The Schooling Process in Spain – How To

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It’s 2026, and we have lived in Spain for about 5 years now. In that time, we have done the school registration process at least 3 times, including going through open hours (puertas abiertas) season, so I have decided to document our process for this year.

To be clear, this blog post will not be complete upon it’s first posting. The process to get your kids into school in Spain is a long one, especially if you do it thoughtfully and correctly. While going to visit schools (puertas abiertas) is not a requirement of enrollment, it IS a requirement of being prudent in your decision making.

Basic Steps

Here is a run down of the basic steps of finding a publicly funded school in Spain. The private school situation is dependent on the individual school, and can be more flexible (and expensive).

• Research schools
• Open House (Puertas Abiertas)
• General School Application
• Get Assigned a School
• Register for that school

Now, unfortunately, each one of these steps can feel like a monumental task, and the whole process itself takes about 6 months, if you are lucky, and depending on how long it takes you to research the schools. For me, it usually includes a spreadsheet at some point.

Side note: Once we complete each major step of the process, I will be posting a video to recap on youtube.

How to Research Schools

Unfortunately, in Spain, there is no definitive database which is accessible to the public, in order to use to learn about schools. There is no true ranking system here, and people are slow to steer you away from certain schools, even if they don’t like them for themselves, unless there is a major reason not to go there (bullying, abuse, etc). For this reason, you will have to be very pro-active in learning about the schools, and even then, you may miss things that in retrospect, you would have considered very important.

How I research schools

From the start, I create a list of priorities for the “perfect school”. This is a general list, so it includes things like school hours (priority), location (bus or walking or either?), which foreign languages are offered, which extracurriculars are offered, class size, do they assign computers to students to use over textbooks, size of the school, any special education considerations (like neurodiversity). I have more on that in the video below.

In Zaragoza, I also reference the school vacancy list from the previous year, which is accessible online. Before I share the link, I want to stress that this is the vacancies list that was available AFTER school enrollment in the previous year, so 2025 for now. Any spots available, are those which were not filled with regular enrollment. This information helps to give me an idea of what the “popular schools” are, and from there I have to determine why they are popular- is it just because of their historical reputation, their location, or because it is a great school? Here is that link.

A very helpful local has also given me this insight. This person said to look at this list. It is for the first grade entrances. She uses it to tell her how desired a specific school is. If the applications (solicitudes) exceeds the vacancies, or is close to it, then this could be an indicator of the quality of the school. That list is here.

The schools that I will choose to study from these list have already made it to my “short list” of school possibilities. I use this list to possibly rule any of them out. If the disparity between vacancies and solicitudes is too large, then they have to go.

My next step is to ask about schools via social media, to search them out by name on reddit, to search news articles about them online, and to ask anyone and everyone if they know anything about any of the schools on my short list. Basically, I am looking for any indication that any specific school from my list is very positive or very negative.

Full disclaimer: I have done this very process before and we ended up in a bad school. I believe this happened because I allowed my child, who was going to attend the school, to have too much of a weighted opinion, combined with that I had no local insight to the local system. I did not have access to people here who could chime into what is good or bad in Zaragoza. I now have a much better idea and am a tiny bit more confident in what I am doing. Tiny- but there is no other way to do this. You do your best, make your best effort, and then fix it if you need to, however you can. The YouTube video that I shared above, does into that type of situation.

Our complete history with the Spanish school system, is here.

By this point, I now have a shorter list. You may be wondering how long the list needs to be. Well, the answer will depend on your region in Spain. For Aragon, which is the autonomous region of Zaragoza, you need 7 schools to put on your general application form. You may need more or less, depending on where you are.

Now, it is not required to have the full list of schools, but if you don’t complete the list, then you run the risk of having your child placed into any random school with a spot. I will explain this later, and refer back to it, as our process goes on this year. However, I have explained it a bit in this video. I also talk about the process to get extra helps here as well.

Attending Open House

Starting in December or January, you will start to see open house (puertas abiertas) dates published at the various schools. If you are not here for that season, you can usually contact the school and ask for a visit, but it is much easier to go when they have them scheduled. You can find them on their social media accounts and/or on their websites.

Some schools will have a form to fill out in advance of your attendance, some will tell you to just show up, some schools will have multiple open houses, some will have only one. Some schools separate the primary (1st – 6th grade) open house from the secondary (ESO, 7th – 10th grade) open house, some don’t. As you will often here me say, it is not consistent.

Our Experience in 2026

Our First Steps

After completing all of the above steps, including asking my child’s school which centers they recommended, I had my list narrowed down to 8-9 schools. I removed the ones that were too far, I added another one based on parental insight from a friend’s network, and I then removed another one when I met a mother at a separate open house, who had a child at this other school, based on my boundaries list- it wouldn’t be a good fit. I have a few things that are deal breakers, and doing all of your work on a laptop is one of them, so off it went. I had 7 concertados and 3 public schools on the list, before we started visiting schools. After the second school visit, I was down to 6 concertados and 3 public schools, due to some insight that I received from the other parent that I met.

We have, thus far, completed two open houses. It is the first week of February. I have 3 more open houses currently on my agenda for the next 5 weeks, through mid-March. I have 3-4 schools which have not posted their open houses yet. I have one school that I am very interested in, which may not have an open house until after Semana Santa, which means that it will fall during the month of April, basically. The application window is not posted yet, and I do not know when it will be.

I am currently down to a list of 7 schools. I am of the opinion that I do not need to add any more schools to the list, although I may end up having to do that, based on the technology issue. There is one more school that seems to indicate on their website that they give out computers as a source of completing school work. We are going to call and confirm that with the school, and if they do this, we will not attend their open house, as planned. Our goal is to end up with 7 schools for the list, and to not leave *any* blanks, or anything up to chance, and to have them placed in order of preference.

Once I get to the application stage, will discuss it in detail, along with screen shots, etc, so check back as time progresses.

Our Open House Experience

As I mentioned, we have visited two schools up to this point. One was a public school, which I coincidently found from someone else’s post on Reddit, and then confirmed through my own social media account, by asking “the locals” about this school. All was positive, so we went to the open house. It was (disappointingly) on a school night, and “late” for us Americans. It started at 6pm. We left after 2.5 hours. I can not tell you how long it lasted, because we left after we had toured the building, but there are plenty of people still there. We got home and in bed so late, that my youngest did not go to school the next day, that’s how exhausting the process is… and we were only on our first open house.

Side note: We once went to an open house outside of Madrid, and it lasted for 3-4 hours!! We couldn’t believe it.

School #1 (Public; first school to visit, not necessarily first choice school)

At the public school open house, we were met with a series of speakers and a power point presentation. We were given a lot of information. They had 4 students there from different levels offered at the school, who were speaking about their respective experiences (this was ESO + Bachillerato). Because of the powerpoint, I was able to understand even more information than I could from the speaker (Spanish), and to take photos of the information, to add to my notes on the school later on, and for reminders of information.

I talk about how the school system in Spain is organized, in this video:

They gave us all of the data we could ever possibly need about the school, they had multiple people there from the school, plus the students, plus the head of AMPA (this is the PTA of Spain). She spoke of her experience at the school, as well as her three kid’s experiences. She also handed out agendas (school planners) to all of the kids, even my 5 year old who is far from ESO level was included, much to his delight (& mine). All of this left a good impression on me.

We then were dismissed to speak freely to the teachers, admin, etc, and to tour the school. We followed the crowd and were taken to the comedor (lunch room), zona de joven (a town hall thing in the school), the indoor gym area, the outdoor patio (for recreo or PE, it was large with basketball goals), and various classrooms (art, music, computer, etc).

The school was divided by floors, with each grade level being assigned a different floor. After we finished, we were directed to the library, where they had some books on display (this is a good place to get some insight into the deeper layers of the school), and english teachers available. These teachers had a high level of english- higher than any school in Spain that I have visited or that my kids have attended so far. They answered our questions, which were really some of our son’s concerns from things he had observed in the school, and then we left. I will share more details in the videos, from my very first impressions that night, so make sure you are subscribed to my youtube channel! 🙂

After this open house, I thought to ask my son about his preferences, ASIDE from foreign language options. I already knew those:

• Would he rather go to a school that required a uniform? (Public schools don’t, and some concertados don’t- although, to my knowledge, all concertados require a uniform for physical education days).

• Would he rather go to a public school, or to a catholic concertado?

• With that information, I moved this public school to the bottom of the list of 7. It was far out from my other child’s school, and my oldest had just given a preference for non-uniform wearing concertados. Since I only had one school to chose from, and had many more to visit, some much closer to us, it was prioritized as last, for the time being.

• Let’s see how that ends up in the end. Here is my current list:

• 7. School #1

• 1-6 are unknown, and things could change.

School #2 to Visit (Concertado)

The next school was very different from the first school. It was:

• A concertado
• Guardaria, Primary, Secondary, no Bachillerato
• Uniforms worn daily

This is how it went:

We found the school, and walked in through the open gate. Seconds later, a man came out to open the door and let us in. He had a checklist, which he could not find my name on. On the school website, I did not see any indication that I needed to sign up for this open house. They had an extensive list of available dates, of which I chose the first one, and the indication that the school could be visited at anytime, so I hadn’t registered for the open house. All was well, he wrote my name on the form, realized we spoke english, and switched to a few english phrases.

Upon entry, we were greeted by some primary school students, who gave us a folder of information, and directed us to a rather small room for the event. Our previous open house had been in an auditorium of sorts, this one was in a classroom. The previous one had a couple hundred seats and desks, while this one had maybe 20 chairs, and it ended up not being enough. This was a classroom for one of their guardaria or infantil classes (somewhere between 0-5 year olds, depending on which one).

We were given the presentation by a woman who spoke very fast Spanish. There was no visual presentation. She was constantly referring to the brochure in the folder, and there was a lot of echo. My husband, who speaks Spanish natively, had a terrible time understanding her because of the level of her voice (low), combined with the echo. I was a lost duck.

However, I had numerous questions. I could read the brochure, which is what she was generally referencing. It was very broad. Things were not detailed. My husband, and myself when needed, ended up asking quite few detailed questions: school population size, teacher-student ratio, student number in a class, preferential access to any bachillerato program?, alternatives to religion class, monthly tuition cost, etc.

Side note: in Aragon, it is required to give an alternative to religion class. In the public schools, you are given an option for which religion class you want, or no religion class. In the catholic concertados, you are supposed to be given an alternative, but I have heard that sometimes they don’t follow through on this- so it is important to ask. You also want to ask how many students are in the alternative class. It’s a “values” (Valores) class. The number is important because it gives you an idea of how many students are not taking the religion class… will your child be the only one (this is really bad socially), etc?

After the talk from the woman, and the questions from the parents, were were directed to a school tour. We walked through the halls and up the stairs, floor by floor. We popped into one primary class, an english class of course (they are always promoting this at all of the schools, but it’s not that important to us, TBH). We also saw the chapel, and comedor (lunch room), and found out that ESO does not eat lunch at school (weird). I did see labeled rooms, which I liked. This is usually seen in TEA schools (schools that have special classrooms for kids with autism), but not in schools without it, like this one.

From there we went to the library. This library was about 1/3 the size of the public school library. There were some large tables with chairs, where we all sat down again. This time, they had a student who had been at the school for all of her education, along with her family members and siblings (very common here).

She spoke of her time here, how much she liked the school, etc. She was very well spoken and respectful. She came across in a good way to me. At this part of the meeting I TRIED to get information about extracurriculars, but they did not seem to be able to help me much with any clarity. To be honest, I did not get the impression that they knew what they offered, or when. Often schools will tell you that they can not be certain about extracurriculars because they are subcontracted out, and if there isn’t enough interest in the group offered, then they shut it down. Extracurriculars are not too popular there (weird to me), and you should not expect or depend on them in schools (I am still figuring that out, obviously). I have especially noticed that schools have less options for ESO than for Primary (I don’t know why, and I don’t like it).

After this part of the talk, we were offered coffee and cookies, and the opportunity to ask more questions individually. We did this, and then we left. I made my initial impressions video for youtube, and we went home and discussed what we each thought individually. This was my question for each of us, keeping in mind that I have a list of 7 schools that I need to make, and they need to be in ORDER of preference:

If you could only choose between school 1 and school 2, and did not have to consider the location of child #2’s school, which school would you choose for child #1?

The answer for all of us was school number 1, the public school. This was not what we went in expecting, but it was what we came out with, and now, the morning after, I still feel the same way.

Our current ranking is:

#6. school 1

#7. school 2

1-5 are unknown at the moment, but that will change, and these two schools could end up at the top of the list. Who knows!!?

At the moment, we have a third open house scheduled for mid-February, although I still have 3 or so schools that have not posted their dates yet, so that plan could change.

Check back for more at that time!

Ashley