giles

We have recently bought a house in Chiva and are about to enroll our 6yr old in one of the schools. We were told that there is a shortage of places at this particular school and that a point system operates to decide who has priority. One of the criteria they ask you to hand in your 'Declaraciones del Impuesto'..basically a Spanish Tax receipt for last year. Has anyone heard of this? And is their any alternative I could offer...obviously I haven't paid tax in Spain yet. Any info. much appreciated

Thanks, Giles.

coralsoft

My wife loves the Spanish systems for signing up to places in schools and other places.

We now have our 3 oldest in a concertado school, after getting in on the points system. Generally, I think these work on the basis of awarding points for siblings, proximity, taxable earnings and maybe a few other factors. The steps that people take to get in to many of the popular schools, where competition for spaces is intense, are acknowledged as being dodgy to say the least.

Stories we have heard include various families who claim to live with relatives near the school, ie, they submit a false address and people (we're talking middle class professions, here, pillars of society) who keep 2 tax returns on the go. They create one with only part of their income claimed and send it off early to be processed. They use the receipt from this one in their applications processes. Before the tax submission deadline, they then 'remember' a whole load of other income for which they submit a revised return and on which they pay the tax.

Your best bet, since you don't yet have a Spanish tax return, is to contact the school and see if they will accept an English one, or figures from the English one, reformatted. Be prepared for a lot of debate over it, though, since it will most likely not fit into their process and you may have to go to ridiculous lengths to get them to even look at it.

We put our children into a British school for the first couple of years until we were established - the cost is so much cheaper than the UK, that it wasn't really outrageous. You may also like to consider Spanish private schools (even cheaper than the British/international ones) and the free state schools. It's usually the subsidized/co-op (concertado?) ones that do the points system.

Thankfully, with 3 of them, their mutual sibling points worked very well in our favour (and perhaps the school was keen to get their only native English speakers - our 8 yr old has had to correct the English teacher ;-) ). However, apart from the frustration and dodginess, my wife loves other aspects...

The infant years when we first applied were not concertado, so instead of being subject to points, they were allocated on a first-come-first-served basis on a specific day. Parents had to queue up. But for places in September, the day in question was in February, which, being Madrid, is rather a cold time of year (remember the recent snow?). Being a popular school this meant queuing through the night - there were people there from about 23:00 the night before. Not such a problem for big Spanish families where everyone can take a go for an hour, but, my wife being keen, off she went with chair, blanket, ski-suit and thermos. She got a place, only for the school to announce a week later that they'd obtained concertado status for the infants, too, and that places had to go through the normal allocation procedure!!

This experience hasn't put her off doing the same for swimming lesson places at the local pool. Mad dogs and Englishwomen go out in the midnight freeze?

cheers
coralsoft