms of ruthless cheapskatery and devious mind-trickery as to leave most people with the idea that you should be grateful for actually having something to bloody well do, and you're actually such an ungrateful little weasel for demanding a higher salary. You are supposed to understand that you are doing a humanitarian act, and asking for more money will lead to demands from the others, which in the end if all the teachers did it would lead the school to bankruptcy.

Utter rubbish.

Imagine you've got a class of 8 students. Their parents have paid a package of £500 to £900 for the week, including all meals and basic accommodation in the residence halls of the campus. That's about £4000 to £7200 per class. That means the people on the course are from families that are not poor. Indeed, they're likely to be the lawyers and doctors of the future. The school has overheads, so let's take away 60%. That still leaves £1600 to £2880 per group. And they can't pay proper salaries to their teachers?

There are many standard replies to that question, including the old cliché about profit margins and the like. But what I find most baffling is that these schools really do find the personnel for their courses. There really are people who wish to fill the gaps. And these are the pedagogical versions of interns, that new breed of modern crypto-slave that will do anything for the promise of a job in the future. Except in this business, there is no guarantee of success or riches beyond the current hourly rate afforded by language schools across the world.

I think it is really high time serious language trainers got together and separated themselves from the amateurish schools willing to employ bookish recent graduates looking for a jobby (job + hobby) from the more serious ones who look after their staff and treat them more like the career-minded human beings they are trying to become.

Career-wise, I live in a bubble of contentedness, and I am thankfully not in this predicament that the vast majority of my fellow language trainers find themselves in. But when I look through the job ads just to see what else I could be doing, I despair for the predicament of those wanting to join me in this noble yet poorly-rewarded of professions. It is a very well-oiled ladder, and that's how the schools like it.

Finally, a short note about the people who do my job. They are extraordinarily proud people, preferring to let someone else organise the lessons, set up the course locations, find the clients, level-test them, propose times and hours for their course, and ask them for post-course feedback. The teacher is only willing to involve him/herself in the bare minimum of extra activity, and you have to ask why. That is because it is not their job. They are paid to teach and give advice, mark work and guide students to their target. Correcting tests, preparing lessons and writing course records go largely unpaid. Many would say that out of every hour spent in the classroom, about 25 to 40 minutes is spent doing the accompanying admin. And in the class, the energy spent giving the lesson in comparison to the monetary rewards has a real effect on morale, psyche and sense of self-worth.

So next time you question the commitment and satisfaction of language teachers, remember there may be a hundred reasons behind it. Either the language schools need to stop their ludicrous race to the bottom with their course fees (a recent article in Swedish on public procurement of language services, this time translation and interpretation, found that low pricing had an adverse effect on overall quality and client satisfaction) or trainers need to refuse jobs that don't properly reward them for their efforts. I know already what is going to happen: all the time there are people willing to work simply for the work experience, who were legally minors less than 5 years before they do their dodgy TEFL qualifications, the rest will be exploited. And this particular formula is repeating itself in many other professional sectors.