Our children for different reasons both live in Madrid and not unsurprisingly so do our four grandchildren. Three of them aged 8,7 and 5 go to primary schools and our youngest granddaughter who is just 17 months old has already started nursery school. I'm very impressed by the quality of these schools, not only in the standards that they set but in the range of curriculum and other activities that they undertake. The schools are both bilingual but take a different approach to whether they teach English or Spanish as the first language. One teaches English as the primary language and Spanish as a second language and also teach English reading, mathematics and science. In subjects in a recent term the school in the primary English class focused on note taking, setting descriptions, character description and researching animals in Antarctica. In Spanish as a second language they worked on vocabulary related to the months of the year, the seasons, and the weather. They have also learned to describe the physical appearance of people, including clothing items. In English reading they focused on prediction, features of non-fiction text, stories with familiar themes and settings, patterned language and repeating patterns. In mathematics the children developed their understanding of multiplication and division. They can solve one step problem questions based on money.

In considering learning skills the schools cover for example the willingness to speak English or the target language, the child's attitudes to learning, their organisation for learning and the degree to which they can learn independently. In assessing attainment they have a range of levels: ‘working significantly above’ means that the child is regularly producing work that is significantly higher than the expected level for the year group; ‘working above’ means that the child is regularly producing work that is higher than the expected level for their year group; ‘working at’ means that the child is regularly meeting the expected level for their year group; ‘nearing’ means that the child is not regularly meeting the expected level for the year group, but they are close to doing so. With continued reinforcement and hard work, they are likely to meet the expected level more regularly. ‘Working below’ means that the child is not yet meeting the expected level. With support they were able to access the curriculum for the year group. The child may be offered additional support within the classroom to access the curriculum more independently. ‘Not yet accessing the group curriculum’ means that the child finds it difficult to access the curriculum for the year group and they need regular additional support. The child may be offered additional learning support to help them catch up.

For me this range of curriculum activities and educational assessment means that the schools are well run and no doubt encourage the children to progress to the best of their abilities. It's nearly 70 years since I was starting primary school and while I did well in my school against the standards of the day I do not recall anything like this range of activities. I no longer have in my records the reports from my school days and that is probably just as well but I know that it didn't cover this kind of depth of assessment and analysis. My recollection of the curriculum, at least for the early part of my primary school education, is that it really was very little more than the three Rs i.e. Reading, (w)Riting and (a)Rithmetic. Few of us would have been able to read when we arrived at the school at four or five years old and these days that's very different so the reading at least initially must have been pretty basic. ‘Writing’ similarly and I think there was almost as much focus on teaching us a particular style of handwriting as anything else and Arithmetic was not much more than reciting the times tables as a  group by rote. The classes were of course much larger.  I recall classes in excess of 40 boys and girls throughout my primary school years of education.

I even recall that part of the school day involved the teachers encouraging the youngest children to go into the hall which had a wooden floor and lay down on it with no pillows or any other comfort and try to go to sleep. I have no idea if we really needed to sleep. I suspect it was simply the teachers getting away with another period of rest having already had one over the lunch break.
I did well at that school and it was enough to get a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, one of the very best schools in the country both then and now.  I still receive its regular publications, the most significant of which is called Ulula, Latin for owl, which is the symbol of the school. In my day this was a fairly flimsy publication that came out every term with probably not much more than 40 pages or so and that was A5. It is now a significant A4 publication and the latest issue which I received has 263 pages.

The school in my day was entirely a secondary school and I was the second youngest boy in the school when I entered in September 1960 at the age of 10. I left it when I was 16 having done my A levels and got my place at Oxford and won an exchange programme scholarship to live and study in the United States for a year. But now the school has expanded and there is a Junior School and Ulula reports on some of the activities in Junior School as well as the Senior School. It's notable that the Junior School awarded prizes for the following subjects and activities: art, classics, computing, drama, English, French, geography, German, history, Mandarin, mathematics, music, PE and games, PSHE, religious studies, science, Spanish, and Russian.

There is a huge range of activities for boys aged from 7 to 10. Ulula reports that all Junior School pupils took part in a production on the main theatre stage: every year 3 and 4 pupil performed in The Jungle Book; every year 5 pupil took on a role in Oliver Jr; and every year 6 pupil brought the curtain down on the year with Mary Poppins. Most of the boys are encouraged to learn to play a musical instrument. So perhaps my analysis which might have implied that Spanish schools were superior to English schools in the way they covered a wide range of subjects and other activities is not correct. Maybe the comparison is not so much between English and Spanish schools today but between English and Spanish schools today compared with those forebears from 60 to 70 years ago. Quite when this development took place I cannot say but I'm very encouraged by the progress that our grandchildren are making.