On those criteria, the UK government’s newly-announced plan to increase university tuition fees has to be a black mark.

Under the policy, universities in England can charge as much as £9,000 per year in tuition fees – a steep rise from the £3,290 at present.

With the government having slashed funding for universities in its October Spending Review, it means many students are set to bear most of the cost of their courses. And that is in addition to the living expenses they already have to pay.

Some, inevitably, will be put off from attending university at all. Those that do go will either need affluent parents able to finance their education, or face a pile of debt at graduation.

Spanish Lessons

The comparative cost of university was a hot topic with some English friends we have just seen on a recent trip back to our former home in Spain.

Their daughter is due to finish her baccalaureate next summer, and is now weighing her options. If she were to go to the local university in Spain her parents would only have to pay for her books – approximately €1,000 a year. Back in the UK, by contrast, they could not afford to give their daughter the advantages a university qualification brings.

Mind you, there is a flipside: the countries’ relative job opportunities.

With unemployment soaring to over 20%, there is a big question as to what career prospects she would have in Spain post-graduation.

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It’s probably just in time too. After an unusually wet and cool spring in our north-eastern corner of Spain the weather has taken a sudden change. Summer has arrived with a vengeance – cloudless skies, little more than a zephyr of breeze, and soaring temperatures. And the forecast is for more of the same, only getting hotter.

The full heat of a Spanish summer therefore makes the long vacation something of a necessity. And of course it’s fantastic for the kids. When I was growing up our six week summer break from school seemed like forever. But three months! And being able to spend it on a Mediterranean beach … it makes me green just thinking about it.

Still, it’s not so great for the parents, for two reasons.

Firstly, three months is a long time to be out of the school routine, with its timetable and the habit of learning that comes with being in the classroom. So how are you going to keep them from going crazy with boredom and in that learning mindset through the extended break, so they’re not hardened against school and all it represents when they go back in the autumn?

And secondly, if both parents go out to work, as is increasingly common, what are you going to do about childcare? Foist your little angels off on the grandparents for three months? Get a nanny? Quit your job?

Or maybe do what many of the Spanish parents seem to and enrol the children in summer school for the duration. Makes you wonder then though why the education department bothers having the long summer break!

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I guess we went through all the usual trepidations parents feel as their ‘babies’ step through the school gates for the first time. Will she make friends? Will she like the teacher? Will she think we’ve deserted her? Will she be scared? Will she go to the toilet OK? What if she falls over in the playground and hurts herself? Will she behave? Will she like it, and want to go again tomorrow?

But there were some added concerns too. For one, the classes are all in Catalan, and she doesn’t speak a word of it, since we speak English at home. She’s also a chatterbox. So how would she be with this sudden entry into a world where she understands nothing her teacher and classmates say, and vice versa? Will she be bored in class? Frustrated? Resentful?

We know many kids from other countries have gone through the same process, and that as a result of this total immersion they pick up the language quickly. As the saying goes, kids are sponges. Nevertheless, to see them struggle through the transition phase from blank bewilderment to eventual fluency tugs on the heartstrings.

But the main, underlying reason for the worry is that our daughter has severe food allergies. At six months old she had an anaphylactic reaction to a doctor-prescribed, supposedly safe milk formula given to allergenic kids. We had to rush her to hospital as her mouth and tongue became swollen and she started to turn blue. I’ve never forgotten the terror of that car journey.

But now we have to let her out into the wide world, to a place where the kids bring breakfast and snacks into the classroom: bread, cheese, chocolate, biscuits and crisps, all the things that could produce another, potentially fatal, anaphylactic shock. To keep her safe we applied, and were eventually given funding, for a classroom assistant whose sole responsibility is to keep an eye on our daughter and see she doesn’t come into contact with these dangers. It is a comfort, the best case scenario we could hope for given the educational set up here in Spain. Still, it’s not easy to let go.

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