I have been trying to register my children for public school in Seville and it has not been as easy as I had hoped. In fact, a total bureaucratic hassle. We have been working on it for almost two weeks. We are only here for two months.
I want my children in public schools (ages 12, 4, 3). My advice is to work both on the level of the closest public schools to your residence while also dealing with the “school district” offices. To begin, you will need to “empadronarse” (to become a resident of your neighborhood) at the closest Ayuntamiento. For this you will need passports, birth certificates, and a rental contract). The process takes 10 days but you can register your children for school once your application is submitted (while final approval is still pending).
While working on that process you will also need to go to the Delegaci?n Provincial de Sevilla Ronda del Tamarguillo, s/n
41005 Sevilla Tlfno: (0034) 955034200/01/02. There you will complete applications for each child ages 4 and up. It takes several days for them to call you back and let you know which schools have spots and in our case the spots were about a 40 minute walk from our house. Once you confirm which school you prefer, they will complete an authorization which you need to collect from their offices and present at the local school.
In my case, I did not like the schools they selected, so I asked at the Delegacion for a particular school that I had seen closer to our residence. They checked and there was in fact a spot available. This is why I would also be in communication with local schools—I also sense they can sometimes cut through the red tape for you.
This is as far as we have gotten. Once you have your approval form, I have been told that there is another registration process at the local school. Some (but not all, it seems) will ask for copies of immunization records.
In the case of our younger child, spots at the public or mixed public/private guarderias are very hard to come by. at the Delegacion Provicinial de Sevilla there is a separate office/window for escuelas infantiles where they can give you a computer print out of schools where there are supposedly spots. However the print outs I received did not have correct information and there were no spots available at the sites they suggested to me. For the youngest we are looking at private guarderias which cost about 180 Euros a month and much less red tape and more availability. We may also consider sending our 4 year old to a private guarderia if we fail to matriculate him in the public school.
I still think that it is a distinct possibility that after all of this we will ultimately fail to successfully register our children. If we were here more time, or arrived before the beginning of the school year, we might have had better luck.
I post this because I would have desperately liked to have known all of this before we arrived.
