I’ve got a 5 year old boy, 6 & 7 year old niece & nephew. Educational policy is decided mainly by the autonomous government. Here in Galicia policy changes with the colour of the government, with PSOE & Nationalists in charge there were free schoolbooks and classes were in Gallego language, with Partido Popular the free books are gone and more classes are in Castellano, but the mix between castellano/gallego seems fluid and depends on the school. In pre-school and primary school I’d say that this short-termism is the only problem. Our boy’s school is fine, the classes are interesting, apart from general class he has gym once a week, english twice a week, computers once a week, music and a nature class. In infants and junior school I think that the system works fine and is as good as anywhere else. My son was born here and has a Spanish mum, although i always speak to him in English he’s naturally more comfortable with castellano, when he’s older he’ll need extra help with English to be fluent, remember all those spelling tests at school?
Where I’m not sure that the Spanish system is so good is in secondary education. Although some teacer friends have tried to explain to me, I’m still a little unsure exactly how it works. It would seem that from 12 years to 16 years one studies COE, this is the basic secondary education, at 14 years one can decide to either study sciencias or letras. This seems to be the the only choice, within the two streams of course, phsical education, spanish, english and mathematics are compulsory, there is a choice between religion and ethics, then sciences study physics, chemistry and bioligy whilst letras study litrature, latin, philosophy (there’s more to the curriculum but I haven’t mastered it yet). At the end of each secondary school year the teachers decide whether a child is up to standard in each subject, if the child is not sufficient in three subjects he can be made to repeat the year again, and again. At the end of compulsory secondary education the child will be awarded his COE (or not). There are no grades as such - either pass or fail. This may be why the failure rate looks so high here in Spain, you either pass everything, or else you fail everything. There is no streaming in classes either, I know that some teachers do not like streaming, but I’d prefer my child to be streamed.
At 16 years the child can either study BUP which is the course necesary to enter university or he can follow vocational studies. BUP again is split Sciencias or Letras, although there may be more specialisation here ( foreign languages for example). What happens at these ages though, is a cloud to me at the moment, nobody, including my wife has yet been able to explain exactly how this part works (or I’m being very dim).
If a child chooses university, his choices will depend (apart from his personal preferences) on his grade in BUP the better the university and the more popular the course the higher BUP score required. Examples here in Galicia are 9.44 for medicine in Santiago or 7.4 for agricultural sciences in Ferrol.
Hope this helps.
