Back to school in a new country

This week as many of us are preparing to send our children back to school (or maybe to school for the first time), a lovely family will be starting school in a new country! Cathy Powell, an Australian mum and blogger, will be sending her children to their first year in school in England after spending the last six years living and working in Italy. Here is their story about how they tackled this challenging transition.

We made a decision earlier on this year to move from Italy to England.  This decision was made for the future of our children.  Everyone has heard about the euro crisis and knows about its effects to varying degrees.  We were looking at things from the perspective that our business was not making it possible to make ends meet and we were supplementing our income by both teaching English as a foreign language.  My husband commuted to Rome for three months and I managed to get work in a local centre that was 30 minutes away from where we lived.  We started to think about our children’s lives once they finished school and what sort of opportunities they would have.  We had moved from Australia to Italy in 2006 with the idea of our children gaining a second language.  My husband had grown up in Italy, but Italian was not his first language so he did not speak it with any regularity to our children.  Six years later we reflected on the fact that this aim had been successfully fulfilled.

My husband is English by birth and although we have been married for nearly 13 years we have not lived together in England.  So we decided to move to England to come full circle.  We also felt that if we did not do it this year the best moment would have passed, as our son will be starting secondary school in September.

What I want to mention here is an idea that we had.  We decided that the kids should finish the school year in Italy as closure for them and their friends.  The types of school do not overlap with the age groups, given that in Italy my daughter has now finished primary school, although coming over to England she has another year ahead of her.  Also there is middle school in Italy, which my son has just completed a year of, so he has already had an experience of secondary school with the necessity of different teachers for most of his subjects.

Our idea was to apply to the local council for permission to get the kids into the last few weeks of school before the school year finished.  This turned out to be the best idea we had had.  Our son had two weeks based at a local primary school and one week at the local secondary school.  He came home on day 1 with two new friends in tow and spent the afternoon with them being shown around the town.  It meant that when he went to taster week at the secondary school he wasn’t in a sea of unknown faces.  With his green pullover he congregated with the others before he went in.  He loved his week at secondary school and cannot wait for September to come.  There I was concerned about him having two different European languages added to his study load but he is going to take it in his stride. He got to participate with building props for the end of school year play for year 6.  One of the songs from this musical is still being sung during the school holidays.

Then there is our daughter.  When she was presented to her year 5 class as having come from Italy there was a murmur of excitement.  She’s adapted really well too.  She loved her year 5 teacher and would have liked to have had her for more than 3 weeks.  She took great care to find the perfect end of school year present for her as well as making a card, with a poem.  She participated in the sports day, her house coming first in the relay and coming home with a little medal.  She’s been given a small school holiday project for the summer which she has very enthusiastically completed.

On reflection my husband and I feel that we made a great decision and with the support of two local primary schools as well as the local council, this has enabled our children to start acclimatizing to their new life in England by being accepted by the other kids and looked after by supportive teachers and school staff in general for which we are utterly grateful.

About Cathy:

Cathy Powell, Wandering Sheila.  Australian woman and her tales about living life away from ‘Down Under’.  Mum to two kids who are 10 and 11 years of age. https://twitter.com/CathylPowell

About Karin Joyce

Karin Joyce is the creator of Embrace Happy, an inspirational and motivational website where the focus is on celebrating the good in our lives every day. The Embrace Happy tagline is: Not every day is good but there is good in every day. Before starting Embrace Happy, Karin was one of the “old school” bloggers from the early days of what was then British Mummy Bloggers with her parenting blog Cafe Bebe. In between school runs, blogging and being a wife to Mark and Mum to Ella (6 1/2) and Sam (3), Karin also works as a freelance social media manager and consultant.

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