We're mulling over the possibility of moving back to the UK but the big stumbling block at the moment is how to keep our 12 year old's currently fluent/bilingual Spanish............ I can find schools which have Spanish on the curriculum, but by and large the standard is often no better than 'good GCSE/A level results'. Nothing remotely resembling fluency!
Has anyone experience of wanting to find/finding Spanish families in the UK so their children can keep day to day conversational Spanish? I've tried Googling but so far to no avail ref exchange type groups. Any suggestions gratefully received! (Gloucester area).... yes of course there's the Spanish school in London but (a) we won't be living there (b) they only take Spanish nationals.

Sorry I can't help with specific advice, despite having family in Gloucester myself, but I'd trying Googling in Spanish to see if there are Spanish language or cultural activities in the Gloucester area. I'd do it myself, but I know very little Spanish and Googling <Gloucester UK espana> drew a blank.

The best I can do off the top of my head is to note that Sebastian, the owner of Sebz Restaurant, at 93 Northgate St, Gloucester, is Portuguese.

No idea about Spanish, but I speak French and French radio stations, French tv and a French newspapers are all available in the UK - I'm sure the same would be true for Spanish. There's certainly Hola! Magazine sold here, although that may not be ideal reading for a 12 yr old!

In general I've drawn so much of a blank that I don't know whether to go 'humph' and putter about how typically British it is that languages are low on the priority list .... or to start prepping my business model for some kind of mega language school franchise...........

I am in the same boat with my son.
I have been living in Uruguay for many years, have an Uruguayan wife and 4 year old son.

We're planning to relocate to Staffs.
If we end up staying in UK my son will most likely lose his Spanish skills at this age.
He speaks mostly in Spanish now but I have been speaking to him all the time in English since he was born. He understands 90% of what I say.

He will pick up the English very fast and mostly likely begin to get rusty with his Spanish even though my wife will speak Spanish at home.

What do we do? We have bilingual schools here. half day in English and other in Spanish but in UK???

Speak Spanish at home would be the big thing.
And take one week cheap package holidays to Spain two or three times a year. A very British thing to do.
Mind you, they may end up picking up Catalan as much as Espanol! They are both Spanish of course.

I have never heard of a bi-lingual school in the UK. It is possible they might exist in London, though I doubt it, but in Staffordshire, not a chance!

Hi we have lived abroad and had many friends who had migrated from countries where English was not their first language and for most of our friends children who were born in an" English as the first language" country their children also spoke their "parents mother tongue" perfectly. Quite a few of our older sons friends here in the UK have friends who's parents language is not English and their friends also speak both languages equally as fluent, maybe you could do that with your son? speak Spanish at home etc and English outside of the home. I do know there seems to be lots more Spanish living here in the UK since we have been living overseas and especially so in Manchester. Good luck

If either of us were a native Spanish speaker I wouldn't have any qualms, but I speak appalling-verb-endings-told-off-by-my son- type-Spanish and my OH although he understands a lot speaks barely any. So we aren't in a position to help our son in the sense of home conversations at all.

I moved my kids from Switzerland to the US a couple of years ago. They were then 11 (son) and (7) daughter; both spoke fluent French, as they'd been in the local schooling system in Switzerland for nearly 4 years.

I umm...ed and I ahh...ed about how, and whether, I should attempt to keep their language. I speak pretty fluent French myself, but my kids have ALWAYS been resistant to me using it with them. We moved to Arizona, so the foreign language here is Spanish, not French, so finding a native speaker would be very needle-haystack. It would require 2-3 hours a week, at the absolute minimum, to keep their language intact, and more if I actually wanted to improve their written skills as their ages progressed.

Most importantly, they were both desperately behind with their English reading and writing skills compared to their peers, knew nothing about US history, fractions, etc. I decided that realistically that's where I needed to focus my efforts, and that expecting them to maintain and improve a foreign language AND make up the lost ground in English would be unreasonable.

So we let the French go. The rate of attrition for my daughter was shocking - I'd say within 6-9 months, she'd lost 95% of it - she couldn't recall words even when bribed with chocolate! My son has retained much more, even 2.5 years later - the difference is that he was reading and writing in French, I guess.

He's going to take French rather than the local default of Spanish in high school when he starts this autumn; he's not a natural linguist and is only doing two years of a foreign language because he has to, and figures he may as well try to end up with functional French rather than tourist Spanish.

The high school has already agreed to skip him up to French 2 as a starting point based on me explaining his background, and are happy to review his placement again if necessary once the classes get going, and we see how rusty he really is. So at least he's getting some benefit from all his hard work in Switzerland.

As for my daughter, I'm hoping the 'oh, little kids who speak two ore more languages create more brain connections and neural pathways that stay with them for life' thing is true... She has at least developed the ability to completely mimic accents, and talks to her classmates here in a South Western drawl, switching back to perfectly-pronounced British English to speak to me

Different in many ways to our situation, because my son has only a slight gap in his level of English from what it would be if he were in a school in the UK therefore no reason to 'drop' his Spanis......... and my Spanish, though functional (to use your quite appropriate word!) is far from fluent or even good when you bear in mind verb endings, cases, etc.! However you said something I'll pick up on - 2-3 hours a week minimum to keep language intact. What kind of 2-3 hours and on what did you base that? I've been wondering if merely having a native Spanish speaking au pair or something might be adequate................?

Nothing concrete, just a finger-in-air guess based on my language learning experience (5 years of school French, 3 of school German, twice-a-week classes to get my French to fluent once in Switzerland, weekly English tutor to a Ukrainian friend in Switzerland, nerdy lifelong interest in linguistics). I'd estimate that a couple of hours a week of conversation would be the minimum needed to keep a language current and natural, in order to be able to use it without translating in one's head or having to employ workarounds because you can't remember a word or particular tense ending on the fly.

My French when I left Switzerland was around the B2 level, probably C1 for reading. I am - sort of... - keeping my French current here in the US by reading the odd novel, and occasionally walking around the house doing an out-loud monologue of what I'm doing (cleaning, tidying, planning a shopping trip, etc), or trying to recount something I heard on the news, but in French, that sort of thing. Speaking out loud is very important - my mouth muscles simply aren't as exercised as they were in Switzerland, when I was having 2-3 hour conversations with friends, parent-teacher conferences, doing a 2-hour 'French only spoken here' class, etc. I'd say my level has dropped back to an A2/B1 for French production (reading is still fine).

And this is just spoken French (and reading). I'm not trying to write it; I could, but it would be laborious and involve checking accents almost all the time!

How on board is your son with this, and does he understand the effort involved? Mine wasn't whatsoever - not a happy linguist, like I said - and ultimately he would've been the one who needed to study very regularly, read extensively to improve his vocab, etc. He had very good French at the time, but it was 11 year old boy French - he knew everything from Star Wars in French, and could discuss Lego and Wii games extensively, but it would've required real effort to expand this to something age-appropriate in the future, so he didn't sound like a child when speaking as an adult.

I know someone who moved German-speaking kids back to the UK, aged around 13 or 14, and 10. The younger one, like mine, needed to drop the language in order to bring his English and other subjects up to scratch, but she had the older one tutored to take an A-level whilst it was all still fresh in his mind, so he'd have the qualification to show for it.

Even though his German was completely fluent (he'd lived there most of his life), it was still a tremendous effort - it's not so much being fluent, it's being fluent in the subjects and vocabulary covered in the curriculum, which at A-level tends to be critical appraisal of literary texts, or crafting a balanced essay to discuss a political situation in a foreign country, and so on. These are things kids of that age struggle to do well in English, let alone a foreign language.

Perhaps look into something like an evening class at a local FE college - perhaps it's something you and he could do together, either leading to a qualification or just for fun. Your son would probably still find it challenging to do Spanish as an 'adult' learner rather than a child, and would learn new things from the language learning role plays like 'you're in an insurance office, and are making a complaint because the policy wouldn't pay out after a flood', or 'you've just been in a car accident, and have to notify the police'.

I hope you find a solution, and wish you the very best of luck with keeping his Spanish; I love the idea of kids being multilingual. I'm hoping that when mine starts French again in the autumn, he'll recover a chunk of his (and *hopeless fantasy* discover an until-now suppressed desire to be a polyglot). But unless your son is 110% committed, and willing to put in the extra hours, on top of schoolwork and new friends and gaming and sports and whatever else he does... it's going to be tough.

But - bright side - I didn't speak ANY French whatsoever between leaving school and going to Switzerland 20+ years later, and my level then was only 'good O-level' which wouldn't have been anywhere near your son's skills. Even so, within a few months I understand a lot of what was being said, and was conversationally fluent within a year, at least on everyday and school matters - the 'can have a parent-teacher chat for 30 mins; can natter to other mums for hours' level. So there's hope for the future, at least, if he ever needed to get his Spanish back again for travel or work.