Schools in Spain >> How Expat Families Choose the Right One

There are four kinds of schools in Spain: public, concertado, private, and international, plus a smaller alternative and online sector. Public schools are free to attend and taught in Spanish or a co-official language. Concertado schools are privately run but state-funded. Private and international schools charge fees and often teach in English or follow a British, American, or International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum.

Choosing between them turns out to depend less on which schools are best and more on two things most families do not think about until late: the age your child arrives, and whether you land inside or outside the enrollment window.

This guide covers how the four types differ in practice, what each one actually costs, how enrollment works and what to do if you miss it, how long children take to settle, and what support exists for a child who needs it. It is part of our Education in Spain series and can be read alongside Education in Spain: An Easy Introduction for Expat Families, which covers how the system is structured by age and stage.

Choosing the Best School in Spain

Public schools

Public schools are run by the regional government, are free to attend, and teach in Spanish or the region’s co-official language. They are secular by default, with religious education offered as an option rather than built into the timetable. Uniforms are unusual. Because places are allocated largely on where you live, the classroom tends to reflect the neighborhood.

For a long time the assumption among Expat families was that public school was what you settled for. That has changed. Claudio Buggiotti, who works with families on public school placement in the Valencia region, describes a system that now routinely absorbs international children and does it well.

The trade-off is language. Instruction is in Spanish, or in Valenciano, Catalan, Basque, or Galician depending on where you are, and there is no English-medium route through a public school. What exists instead is language support, which is covered further down.

Concertado schools

Concertado schools are privately run and partly state-funded. The teaching is paid for by the state, which is why families often describe them as semi-private, but optional services are not, and those can add up. Uniforms and extended services such as early drop-off and after-school care are more common than in the public sector. Many have a Catholic foundation, though some allow families to opt out of religious activity. However, while this right exists on paper, concertado schools’ semi-autonomous status gives them room to push back, and there are examples where it took an assertive parent to make the right stick in practice.

Claudio’s practical note on uniforms is worth having: schools often sell them through their own website, but the same items are frequently cheaper on the high street.

Private and international schools

Private schools charge fees and set their own admissions. International schools are a subset: fee-paying, usually teaching in English or another language, and following a British, American, or International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum rather than the Spanish one. They are covered in more detail below.

Alternative and online schools

Montessori and Waldorf schools exist in Spain, along with other progressive and project-based approaches, and Michelle Gerster’s observation from the webinar was that a number of good ones have opened in the last few years. Online schools also follow either the Spanish curriculum or an international one, and are most often used by families who move mid-year or are still deciding.

Alternative schools are usually private, and their availability is patchy outside the larger cities.

Public vs. Private Schools: What Expat Parents Need to Know

The comparison that matters is not quality. It is fit.

Michelle Gerster, who advises families in Asturias and whose own daughter attends a Spanish public school, puts the decision back on the parent: you know your child, and what works for a seven-year-old will not work for a fifteen-year-old. A younger child dropped into a Spanish-language classroom will usually be fine. An older one arriving with no Spanish and two years until university applications is a different situation.

The one question that cuts through school marketing language is this: how many hours a week are actually taught in English? Schools describing themselves as bilingual or as English schools can mean very different things, and the honest answer to that question tells you more than a prospectus.

How to Decide, by the Age Your Child Arrives

Under seven
Immersion is realistic. Children this age pick up the language fastest and have the least academic content to catch up on. Public school is a genuine option even with no Spanish at all.

Primary years, roughly 7 to 11
Workable, with support. Expect a period where your child understands more than they can produce, and expect grades to dip before they recover.

Lower secondary, 12 to 14
Harder. Academic language starts to matter and the gap between conversational fluency and coursework fluency becomes visible. Language support inside the school becomes the deciding factor.

14 or 15 with no Spanish
This is the point where Michelle’s advice is to look seriously at a British curriculum school or an IB track instead. Spanish upper secondary is academic and lecture-driven, the reading load is heavy, and a student can be conversationally comfortable while still unable to write a Bachillerato essay.

If you are weighing this up for a specific child in a specific city, our school search service puts you in a 45-minute session with a consultant who works in that region.

What Schools in Spain Actually Cost

Free to attend does not mean free.

Public schools
There is no tuition fee. What families do pay for across a school year is meals, books and materials, trips, and extracurricular activities. Claudio’s estimate for the real annual cost of a nominally free public school place in the Valencia region is €1,000-1,200 per child.

Concertado schools
Teaching is state-funded. What varies, school by school, is the voluntary monthly contribution, plus uniform, meals, and optional services. This varies considerably between schools and a single reliable figure does not exist. The key is to ask each school for the total annual cost including all optional items, not the monthly contribution alone.

Private and international schools
Fees vary widely by city and by curriculum, running from around €2,000 to over €20,000 a year. Madrid and Barcelona sit at the top of the range.

What families get wrong
Two things. The first is budgeting for tuition and forgetting the annual costs that sit underneath it, which are real even in the public sector. The second is assuming concertado is the middle option on price. Once optional services are included, some concertado places cost more than families expect and the gap to a low-fee private school narrows.

International Schools in Spain

International schools suit families who want continuity of curriculum, teaching in English, and a peer group of children who have also moved. They are the obvious answer for a child arriving late in their school career, for a family expecting to move again, and for a student who needs A-levels, the IB, or Advanced Placement exams for university applications outside Spain.

What to check before committing:

• Accreditation and curriculum. British, American, IB, or a hybrid, and whether the exam framework matches where your child is likely to apply to university.
• Instructional hours in English. Ask for the number, by subject.
• Spanish provision. A good international school still produces children who speak Spanish. Ask how many hours and at what level.
• Staff turnover. High turnover in international schools is common and worth asking about directly.
• Waiting lists and entry points. Some schools admit only at certain year groups.
• Total annual cost. Registration, fees, uniform, meals, transport, trips.

Fees and availability differ enough between cities that the useful comparison is local. Our directory pages cover international schools in Valencia, international schools in Barcelona, and international schools in Madrid, and the full listing sits at international schools in Spain.

Enrolling in Spanish Schools: Practical Steps

Enrollment is run by the regions, not by Madrid. Dates, portals, and paperwork differ between Valencia, Catalonia, Madrid, and Andalucía. What follows is the shape of the process, illustrated with the Valencia region because that is where Claudio works, followed by a note on what changes elsewhere.

Documents You Need

• Padrón
  The certificado de empadronamiento, which registers you at an address. This proves where you live, and that determines which schools you can apply to.
• Identification
  TIE or NIE for the child and the parents, or passports where residency documents have not yet been issued.
• Previous school records
  Reports, transcripts, and transfer paperwork from the last school attended.
• Vaccination records
  Plus the child’s health card. In the Valencia region this is the SIP card.

The Enrollment Calendar, Using Valencia as an Example

March and April: open days
Schools open to prospective families. Go if you can, and if you cannot, this is when to email.

Second and third weeks of May: the ordinary phase
In the Valencia region, applications for infantil and primaria open in the second week of May, and for secundaria and bachillerato in the third week.

July: the extraordinary phase
A short window, around three days, for families who missed the ordinary phase.

Late July to the second week of September: vacancy filling
Remaining places are allocated as they come free. August is effectively dead because schools are closed.

During the school year: mid-year entry
Handled through a separate process for families arriving outside all of the above.

Applications in the Valencia region go through Adminova, the admissions portal run by the Conselleria d’Educació of the Generalitat Valenciana. Mid-year arrivals in Valencia city use a separate system, PortES, short for Portal de Escolarización Sobrevenida, run by the city’s Oficina Municipal de Escolarización.

That second distinction matters. Adminova covers the whole Comunitat Valenciana. PortES is a Valencia city service, so a family arriving mid-year in Castellón or Alicante needs their own municipal route rather than this one.

One thing worth clearing up, because it sends families into a panic every spring. Search for Spanish school enrollment in March or April and you will find people saying the places have already gone. Claudio’s explanation is that what is happening at that point is existing pupils confirming their place for the following year, which is a different process from new admissions. The window for new families has not closed.

If You Arrive Outside the Windows

Education is compulsory in Spain from six to sixteen, and that guarantee is the thing to hold onto. A child of compulsory school age who is resident is entitled to a place. It may not be your first-choice school, and it may take longer to arrange, but the entitlement is not conditional on having applied in May.

Claudio described placing a child on 29 July for a family who had missed both the ordinary and the extraordinary phase.

You can also apply from abroad, once you hold an NIE and are registered on the padrón. That combination is usually what determines how early you can start, rather than the school calendar.

How This Differs by Region

Dates, portals, points systems, and language of instruction all change when you cross a regional border. Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands each have a co-official language with a different weight in the classroom. Madrid and Andalucía run their own calendars and their own scoring for allocating places.

Our school search consultants work in specific regions for exactly this reason, currently covering Asturias, Barcelona, Cantabria, Madrid, Malaga, and Valencia.

Integration and Support in School

What “Bilingual” Actually Means

Bilingual is the most misleading word in Spanish school marketing, and the gap between what parents assume and what is delivered is wide.

Michelle Gerster’s own daughter attends a public bilingual school in Asturias. In practice that means English twice a week as an elective, plus one natural science class taught in English. That is a bilingual program by the official definition, and it is not necessarily what a parent hears when they read the word.

Concertado and private bilingual programs vary, some substantially better resourced than others. International schools are a different category again, teaching most or all subjects in English.

In Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia, the picture is more layered still, because the co-official language sits alongside Spanish, and an English strand on top makes three.

So the question to ask every school is the same one: how many hours a week, in which subjects, taught by whom.

How Long Adjustment Takes

Michelle’s timeline, from her own practice and her own family:

• Six to twelve months to conversational Spanish.
• Two years or more to academic Spanish, meaning the language a child needs to write an essay or follow a lecture rather than talk in the playground.
• Under seven is the age band that adapts fastest.

Her framing for the early period is marination. A child sits in the language before producing it, and the quiet phase is not a stall. Grades usually dip in the first year and recover, and a dip on its own is not evidence that the school was the wrong choice.

What helps before you arrive is exposure rather than tutoring. Music, films with Spanish audio, subtitles, anything that puts the sound of the language in the house. Formal lessons have their place, but a child who has heard a lot of Spanish arrives better prepared than one who has conjugated a lot of verbs.

Language Support Inside School

Public schools run pull-out Spanish support for children who arrive without the language, functionally the equivalent of ESL provision in an American or British school. The amount and quality varies by school and by how many international children it already has.

Private and international schools tend to identify language needs before entry and offer additional tutoring, sometimes at extra cost.

Alison Johnson’s point in the webinar is worth adding for parents worried about the opposite problem: children in English-medium schools in Spain still come out speaking good Spanish, because they hear it every day outside the classroom.

Support for Neurodivergent Children

This is the area where doing your homework changes the outcome most, and where Claudio was most specific.

Bring the diagnosis, translated.
A diagnostic report from your home country should be translated into Spanish, and where possible apostilled. Without documentation the process starts from scratch.

An existing plan does not transfer.
An American IEP or 504 plan, or a UK EHC plan, has no automatic standing in Spain. It is useful evidence. It is not a set of instructions the Spanish school is obliged to follow.

Assessment runs through the orientador.
The school’s orientador, its educational psychologist, assesses the child and determines what support is allocated. This takes time, and starting it early matters more than almost anything else on this page.

The roles to know.
PT, the pedagogical therapist. AL, the speech and language specialist. Educador, a classroom support role. Which of these a school has, and how many hours they work, is a fair question to ask on a visit.

Specialist units exist.
The Comunitat Valenciana runs UECO units, standing for Unidad Específica en Centro Ordinario, or specific unit in a mainstream school. These are small classrooms, typically four to eight children, staffed by specialists and housed inside ordinary public schools rather than in separate special education centers. Children get adapted specialist teaching in the unit and join mainstream classmates for subjects such as art, music, and PE.

They are not autism-specific. They serve children with significant special educational needs, which includes autism and other developmental conditions alongside moderate to severe intellectual disability and multiple disabilities.

For the 2026 to 2027 school year the Generalitat Valenciana is creating 36 new UECO units across the region, split by province as 16 in Valencia, 13 in Alicante, and 7 in Castellón. That comes on top of 82 units created earlier in the current legislature.

The most useful thing Claudio said on this subject was also the least reassuring. Funding and culture do not correlate. A well-resourced school can handle a neurodivergent child badly and an under-resourced one can handle them well, and the resource list on a website will not tell you which you are looking at. Visiting, and talking to the director about a child rather than about the school, will.

Talking to Teachers

Spanish schools communicate less than American parents expect. There is no weekly newsletter culture, no expectation that you will hear from a teacher unless something is wrong, and silence usually means nothing is.

Michelle’s advice is to be the annoying parent. Ask for the meeting, ask again, and treat the initiative as yours rather than the school’s. Teachers are generally willing. The system just does not prompt them.

Thinking Ahead to University

If your child is eleven or older when you move, the school you choose shapes where they can apply to university, and this is the decision families most often make without realizing they are making it.

The mechanism, as Adam Muri-Rosenthal of Hyll Education explained it in the webinar, is that admissions systems differ in what they look at. American universities will accept almost any school system and weigh extracurriculars, essays, and the whole application. British and European universities compare exam results. So a school that produces no recognized exam framework can quietly exclude your child from the second group.

Curricula that keep options open: A-levels, the IB, the Spanish Bachillerato, and American programs that support Advanced Placement (AP) exams, the American exams universities use as external evidence of attainment. The trap Adam flagged is that not every American program in Spain offers AP support, and without it a student following an American curriculum has no external exam results to show a UK or EU admissions office. Where AP is available it has a specific advantage, because AP results are actual grades rather than the predicted grades UK applications otherwise rely on.

Spanish public universities work differently again, admitting almost entirely on a numerical score. If that is a possibility for your family, our guide to Spanish universities covers the entrance exams, admission requirements for US and UK students, and what tuition costs.

What About Homeschooling?

Homeschooling in Spain is a contested area and not clear.

Spanish law makes education compulsory from six to sixteen, and the mainstream interpretation is that this obligation is met by school attendance rather than by home education. Families do homeschool in Spain, including Spanish families, and prosecutions are rare, but that is not the same as the practice being recognized. Some families use online schools following a foreign curriculum, which changes the practical picture without necessarily changing the legal one.

For Expat families, there is a second consideration that matters more day-to-day. Residency renewals for families with children can involve showing that the children are in school. A homeschooling arrangement that is legally arguable may still be a problem at renewal.

If you are considering it, take advice on both questions, the educational one and the immigration one, before you commit to a plan. Our immigration lawyer partners can address the residency side.

Community and Parental Involvement

Every Spanish school has an Asociación de Madres y Padres de Alumnos (AMPA), the parents’ association, and joining it is the fastest route into the parent network of the school. It is also, in practice, where you find out what is actually happening, because the school itself will not tell you.

The other thing to ask for on day one is the class WhatsApp group. WhatsApp is second only to making phone calls in Spain and, in this context it is how homework, trips, kit lists, and last-minute schedule changes actually circulate. Being outside the group leaves you guessing.

Practical items new families ask about most: uniform if the school has one, backpack and materials list, whether lunch is provided or brought, and the after-school schedule, which in Spain often runs later than families expect.

Getting Help With Your School Search

The decision you have to make is local, and it comes down to which schools in your specific neighborhood have places for a child of your child’s age, arriving when you are arriving, with the language level they have.

Our school search service is a 45-minute consultation with a consultant who works in the region you are moving to. They cover which schools operate in your area, which options fit your child, what the enrollment position is for your arrival date, and what paperwork you need to have ready. Consultants currently cover Asturias, Barcelona, Cantabria, Madrid, Malaga, and Valencia.

Frequently Asked Questions