When choosing a school in Spain for your children, there are many things that you should take into account, before choosing the right one: The deterioration of European schooling and the ignorance of many of the prospective pupils, is seen on a daily basis by head teachers across Spain. With the influx of foreigners coming to places like the Costa Blanca, the prospective pupils that are fighting for the limited school places in private education is vast. Visiting prospective schools should be a joyful event, not the 5-minute wonder it sometimes turns into. There are several schools on the Costa Blanca that are privately owned and run. Depending on where you live and what your financial status is, will ultimately dictate which school you send your children to. Vastly different schools of thought are competing for centre stage. Advocates of progressive education, who want to dissolve structured curricula and competitive grading, battle it out with tradition-minded conservatives seeking a return to school prayer, paddling, and the pledge of allegiance. Fad schools based on the ideas of Dewey, Montessori, and Piaget are not so in vogue these days, certainly not here in Spain. Political interest groups fight to introduce their pet causes, such as the nuclear freeze and sexual abstinence, into the school day. Bussing, city-county mergers, and other forms of integration, which are still causing dissention. People debate the wisdom of lengthening the school year, teaching 2 foreign languages in all school years, tracking skills, and other substantive proposals. Depending on what your needs are, there certainly is the school for your child here on the Costa Blanca, if you are willing to work for it. Children from so many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds that we are seeing here also come in many different shapes and sizes, but most importantly, at so many differing educational levels. If you are moving to Spain with a child that you know has a learning problem, it is important to make sure that the school you are planning to send your child to, is able to cope and meet the needs of that child. For years now on the Costa Blanca, the monopoly for private schooling has been in the hands of a small number of rich business consortiums. These consortiums, being driven by the need to grow profits, have mainly been concerning themselves with bums on seats. Not taking into account the fact that the needs of their pupils were just not being met. Private schooling in Spain is not quite the same as one would expect in the UK or indeed in many other European countries for many years. The market for private education here is sold mainly to what is known as “first time buyers”, foreigners who would not normally in their own countries be in a position to pay for a private education for their children because it would be financially out of their reach. With the cost of a private education in the UK for example costing anywhere from £10,000 - £25,000 per year and in Spain costing around 5,000 euros, Spain opens up the private market for those that would normally not be able to afford it.
