La Vuelta al Cole!

It’s that time of year again. In France it’s all La Rentrée, in the United Kingdom it’s Back to School and here it’s La Vuelta al Cole. The shops contrive to take the edge off their last few days of summer freedom as, just a bit later than in the UK, Spanish children prepare to go back to school. Children are seen clutching bags of school “stuff”, parents look gloomily at their rather empty wallets and a load of websites give advice on how to deal with the stress of it all. After all, the kids have had almost three months of holidays, enough to make anyone feel reluctant to get back to the old routine. The child psychologists, however, assure parents that if they deal with it all calmly everything will be back to normal after a few days.

And going back to school can be an expensive business these days. An article in El País today puts the average cost of la vuelta at 825 euros per child, with Madrid hitting a high average of 1072 euros. Ouch! The costs vary from 1486 euros at a private school in Madrid to 384 euros at a state school in Galicia. ¡Menuda diferencia!

So what does the money go on?

• Clothes – even if your child does not go to a private school and so does not need a school uniform, s/he needs new clothes – obviously, didn’t you know that? – so that s/he is not shown up in front of all the other kids.
• Text books – one expense that (so far) doesn’t usually apply in the UK. Sometimes the course books change from year to year so it’s hard to recycle big sister’s copy. Then there’s the controversy here of whether you buy the books in castellano or gallego and if you get a subsidy or not – life is NOT easy!
• Equipment – I have long wondered how it is that pens, pencils, geometry sets, school bags and so on disappear into a black hole called summer EVERY year!
• Meals – they do have to eat!
• Transport – yes, and get to school!

I’m sure that going back to school never used to be so complicated, so costly or so scientifically calculated when my kids were doing it.

Another thing I’ve been reading about concerning school is the problem of the working mum. The young woman in the article I read had just found herself a new job and was having trouble with what to do with the children. Her youngest child was about to start pre-escolar, the stage between nursery for small babies and obligatory schooling at 5 going on 6. Now she was going to work longer hours and she needed to be there before the school starting time of 9 o’ clock. In the event her problem was solved because the centro was offering before school care for the pre-escolar age children, not schooling, just babysitting. Children could be dropped off at 8 o’ clock.

With increasing numbers of working mothers (yes, and fathers!) a system of before and after school “clubs” has been a feature of English primary schools for a good while now. The article I read here suggested that the service was only available for the pre-escolar group. What happens to the 6+ age group, I have no idea. Traditionally the family, especially Grandma, stepped in but nowadays many grandmas are also working and cannot fulfil that role. The library here in Vigo offers an after-school service for children, with a range of activities but it means that some children have a very long day. This is one of the concerns: that some children will be in “school” in one form or another from 8.00 am to around 7.00 pm. Such is the price of modern society.

Getting back to holidays and stress, I read in the local free paper, back in circulation after its August break, that there is now something called o sindrome pos-vacacional, post holiday stress syndrome. This was not talking about children going back to school after 2-3 months of freedom but adults returning to work after a month off. It’s a recognised social disease, a psychological (or psychosomatic according to the writer f the article) problem: stress caused by the need to demonstrate that despite having been away from the office for a month you can still operate at full capacity.

Apparently it affects 8 out of 10 Spanish women as compared with 5 out of 10 men. This is because we have more responsibilities – how many of us confess to returning from holiday only to wash ALL the holiday clothes, AT ONCE, and then clean the house before going back to work? Be honest ladies!! And I don't think that's just Spanish women. Add to that the fact that we women set ourselves higher targets in a loita, the struggle to prove ourselves not only as good as but better than men. Of course, now that the so-called syndrome has a name, lots of people will discover that they too suffer from “o sindrome pos-vacacional” – what better excuse for having another couple of days off?

All I can say is that I am unbelievably glad that I no longer have to worry about either of these sources of stress, getting the kids back to school and getting me back to work after the summer hols! There are some advantages to growing older!