La vuelta

Our grandchildren have gone back to school today. Peace and quiet reign in our house once more, for a while anyway. In Galicia, however, they still have a week or two of summer holidays to go. In many parts of Spain schools have already re-opened this week but Galicia, along with Andalucía and a few other regions send their primary children back to school next week and their secondary pupils the following week. To an English eye, these are amazingly long summer breaks.

Does this, I ask myself, have anything to do with the failure, reported in La Voz de Galicia newspaper at the end of last week, of some 60+% of pupils to pass their end of year exams for ESO (compulsory secondary education) and first year of Bachillerato? Certainly, these weeks when the rest of their classmates are still down at the beach or in the pool are spent in recuperación by some pupils. They have a last chance to repeat their exams and so progress to the next stage of their education. In some cases they end up repeating a year, although this is, I understand, only permitted once in a pupil’s education so you no longer end up with a huge, disgruntled and disruptive 15 year old in a class of 12 year olds.

It seems as though every country is having problems of one kind or another with their education system. In France, teachers are accused of not encouraging their pupils enough. They are too critical and are extremely poor at giving praise. Pupils feel undervalued and stupid and stop working with enthusiasm – you know the rest of the story, I’m sure.

As a result of the statistics about fracaso escolar in Spain, they are having big discussions about the need to diagnose problems and offer support at an early stage – right down at primary level. That makes sense. In the UK we do supposedly identify problem children early. However, my daughter who has just started working in a primary school reports that they have had to retest all their first year juniors as the infant school they came from reported them all as being up to standard when this was very obviously not the case. The big push to be high up on the league tables for results leads schools to “manipulate” results of tests. So the Spanish need to take it carefully and not make it into another way of “testing” the teachers.

The Spanish fracaso escolar has had its consequences in our family as well. We have just spent a weekend in the deep south – actually Surrey – where our son was getting married. My Spanish sister (OK, I know she has a UK passport but she’s lived in Spain for longer than she ever did in the UK) and her husband had intended to be there. However, my Spanish nephew failed his end of year exams, becoming one of the 60+% I mentioned earlier. Consequently he needed to register this week to re-sit the year and my sister felt that he maybe needed some parental encouragement.And so they missed a family reunion at the weekend.

The rest of us had a delightful time and the sun even managed to shine on the proceedings. It’s a good job the grandchildren weren’t due back in school until today.

As for us, we seem to have been building up to this for a good while, following a proposal on a Pontevedra beach last September but now the excitement is all over and we can get on with organising the rest of our lives: i.e. planning the next trips all over the place.